Quote:
Originally Posted by John Wilkes Booth
as for eating animals... to me it is really quite simple. if you believe that kicking a cat is cruel and should be punished yet you buy meat that was raised on factory farms which cause 1000x as much suffering in animals then you are a hypocrite. there is no ethical principle being defended if you arbitrarily decide which animals can legally suffer and the circumstances under which this can happen.
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Bulls-hit. First, you're setting up a straw man argument. It assumes that animals raised as food really suffer "1000x" worse than an animal being abused. Where's your proof? I don't think you've ever seen true cases of animal abuse. I've seen people do things to animals that would make you puke. Moreover, where's your proof that the lives of livestock would be effectively easier if they lived in the wild where they would assuredly live no longer of a life? Would you rather be killed fairly quickly in a slaughterhouse or ripped apart by a pack of dogs or a bunch of crocodiles? I'm sure you've seen it on TV, it's f-ucking brutal to watch. The bottom line is that they are going to be food for something or someone--no getting around it.
That raises the next issue of if we stop eating cows, what do we do with them all? Turn 'em loose? Vegans, anti-hunters and ban-all-guns fanatics apparently have no idea how many whitetail deer there are and how fast they multiply. Without a hunting season most wooded areas would be overgrazed resulting in mass starvation without the culling of deer. And, to me, if you kill an animal--you eat it.
Some animals make good companions, some make good hamburger. I see nothing hypocritical in making that distinction. In fact, failure to make that distinction is something we do at our own peril.