Not really. You may have already heard that from an objective standpoint it makes more sense to say that house cats have domesticated humans rather than vice-versa.
As I said, that would be the experimental equivalent of cannibalism.
I am a vegetarian, but I don’t see a problem with humans eating other animals.
Lions eat zebras but that doesn’t make lions superior to zebras. Animals eating other animals is the natural way.
Maybe you mean something different than I do when you say humans are superior. I was taking you to mean that humans have more value than all other animals.
Personhood, or the recognition of some set of rights, does not necessarily imply or require equality.
I believe that humans are superior to non-human animals in several ways, but that doesn’t particularly have anything to do with the rights that might accrue to those other species. If they have rights that deserve recognition, it is because of what they are, not what we are.
Personhood is a poor way to frame the issue but chalk me up as agreeing with the spirit of the OP. My position is pretty much the same as Max the Immortal’s so far.
No, hunger justifies eating animals. Animals eat other animals. It’s a fact of life.
For a person with no alternatives, sure.
Well, hunger and the fact that they are simpler creatures. “I was hungry” wouldn’t get you much sympathy in court if you ate your neighbor.
A person is a human by definition. ‘Personhood’ for other species is a meaningless concept for me.
‘Superior’ isn’t the word I would use to describe the difference between us and every other animal so far as we know. We’re just smarter, and that makes us different, and capable of many things other species aren’t.
I don’t eat animals because I feel like I’m better than them. I eat them because humans are natural predators, and there’s no immorality in plain facts of nature (things have to die for us to live. And many more organisms are destroyed by agriculture than meat-eating). Plus human health depends on nutrients found primarily in animal products.
If I’d been raised in a cannibalistic culture I would probably feel the same about eating other people. It’s just what we do.
Zogh-Uhr of Zeta Reticuli disagrees!
You have no alternatives to killing to eat. All plants are alive. The insects that are killed in the growing of that vegetation are alive. The weeds that are torn out to protect that vegetation are alive. Death is the inevitable result of all production of food.
Of course you have an alternative. You can hire killers.
I dunno. The survivors of the Donner Party got away with it.
Look, kidding aside, of course you can’t make a snack of the kid next door. We have laws against murder. But we don’t prosecute an animal who eats a human being. We might kill it to protect other humans, but we understand the animal’s killing as a natural function of the animal. It’s not murder.
Long ago, we were killing as a natural function too. Maybe we were eating each other along the way too, who knows. But somewhere we developed an idea of morality. It is wrong to be a cannibal. As far as we can tell, other animals have not come up with this idea of morality yet. Maybe they will someday. We probably won’t eat those animals.
Here’s a thought. If you come upon your neighbor already dead, is it against the law to eat him?
But you can take steps to limit the amount of death. And plants, while alive, aren’t animals. I still say that if you think animals are our equals, you had better be a vegan.
Yeah, if you think animals should have personhood, if you eat them you’re a cannibal. Most vegans I know do seem to think that animals deserve equal treatment and meat is murder.
It’s so silly. No offense to veggies, I was one myself in my idealistic youth, but the idea that eating a diet produced by monocrop agriculture ‘limits death’ is ridiculous. Hundreds of thousands of organisms die during the growth and harvest of the endless fields wheat/corn/soy/seeds used to make oils (which make up the majority of the calories in most American’s diets), and huge ecosystems that used to be teeming with large, cute animals have been obliterated probably for good to allow humans to grow our plants. The slaughter of one 2-year-old grass-fed cow can feed me delicious meat full of essential nutrition every day for 9 months of the year. I feel a lot less guilty about that individual cow being killed to feed me than I do when I eat corn tortillas. I don’t even like to eat conventionally-fed (corn, soy) animals because I feel that agriculture here is so evil.
When you consider all of the bugs and worms and field critters that get killed by pesticides and modern ploughs and combine harvesters, even foods that don’t contain animal products are produced with techniques that kill animals. A truly dedicated vegan would grow his own food. If you grow your own produce in a garden and harvest it by hand, you’ll kill fewer critters compared to buying food that was harvested with modern machinery. This would take a lot of work and would mean a major lifestyle change, but refusal to do so is tantamount to killing animals for convenience.
What is “equal treatment”? If it involves not being able to exploit an animal simply because it is convenient, I’m all for it, and I’m sure I’d soon get used to not eating meat if there was none available. It’s easier to do without bacon than it is a cigarette or a joint.
Again I think this is a ridiculous argument. You’re excusing something that you think is wrong with laziness.
“If slaves weren’t so cheap I’d stop buying and using them.”
Edit: And yes, my slaves are made of straw.
Accepting the reality of the situation, while doing what is within your limited power to diminish the cruelty involved, isn’t “excusing” anything. I stick my name on petitions, throw coins in buckets, and eat less of something I’d been led to believe was a necessity every year.
All more or less irrelevant considering that as someone who is likely a middle class citizen of a well-developed western country you are capable of becoming fully vegan.
True. But after 40+ years of eating meat, it’s not easy going cold turkey, forgive the pun.