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Comment by blweiner | Hacker News Reader

I've been struggling with this recently as well. I don't need to kill animals in order to survive and so doing so is just for my pleasure. It's surprisingly easy to put this out of your mind when you're sitting down to a nice dinner, but I do doubt that I'd be able to kill animals if I needed to do it with my own hands. Yet I and most others decide all the time that ending the life of another animal can be justified by the pleasure we'll receive from it when we choose to eat meat. So yeah, I'm also having trouble coming to terms with caring enough to reduce some suffering but still being OK with taking a life.

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Why do you, and many contemporaries with you, doubt you'd be able to kill animals? Especially when apparently our ancestors had no such qualms. I venture this is a matter of exposure, we rarely see animals butchered. In fact, most animals we see are pets, contant with wildlife is very minimal.

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.

Rights are fundamentally a social construct, or perhaps we should say a social compact. So far, animals have a much more limited ability to comprehend and reciprocate our social mores. I believe this may be related to the limits we place on animal rights.

> 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.

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.

Human meat consumption typically comes from hunting of prey animals or from domesticated livestock. In the former case, a .30-06 through the heart is a much nicer way to go than to be devoured alive by wolves or coyotes or to starve due to overpopulation. In the latter case, the animal is literally genetically predisposed to this life, and the entire lineage would die out if people did not eat them.

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.

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