Many animals would happily eat us. So if animals can think, does that mean that they've made a conscious decision to eat other animals? And if so, why are we wrong for making that some decision?
"…when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People...”
Secondly: our technology allow us a variety of diets and ways of life that the animal primitive way of living does not.
This does not mean you should be vegetarian. I am, and I would certainly not enforce it on anybody. But if you take the decision to be veggie or not, it should be from the perspective of a modern, educated human in the context of our science and society.
Oh, come on. The behavior of a hyena should totally be taken as normative for humans.
All too often people fall into the trap of viewing humans as distinctly separate from all other animals and not simply at one end of a continuum of development.
It shouldn't matter. Whether 7 billion people all kill and prepare their own animals, or most of them outsource it to the few running the meat industry, it's more-less the same amount of animals killed, for the very same purpose.
I submit that we would be much less sanguine about meat if we were more involved in its consumption than, "purchase, remove shrink-wrap, heat."
To quote one of my favorite sci-fi books:
"The difference between raman (human-like aliens) and varelse (mere animals, with whom we cannot relate) is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have."
But industrial farming is just horrific.
Let's not put our year 2015 Western ideas of 'right and wrong' on a pedestal as the objective moral truth. They may not have your understanding of right and wrong, but they do have an understanding of right and wrong.
To quote Nietzsche, morality is just herd instinct in the individual.
It's no coincidence that though human moralities have differed incredibly - you have everything from total pacifism to an obligation to perform ritual sacrifice on other human beings - it pretty much always reflects, to greater or lesser degree, the basic principle of in-group altrusim, which is probably genetically encoded at some level. (Interestingly, in the past few hundred years, Western societies have made the "in-group" increasingly inclusive. Perhaps we will one day include animals more than we do.)
Animals, particularly more social animals, certainly have 'moral' instincts (that is, a herd instinct.)
Instinct and thought are not opposites, they're just gradations on a scale.
Right, and I suppose I wasn't terribly clear in my wording, but I intended to communicate that all (or, most) animals have some sense of right and wrong, it's just that I believe we are capable of having a more "nuanced" one. Which, in my view, indicates that our actions should be held to a higher standard than that of animals. In the same sense that a person with mental disabilities that commits a crime might be held to a different standard than the average person, animals should be given some slack for similar reasons.
Anyway, I essentially agree with you, and I advocate for the idea you mentioned, of increasing the inclusivity of our ethics.