Eating meat

You're sort of just making excuses to try to justify eating meat, and the animals don't want to hear your excuses. (sorry for being very straight-forward).

Unless you raise the animals yourself and kill them yourself then they rarely live happy lives or are well cared for. Even 'free-range' animals get bad treatment.

Since you're here, I believe you have it in you to make the change. Start slowly, you'll get there.

Improving the conditions of livestock would eventually be a transition to a vegan society. The promotion of abstinence as an alternative to our current treatment of livestock, if anything, prolongs the misery of animals.

As for whether eaten animals are able to live happy lives, they can live just as happily as an animal that will die of old age. A cow, a pig, a chicken, isn't aware of its own mortality and isn't dwelling on the contingency that tomorrow may be its last day alive.

Are you serious about the bad treatment of free range animals? That's of course true in isolated cases, but the culprit's brandname is quickly boycotted.

I think it's just better not to eat animals, if you have the option. We don't know if 'free range' animals are happy or not, so you might as well not risk it...

Interesting assumption. Since animals (as do people) demonstrate a definite 'fight or flight' response when faced with certain stimuli I'd say the ability to perceive danger (and subsequently mortality) is inherently instinctive. I'd like to know how you reached those conclusions... pure reason alone says we can't tell what's going on inside someone else's head since we are bound to the experience of our own perceptions.

What, then, is to say that livestock dislike inhumane treatment? "We don't know if 'factory farmed' animals are happy or not. For all we know they could be masochistic, so we shouldn't risk giving them a pleasant life".

A fight-or-flight response isn't an awareness of mortality. Very few animals have a prospective awareness.

You could continue down that solipsistic line of thinking — you can only be sure of your own consciousness  — but for what reason then would you care about animals? By the way, fMRI scans are a measure of brain states... there are also behaviours that are suggestive of being aware of death which are seen in monkeys. You do not, however, see a chicken having an existential crisis.

I hope this won't lower the intellectual quality of this debate ... but chickens seem to enjoy pecking around for their food; cows seem quite content hanging out with other cows during the day; and pigs definitely seem to enjoy doing piggy things. So why should we deprive of them of that by killing them?

Given our advances in genetic engineering, every cell in our body is a potential human being. By scratching your nose you are committing a holocaust of 20,000 potential selves. Obviously, we have no option but to ignore could be happiness, and focus our attention instead to maximizing wellbeing within existant life, even if that means cutting the life short.

That's an interesting perspective, but have you considered that regardless of how well the animal has been cared for, there is no real humane way to take a life from another?
And it has been proven time and time again that eating meat, regardless of how well cared for the animal is is highly detrimental to our environment and health?
I recomment Meat the Truth, or most definatly eating animals by Jonathon Safran Foer
In today's society it isn't economically sustainable to have "morally adequate" solutions for the meat and animal by-product industry, it simply isn't the reality of today.
If it does become reality, I would certainly be more respectful of people's decisions to consume meat and animal by-products, but in the mean time, I highly recommend conveying your opinion through ditching those morally inadequate products you consume and wear today.
Sorry if that sounded in any way preachy!

We're talking about actual lives, not potential ones. Big difference. All that nose-scratching that I do isn't making a sentient being scream in agony or terror.However, while I would love to live in a vegan world, I concede that this is unlikely. If people are going to eat animals, then I believe it should be done as humanely as possible.