There is a beach on the island of Barra, in the Outer Hebrides, where a colony of seals lives. Last summer, I sat on a rock watching them watching me with big brown eyes. They are beautiful creatures, all sleek body and salty intelligence, and I would balk at bashing one over the head. But I’d eat a seal sausage roll.

Seal tastes like moose, apparently. As a non-Canadian moose virgin, I can’t tell you if that means it really tastes like chicken. The Canadian politicians who sat down this week for a symbolic seal lunch had it wrapped in bacon with a port reduction.

It is Canada’s annual seal cull again, and the animal rights protesters are preparing their traditional response. Yet they are strangely silent about the rat genocide in South Georgia, where millions of non-indigenous rodents will be killed over the next five years. If you prick a rat, does it not bleed? The EU has banned the import of seal produce, much to the fury of some Canadians. Why ban seal skins and not fur? How can the home of foie gras and veal crates complain about smoked seal loin?

Our relationship with animals and food in this era of plenty is riven with hypocrisy. There are only two intellectually coherent positions on meat — extreme veganism or enthusiastic carnivorism. But the middle position seems to dominate popular thought; a mishmash of sentiment and wishful thinking. It’s the cute-arianism position — I’ll eat meat, but only from animals that don’t make me go aah.

It’s not surprising that our relationship with food is difficult; it made us what we are. In his book Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham argues that eating meat, then learning how to cook, were fundamental to our evolution. Eating nothing but raw veg does not supply much energy — eating meat helped our brains to grow. But raw meat is hard to digest. Professor Wrangham, a Harvard primatologist, argues that cooking food increases the energy we draw from it, and allows us to digest it more easily. Easy digestion means a smaller gut, and a smaller gut means more energy gets to a growing brain.

There is a reason that ickle fluffy lamb smells delicious when butchered and roasted with garlic and rosemary; that process of tenderising our meat is an essential part of our humanity. What you are smelling is the essence of what made you, you. The whiff of cabbage doesn’t cut it.

Now that we are a little more evolved, however, the argument changes. Those of us fortunate enough to live in places where food is cheap and plentiful get to have moral choices about what food is ethical.

The basis of these choices is the experience of animals. Two books out this month, Do Fish Feel Pain?, by Victoria Braithwaite, and Second Nature, by Jonathan Balcombe, argue that we have underestimated animals’ sentient inner lives. Braithwaite, Professor of Fisheries and Biology at Penn State University, says that there is sufficient evidence to assume that fish experience pleasure and suffering in much the same way as birds and mammals. Fish don’t like being hooked in the cheek and clubbed over the head any more than I would.

Balcombe, an animal behaviourist, argues that animals have feelings too, and that our assumption that the natural world is relentlessly harsh and unforgiving is misplaced: animals have just as much to live for as we do. Mother baboons show elevated levels of stress hormones for a month after losing a baby, as do humans. They cope by extending their social networks — or “grooming as therapy” as Balcombe terms it.

If all animals, even fish, feel pain and pleasure, separating them into an artificial hierarchy of edibility based on our emotional response makes no sense at all. Why is a pig more edible than a dog? Why is a mackerel more expendable than a seal? The mackerel’s problem is that it doesn’t look as cute as a seal pup when nestling up to Brigitte Bardot. A pig’s miserable last days in some excrement-smeared pork factory is less photogenic than the seal blood pooling red against the snow.

What about a hierarchy of carnivorism based on quality of life? Lambs and seal cubs, which spent their early days gambolling in field and sea, ought to be eaten with a clearer conscience than a hormone-raddled chicken, or a farmed fish, which has been suspended in its own effluence and can feel the stress and pain of its captivity. Yet the cute-arian position would rank a fish as more edible than a lamb, a chicken preferable to a seal.

Carnivores who worry about the suffering and slaughtering of animals are the ones who can afford it. A 1.8kg Tesco Value whole chicken costs £1.99. A 1.9kg Black Farmer organic chicken from Waitrose costs £14.72. That £1.99 chicken led a shamefully disgusting life. We have turned living beings into a commodity — a development that is not much fun if you are an animal, but is an extraordinary boon if you’re broke with a family to feed. The £14.72 chicken tastes better — all that organic rearing makes for a yummy roast — but the decision to buy it rather than its pathetic cousin is born out of luxury. Necessity has its own moral imperatives.

If you eat meat, dairy or fish, if you wear leather, fur or seal skins, you cannot pretend that the animals that offered up these goods did it willingly. The cow tethered to the milking robot, or the caged, clipped-beak chicken squeezing out eggs, is not having fun.

There is honesty in strict vegetarianism, as Jonathan Safran Foer concludes in his new book, Eating Animals. However, that works only on the modern, post-famine premise that there is plenty of non-living food available as substitute energy fodder. And there is equivalent honesty in the actions of Michaëlle Jean, the Governor-General of Canada, who last year used a traditional Inuit knife to slice the heart from a dead seal and eat it raw.

Unless a carnivore can afford to go completely organic — and even then — using animals demands a certain steeliness of soul. It’s a position that says animals are subordinate to man’s appetites and it acknowledges that beasts suffer for our stomachs; yet it takes this knowledge and weighs it up against the loveliness of a strip of bacon sizzling in a pan and the crunch of pork crackling. Buying the odd slab of organic meat does not absolve you from the harsh reality of killing animals for your table. The choice boils down to how nice you are, and how brutal your view of the world is.

In the conscience-versus-bacon stakes, mine’s on white bread with brown sauce, please.