My own objection to culled deer being eaten is twofold. On the one hand, it’s moral: I’d no more want to eat a deer that’s been shot than I would want to eat a dead human who’s died of natural causes. I acknowledge that humans may have higher consciousness than animals, but our similarities as creatures outweigh our differences. The fact that the death was necessary doesn’t make the consumption of the corpse pragmatic, healthy, or just — whether we’re talking about humans or deer.

Second, I’m convinced by the suggestion that meat isn’t good for us, and that our bodies thrive best on plant-based diets.

They weren’t “engineered” for anything. We’ve evolved to be able to eat a wide variety of foodstuffs because helped us survive to do so.

Hugo, you say: “For a 21st century middle-class American, the killing of living beings isn’t a survival imperative — it’s a decision to which there are legitimate alternatives.” The trouble is that we are far from finding any really legitimate alternatives. Let me illustrate what I mean by an example.

You said: “When we eat bread grown from wheat fields which were cleared by mice-killing combines, we are — in a much smaller but still painful way — complicit in death.” Well, even if we could invent a mice-safe combine, the fact remains that the wheat field was once a natural forest or grassland. An area of habitat that once used to support a wild diversity of life, is now used primarily to support human life. Over the past ten thousand years, we humans have made dramatic changes to our planet, all for the purpose of supporting our burgeoning population at the cost of the other animals that share the planet with us (many of which have gone extinct or face extinction). The only other animals and plants that have prospered are the ones that we have domesticated for our own purposes - cows, hogs, chickens, cats, dogs and plants like wheat, corn and rice. So what was that legitimate alternative again? As a species, we are not yet intelligent or sophisticated enough to come up with an alternative that is truly harmless, or even one that is indisputably less harmful than any other.

I actually disagree with Hugo’s argument at so many other levels. That it is ok to eat plant matter, and not animal matter, as if plants are not living entities (I find it telling that Hugo uses animals and living things interchangeably). Plants respond to stimuli too, and I’d argue a plant has as much capability to experience “delight” as an animal, only in a way that we cannot comprehend. Fundamentally, Hugo, your argument is anthropomorphic. You are selectively empathizing with those closer to us in nature (animals), at the cost of those further away (plants).

Environmentalists and ecologists say that we must enforce population control measures on certain species that can cause great environmental harm if left unchecked. Rats are most often cited, but pigeons, gulls, rabbits and deer are also included. Any method of short-term population control is going to have cruelty issues tied to it, and long-term solutions (like reintroduction of predators) are not always viable options. If there is a natural woodland ecosystem that needs 100 fewer deer in order to maintain its health and biodiversity, then let’s eat the deer and use that much less of any other food source.

Sure, hunting can be done in very cruel and inhumane ways, but there are instances where it is a good moral choice even when it is not, strictly speaking, a necessity for feeding oneself and one’s family.

I’m sure the deer would feel joy about not having any predators, but when they pass their carrying capacity and become overcrowded, malnourished, and diseased, I don’t think their joy will be as great.

The rest of the primates have forward oriented eyes, yet they eat very little, if any, meat.

Might as well ask a woman on birth control, why she’s not willing to get pregnant? Why else would God give her a uterus?

In other words, if your God doesn’t want you eating meat, why did he make it so possible for you to do so?