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Comment by belltaco | Hacker News Reader

>I do not consider animal lives worth valuing or deserving of rights

So you're against animal anti-cruelty laws? Are you okay with animals like dogs and cats being torture for human entertainment?

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>So you're against animal anti-cruelty laws?

"I do not consider animal lives worth valuing or deserving of rights" is not necessarily the same as "I don't want animals to have rights". It can simply be "I don't care if animals have rights".

"I do not consider animal ... deserving of rights" is pretty much as close to "I don't want animals to have rights" as you can get.

Cruelty means e.g. causing pain. We can kill animals without causing them pain.

At a broad enough definition of pain, that is very hard. Many of our farm animals have strong family ties. In order to kill them you have to sever them ties. That hurts. If you see intellegent mammals being reunited after some time apart you will know they reeeeaaly love each other, much like we humans do.

> We can kill animals without causing them pain.

We can, but it seems like we often don't.

Animal cruelty laws also police an active precursor behavior that might easily turn into human cruelty, which is a justification that really has nothing to do with the animals themselves.

That is an ancillary "benefit". The main purpose of animal cruelty laws is the obvious one: it's inhumane to hurt/torture/kill animals (depending on your jurisdiction).

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