Originally Posted by tore

Your argument seems to be based on a few assumptions which might be wrong, though. You kind of treat the lynx and the rabbit as the same, both are animals and so should recieve the same kind of moralistic consideration. But that's a moral argument, not a rational one and failure to follow it does not necessarily equal irrationality.

There are some differences between rabbits and lynxes and you could say in those differences lie the rational basis for treating them differently. F.ex, the lynx is a threatened species, the rabbit is not and number in the millions. The rabbit is causing ecological problems and may be a competitor with us for resources (nibble in your vegetable garden) while the lynx is generally not.

So, killing lynxes hardly seems rational. They're not around to bother us and there are few of them. However, rabbits are often considered a pest and so they get killed. Is that really so irrational?

Originally Posted by tore

I'm generally against animal cruelty, but I'm not a fan of the basic assumption that killing animals is simply wrong.

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

Actually, in some cultures, dogs are food. Similarly, cows are sacred. It's all relative.

Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA

I feel most meat-eaters are very arbitrary (wishy-washy) in making decisions about whom to eat. Most meat-eaters don't seem to even develop a rational reason for the line they draw. They will concoct some excuse to feel good about eating pigs but bad about eating dogs, even though dogs and pigs have very similar intelligence levels, playfulness, and other attributes (including tastiness).

For example, consider your reason for valuing human lives the most. I have never read any modern science study proving that only humans think about thinking. Also, I'd be very surprised if babies and young children think about thinking. So it isn't even clear that people always think about thinking. And why should the ability to think about thinking be more important than an animal's ability to love, feel friendship, feel playfulness and pleasure?

You wrote that you feel insects, "on a psychologically evolutionary scale," are "on the same playing field as the aforementioned meats" (cows, pigs, chickens), but I don't agree with that at all.

I see humans and other animals as often being on a continuum according to mental abilities, rather than there being sharp divides between species. If an animal appears to have a greater mental capacity to enjoy and appreciate being alive, then I feel a stronger need to avoid killing that animal. A pig has a much more developed emotional life and intellectual interaction with its environment than an invertebrate like an ant does, so I feel more concern about the pig's life than the ant's life.

But I try to give animals the benefit of the doubt. If I know the animal has a brain, I know it is thinking or experiencing *something* and so I try to avoid killing it, even if it is an invertebrate animal whose life I value much less than the life of a pig because the pig is so much more mentally aware and capable. I rarely go out of my way to kill creepy-crawlies. Even as a little child I'd rescue worms from sidewalks so they wouldn't get stepped on.

If, to save time for myself, I vacuum up a spider rather than do catch-and-release, I feel bad about that because I know I'm valuing a minute of my time more than that spider's little life. And yes, the spider's life may be little, and the spider may be only dimly aware of the experience of life, but it is still probably aware so I feel selfish to have killed it.

So, how *do* you decide the value of someone else's life? I feel it is best to try to figure out what the life experience is like for that being, and then make ethical decisions about how to treat that animal from there. Simply saying "only humans matter" isn't a convincing argument to me, because it ignores or trivializes the ability of many other animals to have a wide range or emotions and thoughts.

When I know that animals have strong emotional attachments to their family and friends, and they like to play, and they enjoy basking in the sun...I don't want to end that for an animal.