# How many animal lives is one human life worth? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 19, 2009, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-animal-lives-is-one-human-life-worth/493662 "2009-04-19T22:45:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 92
**Author:** ![mutantmoose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a87d85/32.png) [@mutantmoose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mutantmoose)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2009, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-animal-lives-is-one-human-life-worth/493662/92 "2009-04-23T00:15:54Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > I don’t take potshots witha shotgun. ok maybe you use a high-powered rifle or a bow. They’re still potshots. > [@](#): > > But when my cousins and i go out with our bows, when my cousin Sam butchers the deer we have killed and we divide it up to put in our freezers, we are at least being HONEST with ourselves about what we’re doing, about what it means to be a meat-eater. Well, well done you! You can all congratulate yourselves for being HONEST with yourselves. Round of applause called for, I think .. clap, clap I’m being equally honest with myself when I buy a steak from the supermarket. I know it came from an animal but, unlike you, I don’t need to actually go out and shoot the poor thing myself. You’re not being honest, you just like to kill things. We all know what it means to be a meat eater- it means you eat animals. There’s a difference between that (a necessary evil, best done in well-regulated slaughterhouses) and actually enjoying the job. Volunteering to go out on your own time. > [@](#): > > If you eat meat from a butcher or store and think that makes you somehow morally superior to a man who hunts for food, you are not being honest with yourself. Equally, you’re not on some higher level because you like shooting things. When you leave the house, you leave with murder in mind. You want to see blood before the end of the day. If you don’t get a kill before the end of the day you will consider the day a failure. What other walks of life are there where you would leave the house in that frame of mind? Where you must kill something or the day is a failure? > [@](#): > > She was quite enchanted by the lion cubs, and equally so by the young gazelles; but she was dismayed and angered by the adult lions’ hunting gazelles, saying angrily that they were “mean” to kill gazelles as they were doing. She was being foolish, of course, but she had the excuse of being a child. What’s your excuse? Food. I covered all this above. That’s one of the (two) reasons they will attack something. So what? Likewise with a snake biting a horse or a person - self-defence. That’s the other reason they fight. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-animal-lives-is-one-human-life-worth/493662)._