If lions eat meat, why shouldn’t humans?

The objection

“Predation is everywhere in nature. Lions, wolves and orcas kill and eat other animals, and the whole food chain runs on it. Humans are animals too, so why should we be the one species that pretends it’s above all that?”

The answer

Nature is full of killing, and nobody blames a lion for it. The reasons we don’t blame the lion are what sink the argument, because neither of them applies to a person choosing what to eat.

Why don’t we blame a lion for killing?

We excuse a lion on two grounds: it needs meat, and it can’t choose otherwise. Like other wild cats, lions are obligate carnivores that rely on nutrients from the animals they eat [1]. A lion is also not a moral agent. It can’t weigh its prey’s interests, picture an alternative or decide against the hunt, and responsibility needs the ability to deliberate.

Do humans need meat the way lions do?

Humans don’t need meat to stay healthy, which removes the lion’s first excuse. The British Dietetic Association says carefully planned plant-based diets can support healthy living at every age and life stage [2], and the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ 2025 position is that appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults [3]. For most people, then, meat is a preference rather than a necessity. We are also moral agents. We deliberate and hold ourselves to account for harm, and the UK’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 treats vertebrates, cephalopods such as octopuses and decapod crustaceans such as crabs as sentient beings [4].

Isn’t eating meat just part of the food chain?

That something happens in nature doesn’t show that we ought to do it. David Hume noticed arguments slipping, without explanation, from what is to what ought to be, and philosophers still argue over what follows from his point [5]. Nobody treats nature as a moral guide anywhere else. In many mammal species, males kill the young of their own kind (Lukas & Huchard, 2014) [6], and nobody cites that to excuse infanticide; appeals to nature turn up only where they license something we already wanted to do. The animals on our plates don’t come from a food chain anyway. In 2024 the world slaughtered about 86 billion cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys and ducks for meat, more than nine in ten of them chickens, animals farmed and bred for the purpose [7].