You can care a lot about animal welfare and still eat meat -- witness Temple Grandin, who optimizes meat plants to minimize animal stress [1]:
"We owe it to the animals to give them decent living conditions and a painless death. People are often confused by the paradox of my work, but to my practical, scientific mind it makes sense to provide a painless death for the cattle I love. ... Often I get asked if I am a vegetarian. I eat meat, because I believe that a totally vegan diet, in which all animal products are eliminated, is unnatural." [2]
> "We owe it to the animals to give them decent living conditions"
The problem being that places where this is true are few and far between, even among 'organic' farms.
For example: Legally, 'free-range' chickens are only required to have 15 minutes of time out of their ridiculously small cages per day. And they are still packed so close together that farmers burn off their beaks so that they don't peck each other to death (which is mainly a symptom of over-crowding and less of a chicken's temperament). Is this treating the animal with respect (even if you are going to eat it) or is this treating the animal as another cog in the machine of industry (in this case the food production industry); reducing it from a living being into just a material or a resource?
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You can care a lot about animal welfare and still eat meat -- witness Temple Grandin, who optimizes meat plants to minimize animal stress [1]:
"We owe it to the animals to give them decent living conditions and a painless death. People are often confused by the paradox of my work, but to my practical, scientific mind it makes sense to provide a painless death for the cattle I love. ... Often I get asked if I am a vegetarian. I eat meat, because I believe that a totally vegan diet, in which all animal products are eliminated, is unnatural." [2]
[1] http://www.grandin.com/
[2] http://www.spinninglobe.net/cowlady.htm
> "We owe it to the animals to give them decent living conditions"
The problem being that places where this is true are few and far between, even among 'organic' farms.
For example: Legally, 'free-range' chickens are only required to have 15 minutes of time out of their ridiculously small cages per day. And they are still packed so close together that farmers burn off their beaks so that they don't peck each other to death (which is mainly a symptom of over-crowding and less of a chicken's temperament). Is this treating the animal with respect (even if you are going to eat it) or is this treating the animal as another cog in the machine of industry (in this case the food production industry); reducing it from a living being into just a material or a resource?