Step away from the emotional argument for a bit and simply consider the logistics. There is no evil in profiting from the cycle of life. Do you also believe herding to be cruel and unnatural? What about other animal product harvesting, like bee keeping or silkworm cultivation? Is it ethically dubious to mine limestone because the ancient crustaceans couldn't consent?

These are good questions. I'm not too sure about bee keeping or silk production since I don't know exactly how their products are being harvested and what happens to the insects during this. With herding, it's not the herding I have a problem with but what it is done for. I would not say we are profiting from the cycle of life if we kill a cow. The premature separation of cow and calf to gain more milk is another thing. If we just got milk by pumping a "breastfeeding" cow (as you might have guessed English is not my first language) and otherwise let it be - go for it. I wouldn't see anything wrong with that. But this isn't how it works, and you are very right that profit is to blame.

In my mind, the real problem is cruelty for profit. It should not be profitable to treat animals cruel, and that can only change with legislation. The system is too easy to abuse, and humans will almost always make pick the easy option over anything else.

I agree with this absolutelty.

Maybe if we found a way to go back to eating meat on very rare occasions, eating mostly game that was hunted for other reasons than meat or something alike, we could find a balance with it as a product for consumption.

I mean, would you want to be reborn as a cow on a free range organic farm? Where you are still being inseminated without ever having seen a bull or knowing what's going on. Where you give birth to a baby that you still will be separated from before it's time. Where your kid will have a similar destiny as you. If it even makes it to adulthood. Most likely it will be killed and eaten while you are still being pumped. Where your life is ended by a machine and your body sold to people who toss half of you in the trash because they cooked too big of a portion. Like, yeah, maybe you get to keep your horns and see some grass once in a while and your cage is slightly bigger than the low class conventional farming cows but at the end of the day it is still a miserable life.

How well do you think a plant based diet is going to work on a glacier?

Fwiw, I enjoyed the paragraph that led to that sentence, it was beautifully written. Just so that there are no misunderstandings: I'm not necessarily for a plant based diet under any circumstances. There are people with metabolic diseases that might need to eat more animal products for their health. Or nomadic cultures, indigenous tribes with hunter gatherer societies, and also people on glaciers.

And this is actually exactly why I do have a guilty conscience when I personally consume meat (and again, I am a huge hypocrite, I do eat meat!). I don't need to. There is a time and place where hunting and killing and slaughtering and herding are necessary for survival, but it is not in my life. I can buy a B12 supplement that will last me a year for like 10€, probably less. I can choose from a huge variety of plant milk alternatives in every supermarket. Let's not kid ourselves, nothing I eat is "natural". It's not natural to get a huge watermelon or a cloned banana or refrigerated milk in tetra packs and avocado from the other side of the world. If I drink carbonated soda or an energy drink that tastes like gummi bears then I can also not claim that supplements are "unnatural" and not what nature intended. Nothing I do is natural. I wake up by an electricity powered alarm clock. But with all of that privilege, advancement, technology and detachment I am supposed to somehow justify cruel animal farming and killing?