While food is necessary for survival, we need not consume animals for food – a plant-based diet is fully adequate. So the consumption of animals is not necessary for survival.
I am not persuaded of this.
Like the Indian referred to earlier who kills a buffalo, our ancestors (mine anyway, being of European extraction) totally depended on their herds for survival, for thousands of years. There’s no food for humans in the world’s grasslands. Without ruminant animals, grasslands might as well be sandy deserts, for all the food they can produce.
Today? Well, fully 1/3 of the world’s habitable surface is grassland. Same is true of the U.S. People can’t eat grass and live, and most grasslands won’t raise anything else. Removing the meat of domestic animals from the human diet would remove a huge source of high-quality protein from human consumption. Can the world’s population, or even that of the U.S. sustain such a loss? Personally, I doubt it. The great irony of such a situation would be that empty grasslands would then fill up with wild grass-eating animals, just as was the case on the Great Plains before Indians had the horse. Plains Indians before the horse consisted in tiny, half-starved populations while billions of tons of high-quality food were largely unreachable to them. Wolves, cougars, bears and carrion-eaters would thrive in such a scenario, but humans would not. That makes little sense to me. Is it written somewhere that humans must starve so wolves and bears can live?
For whatever it’s worth, I think grass-eaters like cattle, sheep and goats are God’s gift to humans. He gave us nimble fingers, yes, so we could pluck fruit from trees. He gave us brains enough to figure out that if we planted and tended wheat grains, we would multiply them. He gave us ruminant animals to convert useless grass to protein, and the talent to figure out how best to utilize them.
I’m not Jewish, but I think there are some wisdoms in the Jewish dietary laws. For instance, to be kosher, the animal must be unconscious before it is killed. It has to be bled out immediately. It must not be mistreated or diseased.
In modern processing plants, that’s exactly the way they do it. I have been in processing plants where the only difference between non-kosher and kosher preparation is the prayers of the Rabbi and his stamp.
As Catholic Christians, we are not obliged to follow every dietary law the Jews received in the Bible. But when it comes to the treatment of animals, I see no reason why we shouldn’t follow them as closely as is practical, because some were given because they are humane. And the very existence of such rules demonstrates that God was not prepared to tell mankind not to eat animals at all. His instruction was to be healthy and humane about it.
Finally, there is not a single thing we can do to obtain food that does not have adverse consequences to some creature. If we plant grain, we kill animals of the earth in doing it, and exclude others from our fields. If we plant food-producing trees, we shade the ground and deprive some creatures of the use of what would otherwise grow there, and we do our best to keep other eaters out. If we plant vegetables, we kill creatures in doing it and exclude others from our vegetable gardens that might otherwise provide them with a diet. Most definitely if we use herbicides and pesticides, the carnage is enormous.
