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Comment by thevardanian | Hacker News Reader

..and then we'll take a look at each other and realize that perhaps we humans have choice to act humanely, or to act no differently and start a cage fight on a global scale. The latter is true today anyways.

The point isn't how they treat each other necessarily, but how we treat them in light of the knowledge of their "individual" characteristics, not unlike human beings. So we humans then extend the gift of life to other species.

Those animals treat each other as a matter of survival, is it necessary for us to do the same?

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Many animals kill not just for survival but for play and sport.

Any cat owner has observed this behavior.

maybe because a cat can't afford to go to school and study for their future job?

To be fair, that probably evolved to train and further facilitate survival in the long term.

But, yes, animals often produce suffering. In fact, they've been doing it for a while before we got here. But animals are largely doing it out of instinct, not because they've reasoned out and concluded that it was the "right" thing to do.

In my experience, the vast majority of human reasoning can be assigned into two categories:

a) that which justifies doing as their instincts say

and

b) that which justifies acting in their interest as determined by their instincts.

Humans are animals. We happen to possess an extraordinarily tool for abstract reasoning. That tool is mostly used for rationalization and not as an oracle of truth. We are all creatures of biology. Most everything we do is about getting food, shelter, performing sexual displays, and various forms of social signalling and jockeying.

Our Laws, Moralities, Religions, and all knowledge, including scientific, is merely another ploy towards power. I honestly do not believe that there's anything ulterior other than power that motivates us as human beings.

We have all sorts of conmen that market it all sorts of bogus ideas, even the ideas of food is bogus, and entirely irrelevant to the survival of this body.

It is the attachment to the pleasure movements that motivate us, but more fundamentally the attachment to the thought structure, and demand the repetition of various kinds of thought that has produced the human being, and at a very basic sense our selves as we know it.

So it is the thought there that has demanded continuity, and in that continuity you have a plethora of varieties that add to the momentum of that thought, and this is the case with all things, from scientific, to the so called "artistic", to the religious.

What is religious thought other than the demand for ultimate pleasure without a moment of pain, to have compete happiness, bliss, without a moment of another, which is in itself a bogus idea.

So the ultimate question then isn't really a question at all it is really an answer, as then the only thing left is what we demand in thought.

So then what is it that you demand?

I personally see no reason to kill anything at all for the satisfaction of this body, nor do I see any motivation to purposefully torture animals, but if that is what you do then it is up to you, but basically it is not required, and is only demanded by that repetition of thought.

Play and sport are fine-tuning the animal for survival (eating, or avoiding being eaten, or finding a mate). It's practice.

Exactly, I said the same thing in my comment below (only in a somewhat more exotic way..) but it was just misunderstood and pushed down. :)

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