One of my friends ate a cat. She lives out in the country and it was one of the hundreds of stray cats they had running around their neighborhood. She posted about it in her livejournal, how her mother cooked it and they ate it for dinner. Of course, most of the people who responded went “ew” but she was just went “what? it’s food.”
My fiancée, who’s Korean/Japanese, said that one of the reasons why they didn’t have pets when she was growing up, was because her grandmother would have probably wanted to make it for dinner at some point.
It is all cultural. I don’t have a moral problem with eating dog/cat/horse flesh, but because these animals are commonly considered as pets, there’s a societal taboo against eating them. As it happens, I would have a problem with eating an animal raised as a pet/family member (including pigs), but only because of the preexisting psychological relationship you are likely to have with such an animal. If you raise dogs and cats specifically for food purposes, or purchase them specifically for food purposes, there’s nothing wrong with that that I can see. Of course, I’ve never had dog or cat - I had horseflesh, once, when I was in France, and it was a bit sour but otherwise excellent. Of course, I never knew the animal in question.
There are not that MANY top predator species and not many of the individuals, but that doesnt mean they dont exist.
My thoughts on this? It speaks ill of one’s morals to harm something one looks after more than something one doesnt know. So, it would be less moral to eat a cat/kitten you just caught than a pig you kept as a pet, and vice versa.
… except, of course, for the obvious reward of eliminating (or scaring away) a potential competitor for food resources.
Predators eat other predators all of the time. Perhaps it is because we modern day humans are so far removed from the realities of the food chain that we tend to forget it.
Moral difference between eating a kitten and a pig? None, if you are hungry enough. If you’re smart you will go for the pig first (they are bred to be food), but don’t think for a second either one wouldn’t eat you if they had the upper hand. That said, I think there is something morally disturbing about killing and eating an animal you have developed an emotional bond with. You would have to be willing to see the kitten as food first and cute and lovable second. But in the West we are expected to have that emotional bond, and eating an animal kept around primarily for companionship (in the modern day) seems more than a little psychopathic.
In case nobody else has answered this, the answer is no; neither kittens nor pigs are kosher. Pigs have divided hooves and don’t chew the cud; kittens have claws and, obviously, don’t chew the cud.
I think my cat would dress out to about ten pounds of meat. He’s a fat bastard.
Some small difference. Over some 50000 years us humans have domesticated animals, and raised them in the image we wanted. Pigs were bred to be eaten. Cats & Dogs were bred to be pets.
By eating a cat or a dog we are invalidating that “contract” that Ogg the caveman made so many years ago with the first proto-pets.
That being said- I’d eat either, or even people- if it was that or starving.
I hear ya. My (Korean) wife’s father actually did cook and eat her pet dog when she was a child. She became a vegetarian for the next twenty years, and has yet to speak to her dad.
I remember travalling in Taiwan once with someone who grew up there. We saw a dog run into the street and she said “Kind of unusual to see a dog this time of year.” It took a few minutes before the rest of us figured out what she meant.
On the first page, 2trew made a contractarian argument for a moral difference between eating cats and pigs; i.e., we’ve made a deal with cats that they catch vermin so we have a duty not to eat them, whereas we’ve made no such deal with pigs.
First, how many cats have this deal been made with? Our is this a species-wide contract? Second, if it’s species-wide, why not generation-spanning as well? Pigs were commonly used to eat garbage in cities in the late 18th-to-early-19th centuries. Why don’t we have a species contract with them?
As far as animals being cute – don’t eat kittens 'cuz they’re cuddly – how does this make any moral difference? We don’t think that it’s morally correct, generally speaking, to discriminate against ugly people when attractiveness is an irrelevant factor (e.g., who gets prosecuted for certain crimes).
As far as having an emotional bond with kittens (assuming that it is immoral to eat something with which you have an emotional bond), I’d call this an instance of the fallacy of the undistributed middle. Humans don’t have emotional bonds with all kittens. They certainly would be less likely to have emotional bonds with kittens bred to be food stock. And if we’re again going to make this species-wide, then I say we shouldn’t be permitted to eat sheep or cows. I’ve heard of all too many instances of human-sheep lovin’…
