It is ethical to eat meat as secondary consumers

The argument

The argument places humans within the natural order rather than above it. Every ecosystem is structured by levels of consumption, and species at each level feed on those below. Humans occupy the position of secondary consumers: animals that eat other animals. This is not a choice the species made but a description of where it sits, and the relationships that make up a food chain depend on each position being occupied. A predator that stops predating does not remove itself from the system; it leaves a function unperformed and the balance of the chain altered. Longevity supports the same reading. Humans have eaten animal products for more than sixty thousand years, which means meat-eating is not a modern habit layered over an older vegetarian norm but the practice that accompanied the species throughout its development. Omnivores are equipped for it, and a behaviour an organism is built for and has practised for that long is natural in the most straightforward sense of the word. The evolutionary claim goes further. Proponents point to studies indicating that cooking meat was a major factor in human development, driving a significant increase in brain size. If that is right, the species' capacity for the very reasoning now used to question meat-eating is itself downstream of meat-eating. The ethical objection depends on faculties that the practice it objects to helped produce, which proponents treat as a reason for caution about describing the practice as an aberration. Taken together these points form a single argument: that eating animals is what humans are, biologically and historically, rather than something humans do to animals. On this view the question is not whether the practice can be justified but whether there is anything to justify, and the answer given is that eating animal products is ethical because it is the ordinary functioning of an omnivore in its place in the food chain.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Just because something is natural it does not mean it is ethical and that we should still do it. We cannot look to nature for moral advice as nature can be wrong and twisted in our human perception of what is moral. Even if one were to accept that all that is natural is therefore ethical one can argue that; It is not natural as we are primates. Of the 633 species of primates humans are the only ones who eat meat (chimpanzees too on occasion). Eating meat was an evolutionary fault rather than a natural process of evolution. Furthermore, while other animals eat each other as they need to for survival, humans eat animals not out of necessity but merely because they want to. That is wrong

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] It makes no sense to do something simply because it is 'natural'.