The animal you are doesn’t care where you bought it from. You’ve still placed the value of your taste buds over the value of their existence.

Next, let’s look at the arguments surrounding abuse. A cow is not a natural creature, it’s body has been deformed to meet human demand. Therefore it is the victim of abuse for the sake of our vanity.

There are no wild chickens, the Asian fowl that it is descended from produced a clutch of maybe 10 eggs annually. So again, our need has warped this animal causing them physical harm. The list goes on. Pigs are nothing like wild boar, turkeys are nothing like wild turkeys etc. So the argument that because they live somewhere that they can run around before they’re are killed is somehow more ethical is nonsensical.

To say it’s as “good as it gets when it comes to ethics” is nonsense. Not killing animals unnecessarily for your consumption that drives sufferings, our own rising health crisis and destruction of our planet is the ethical choice. We are herbivorous apes by design. Our modern obsession with meat and dairy consumption is a modern phenomenon that is killing us and our environment.

Your meat consumption drives demand. That demand is subsequently met. If that demand dries up, so does the provision of the product. Whilst you are right in that your consumption in one place doesn’t directly contribute to production somewhere else you are still feeding into a system that will continue to produce more animals until there is no longer demand. That is how it is all linked. The animals wouldn’t exist if not for the demand and your demand, no matter how small is responsible for their existence, millions of which live in unimaginable, torturous conditions.