Following up my series on liberating ourselves from moralists, meddlers, and others who want to impose their subjective values on us in the name of objective truth in the realm of food, let’s continue with animal cruelty, the next on my list of a few days ago.

I’ll keep this brief.

Once an animal is born, it has to die. Killing it for meat doesn’t mean it feels more pain. In fact, killing it intentionally can create the opportunity for it to feel less pain than it would have felt if it died not by human hands. If not for humans, some predator or parasite would likely kill it, and likely more painfully.

I don’t eat meat, but I don’t accept that a human killing an animal necessarily hurts it more than not killing it. Nor do I accept that it would cause anguish to its family members more, in the case of animals that have more human emotions.

That said, I don’t think humans do a great job of killing animals painlessly when they do. More relevantly, we don’t do such a great job of not hurting them while they’re alive.

In today’s world, meat eaters stand a significant chance of supporting factory farming when they buy meat. Everybody has their own morals, but I can’t stomach supporting factory farming for the cruelty it seems inevitably to inflict on animals (and the humans who work there too). I can’t imagine anyone who observes it can support it.

So eating meat doesn’t necessarily have to cause animal cruelty, but you have to work hard to avoid it.

• ← Why I don’t eat meat: non-issue3: animal rights
• Why I don’t eat meat: non-issue5: feeling closer to nature →