On and Beyond The Ethics of (Animals) Eating Animals

My intent, as advertised, is to reflect on the ethics of animals, including our own variety, eating other animals. My further intent is to ruminate on the practical ramifications of the pertinent choices we make as the planet's supreme apex omnivore, which I will argue reside substantially beyond the dominion of ethics altogether.

Before wading into this perilously fraught topic, a few provisos. First, the immediate impetus for this undertaking is a recent piece in the New York Times about the "eat what you kill" movement that was provocative and illuminating until the penultimate paragraph, when the light in question proved to be an oncoming train in the process of running off its rails. The author described the nature and implications of the trend, along with the general dispersion of nutrition into competing factions and passions, quite insightfully up to that point. Just before concluding, however, she declared that for want of proof, we cannot know that animals have emotions, nor that any given diet is healthier than another.