Yes but dignity is usually related to respect and honor.
When was the last time you killed and ate something out of respect?
They should change that phrase to "reduce cruelty towards animals" and then it's fine. Say it as it is basically.
When was the last time you killed and ate something out of respect?
They should change that phrase to "reduce cruelty towards animals" and then it's fine. Say it as it is basically.
I don't kill what I eat, but most communities and cultures where this is a regular occurrence have long traditions of respecting the animals being sacrificed. One form of respect is to minimize the animal's suffering (both when it's raised and when it's killed), another is to use all parts of it, another is to not have an unfair advantage when hunting it, and so on. It's not one dimensional.
One of my all-time favourite comments on HN deals with this beautifully:
So we recoil at killing animals, because pets are like family, and most of our experience with animals are with pets. Thus, we see animals as much more human than our ancestors.
What then, does this say about the ethical status of animals. Certainly, it seems like our lack of exposure to butchering is why we now care much more about animals. The issue would be much clearer if things had happened the other way around. That is, things would be clearer if we stopped all butchering animals because we thought animals had rights.
That is not to say this means animals have no rights, it might well be that by no longer killing animals as a manner of habit we realized their ethical standing. However, this is less evident than most other cases where we (the caucasian west) have given other groups more ethical standing.
With slavery, we first realized it was wrong, and then stopped having slaves. The counter point might be that in this analogy we are still before the point of abolishment.
I think all I can conclude is that 'not being able to kill animals' is not a sufficient arguments for animals having more ethical standing. In the end though, it might boil down to ethics not being absolute but instead being relative to culture.
This also heavily depends on how human-like we perceive the animals, both in their behaviors and appearance. Most people would be horrified at seeing a dog slaughtered, but have no problem genociding away the fleas, ticks, and worms living with it.
I mean, I get that you think your position is kinder to animals, and there's a certain intuitive value to that position. But ceasing consumption of livestock would, in effect, amount to genocide.
I try to kill anything I’m going to it with dignity and respect. Not out of respect.
And the least I can do to that end is to not kill anything I’m not going to eat, and if I kill anything I make it as quick and painless as possible.
Some indigenous American cultures do make sure to eat the things they've killed, out of respect. You could call that "animal dignity." (You could also consider it a superstitious belief that the animal's spirit will get after them if they disrespect its gifts.)
I also know that in many cultures (at least in previous eras†), if you killed the parents of a family (human or animal), it was seen as correct to kill their babies (i.e. children not yet of an age to fend for themselves) as well, to prevent them from just later succumbing to starvation or predation. That's a form of "animal dignity."
† This mostly came up for human babies in the context of soldiers from an army-on-the-march razing foreign villages. If these villages worshipped a different faith, the whole village would go. But if they worshipped the same faith as the attacking army, the army would likely refuse to burn down the temple of the faith they believed in—and so, rather than kill "innocents", they'd dump them into the hands of the priest of that temple. This was the de-facto invention of the orphanage. Later, orphanages would become formalized as an institution, and spread to the point that soldiers would just assume foreign cultures to have them as well, and so the killing-innocents part of razing villages generally stopped.
(And recently in Western culture, we've invented the equivalent of orphanages for animals as well: wildlife rescue habitats.)