> a smarter animal shouldn’t be eaten as opposed to a dumber one
i think there is something to this, it's about being able to relate to the animal more, making it more digusting. At some point also lactobacillaceae are living beings, is it unethical to eat bread then? Plants also have a level of intelligence. To me these living beings are so far removed from us that it's ok to eat them, mammals are much closer to us, we can empathize with them much more than a fish for instance.
That's how I justify my pescetarian diet. Mammals and birds, too close to our cognition for comfort, fish.. eh, less so. I rarely eat fish anyway, but I haven't eaten mammals or bird since 2019. The second I can buy lab meat that is functionally the same but didn't require a brain (and suffering), I'm back to meat.
Do you think that's where the battle is currently? People debating between Pigs and Bread? Let's avoid the reductive argument otherwise we can never determine right or wrong. Reductive arguments are Thor's hammer for those that want to be amoral at best.
The animals we eat can play fetch, go look up cows. We think chickens are brainless. I don't think a single one of them likes being raised at mass scale in the way we do it. Few can look at it, but so many can debate down to the atom of whether we should stop eating literal matter. I'm not trying to be aggressive specifically towards you, I'm just trying to disturb a lurkers mind that thinks in this way.
No one is going to look at the factory farm videos today, but they will talk their ass off about this topic. I hope everyone makes the pilgrimage to Youtube at the very least to see it every once in awhile.
That was not the point, nor was it reductive. Everyone has to draw the line somewhere along the line from bacteria to other humans. It is impossible not to eat a living creature was the point.
i think there is something to this, it's about being able to relate to the animal more, making it more digusting. At some point also lactobacillaceae are living beings, is it unethical to eat bread then? Plants also have a level of intelligence. To me these living beings are so far removed from us that it's ok to eat them, mammals are much closer to us, we can empathize with them much more than a fish for instance.