We do not need to exploit animals for our survival. — chatterbears
You know well enough you'd be perfectly healthy being a vegan for the rest of your life, Sir, so long as your diet was varied and you got enough protein. Essential amino acids can be harvested from plants and B 12 can be synthesized (i think). — Nils Loc
Human beings are, by evolution or creation, omnivorous. That does not just mean that theycaneat most kinds of foods but that they need to eat different types of food. — Sir2u
Our dominion over animals is not unethical, it is natural. — DingoJones
Ethics concern humans, it is created by humans for humans, and even then only about what specific humans or groups of humans agree to. It doesn't make sense to apply ethics to creatures not capable of ethics, you might as well apply ethics to a rock. Non-sequitur, apples and oranges etc — DingoJones
Also, the way humans treat animals has nothing on the way animals treat animals. Nature is a savage, merciless and relentless wasteland of suffering and horror. — DingoJones
If you want animals to have a seat at the table of ethics then it stands to reason that we prioritize the ethical violations against them, since they inflict so much more suffering on each other than we do, how exactly do you propose we go about holding animals accountable for that? — DingoJones
What's natural about rape (forced artificial insemination), torture and unnecessary slaughter? — chatterbears
Our interaction with animals is not an ethical matter. Ethics are a social contract which animals cannot agree too. What animals DO abide by is nature, survival. That is something humans are capable of understanding, and Id go further and say that humans are already doing that. We are a part of the food chain after all. Its just incoherent, to me at least, to include them in ethics. Even if we ignore that and we focus only on what humans can do to measure animals according to our rules, wouldnt we be obligated to do everything we can to reduce the suffering of animals inflicted by other animals? It doesnt make sense. — DingoJones
I can go along with your position that interactions between non-human animals are not governed by morality, and that animals are not moral agents.The trouble is that the human treatment of animals is part of the moral sphere, simply owing to their involvement in our practices. In doing things with animals we involve them in our relations with each other, and the "ethicality" of those intrahuman relations is thereby in a manner of speaking transferred on to the direct relations between humans and animals. — jamalrob
I think just about anything can be "included in ethics" that concerns human actions, so the human treatment of animals is or can be an ethical matter. Let's agree that animals are not moral agents. Does it follow that human actions involving them are not a matter for ethics? I don't think so. Some version of the argument from marginal cases (AMC) can be used to show this. E.g., the treatment of infants is a matter for ethics even though they might have no concept of right and wrong. — jamalrob
The case with infants is different, the infant will grow up and gain moral comprehension — DingoJones
But take the generalized AMC. Some infants may not ever gain moral comprehension--it could be some kind of severe mental disability--and yet they do remain morally significant. — jamalrob
if I destroy the Mona Lisa for no reason... — jamalrob
The main point here is, the killing of these animals is unnecessary. We do not need to exploit animals for our survival. We do it for pleasure and convenience. But is pleasure and convenience worth the torture and death of innocent sentient beings? — chatterbears
Human beings are, by evolution or creation, omnivorous. That does not just mean that theycaneat most kinds of foods but that they need to eat different types of food. — Sir2u
And we need to keep on eating our animals and plants because they are part of our family; the Homo Sapiens phenomenon has never been just a bunch of individual hominids, but also the relationships with other species. — DiegoT
Our interaction with animals is not an ethical matter. Ethics are a social contract which animals cannot agree too. — DingoJones
What animals DO abide by is nature, survival. That is something humans are capable of understanding, and Id go further and say that humans are already doing that. We are a part of the food chain after all. Its just incoherent, to me at least, to include them in ethics. — DingoJones
Even if we ignore that and we focus only on what humans can do to measure animals according to our rules, woildnt we be obligated to do everything we can to reduce the suffering of animals inflicted by other animals? It doesnt make sense. — DingoJones
Have you made a first hand comparison of a cow being inseminated artificially with a cow being inseminated by a bull? — Bitter Crank
I don't approve of factory farming practices which subject animals to unnecessary stress, pain, or discomfort. — Bitter Crank
In nature, most animals are slaughtered by predators. Predators are not humane; they begin eating prey animals as soon as they are no longer a threat (like by kicking). A prey animal might have to endure a couple of hours of being eaten before it finally bled to death -- depending on what the predators ate first. — Bitter Crank
An animal's death in a slaughterhouse is quick and final. What would you prefer? A natural death by being chewed on by several wolves, or a bullet in the head? — Bitter Crank
Now if I'm right and it is an ethical matter, you could still argue that it is not wrong to exploit animals, perhaps by invoking the significance of species membership (which includes the so-called "marginal cases"). That is, you could argue that species membership justifies our treatment of animals, even though it doesn't justify the claim that the treatment of animals is not ethically significant at all. This would probably be something like my own position, e.g., we can eat meat without doing wrong, so long as we don't treat the animals cruelly. — jamalrob
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