Visitors to the ‘Worldview’ section of this site will know that human population growth and the impact of humans on the environment trouble me more than the way the Bordeaux 2000s are shaping up, or whether or not 2007 will eventually be a declared vintage for port. Wine, food and travel are a beautiful distractions, but with one million new human beings falling to earth every five days, and with every one of us committed to a gamble about exactly where the tipping points for climate change lie, it would be foolhardy to become distracted by our distractions.

I recently learned that 97 per cent of all the vertebrate life on earth is constituted either by human beings, or by the animals which humans farm or feed as companion animals. In view of this, it seems astonishing that addressing our own fecundity is so little discussed in international political discourse. As I suggest in ‘Worldview’, leaving this imbalance for nature (or human bellicosity) to correct is unneccesary and immoral, given our capacity to effect change for ourselves.

In the ‘Worldview’, I share my belief that:

We are one. No human life is more important than any other.
We are one. No evolved species is, morally, more important than any other species (though evolution is by definition dynamic and not static, and the mechanisms of evolution involve struggle between species).
The health of the planet is paramount, and of more consequence than the health of individual species.

In the light of these beliefs, and of statistics such as the one I cite above, I’m wondering at present whether or not it is morally acceptable to eat other animals.

I ought to say at this point that it would be very difficult for me to practice my profession without eating other animals, since I eat and drink on behalf of others who may not share my views. In truth, I enjoy cutting, cooking and eating meat. Fish, too; perhaps still more. Those for whom I cook greatly relish eating meat and fish. I accept that the act of killing is implied by the act of eating. As I eat fish and meat, therefore, I would be prepared to kill animals and fish — personally if necessary (though I have no desire to do this and it would bring me distress rather than pleasure, especially in the case of larger animals).

Yet, if one believes that no evolved species is morally superior to any other species, should human beings kill other animals for the purpose of eating them? If human beings and chickens are morally equal, what right does a human have to kill and eat a chicken?

Exactly the same right, you might reply, as the buzzard or the fox does. Instinct, ability and necessity combine throughout the natural world to sanction, as part of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, the killing of smaller creatures by larger ones.

Indeed. Yet there are, it seems to me, two important differences. The first is that humans have few rivals for omnivorousness; the range of foods with which we can sustain ourselves is far greater than the gastronomic options of the buzzard or the fox. Most chicken-killing buzzards and foxes are engaged in an act of survival. We have a vast range of non-animal foodstuffs which will provide us with a nutritionally balanced diet. Eating a chicken is a choice which has nothing whatsoever to do with survival.

The second difference is that we have brought the chicken into being with the sole purpose of killing it for food, whereas the fox and the buzzard simply found themselves sharing the world with a chicken which already existed. All three are equal both morally and in the struggle for survival; instinct and ability combined to ensure that the buzzard and the fox survived for longer than the chicken.

Normally, of course, the further up the food chain one moves, the fewer animals are found occupying that niche. Not so with human beings, as we’ve discovered.

Is there anything morally superior about bringing an animal into being expressly for the purpose of killing it for food? Perhaps, though much depends on one’s view of the experience of being alive. According to the Christian view, for example, life is the most precious gift of all, and those who give life are acting as conduit’s for God’s love. A few months of life for a creature which might otherwise never have existed is, by this logic, a magnanimous gift on the part of human beings, further amplified by that creature’s bodily wants (chiefly food) being amply satisfied at all times, something few wild animals enjoy. Set beside this gift, a swift and painless if premature end is nothing.

(One might briefly retort that there is a sort of perversity in regarding the life of many farm animals, and especially for factory-farmed chickens, as a ‘gift’.)

By contrast, if one subscribes to the Buddhist view of existence as emptiness, illusion and suffering, then bringing any creature needlessly into being, even lambs gambolling on Welsh hillsides on a fine day in late March, is an act of cruelty. That act of cruelty is then intensified by the act of killing, both acts having negative effects for the perpetrator.

Even if one subscribes to the Christian view, it seems hard to justify the killing of wild animals not expressly raised by humans for food, except in those exceedingly rare cases where natural populations of the killed species have reached unsustainable levels, and culling will be of genuine benefit to the species concerned.

This is a particularly pressing issue with regard to fish-eating, where many of the species commonly eaten by me (and others) are wild, and where their populations (as grimly documented, for example, by Charles Clover in The End of the Line) are teetering on the edge of collapse.

To summarise, the more I think about the act of eating other animals, the less morally justified it appears to me to be. Some of my reasons for eating other animals (such as custom, pleasure and culinary indolence) appear to me to be flimsy and immoral. Others (such as the nourishment and pleasure of those for whom I cook, children included, and the inability to perform my job effectively as a vegetarian) seem to me to be stronger reasons for continuing.

I would welcome advice on this topic.