Standing at the fridge, looking at the meals prepared for late-working Dublin Googlers, I ponder the ethics of choosing one of the prepared meals.

Should I eat the chicken, which is tasty and good for me? Or should I not?

If I don't, the chicken's short life and suffering in a probably too-tiny cage will have been totally in vain, it will end up in the compost heap.

If I do eat it, I'm voting for more chickens to suffer.

Seeing as this individual chicken is already dead and doesn't care anymore at this point, I clearly shouldn't choose to eat it.

Hmm. How about the beef? Are cattle more or less unhappy than chickens? I really don't know. I'd guess they might be a little more happy.

However, I'm pretty sure cattle are more resource intensive to raise than chickens, indirectly consuming more fertilizer and fuel and releasing more greenhouse gases; slowly but surely contributing to global warming.

That's bad.

Also, the chicken is probably better for me, by eating the beef I'm potentially damaging my own health and placing a burden down the line on the society which will be forced to care for me in my new red-meat-induced role as invalid.

So I clearly can't choose the beef. Or the pork, for the same reasons. I don't feel like vegetarian and at first glance there don't seem to be any vegetarian meals left anyway.

I also can't help but wonder what the carbon footprint of a vegetarian meal made of produce from Spain and Israel and other far-away places really is. Is locally grown (locally tortured) chicken better or worse?

Do I care more about animal cruelty, or more about the greenhouse effect?

I should probably just starve myself, really.

But I just don't care that much.

So, sorry chicken-kind, I'm voting with my mouth for your ongoing suffering. You're what I wanted to eat anyway, I'm probably just rationalizing.

Yum. Yum yum.

Trouble with these ethical questions, is they're really very tricky and hard, but the answer always boils down to "eat locally grown vegetarian food".

At least until scientists breed crazy mutant brainless chickens that are physically incapable of suffering! If they could make them grow on trees in places like Ireland and Iceland, that would be even better.

Yum, mutant tree-chicken dinners! I can't wait!