Neither do humans, of course. Do you stop and grieve for the chicken you just grilled and ate?
Obviously animals are capable of recognizing that other creatures have emotions, too--any dog or cat owner can tell you that. But clearly, like us, they don't always choose empathy.
Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit but not another cat.
Occam's razor says that most wild animals exhibit preference of what species they'll eat based on taste and availability of food, not because of ethics. I said most because I'm not a wildlife biologist and there always seems to be strange outliers, but I have a hard time believing an omnivore/carnivore, such as a bear, would willingly choose vegetation 100% of the time because of ethics when there's plenty of game of its preference to eat.
>Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit but not another cat.
Most domesticated dogs that were raised alongside cats won't eat them because they've learned that they're not allowed to. The ones that do attack children and other pets are frequently euthanized.
That's an absurd statement. While tempers of dogs vary from one to the next just like humans, I vehemently disagree to the extent that I'm hesitant to believe you've ever raised a puppy, or even have been exposed to many dogs for that matter. Plenty of pet dogs behave more like their wolf ancestors than others.
That's a separate issue from the one I raised, namely that animals display species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that for some animals this preference can be emotionally/socially based.
If there is any species-oriented preferences outside of taste and availability, it's purely out of a symbiotic relationship that they benefit from. Wolves aren't going to stop hunting deer unless the deer somehow provide additional sources of food that the wolves realize only exists because of the deer's help.
Isn’t that how humans operate as well? People keep pets that they get satisfaction from but we don’t eat our pets.
Then you have the debate of whether true altruism exists or whether people do even our most selfless acts because of the endorphin rush we get from helping others.
And not just dogs. I have trained cats to become friendly to individual rats (I think instinct is too strong), and I have seen some species express either preference or disdain for other species. My personal analysis is that this has more to do with social and emotional conditioning, a true recognition of another animal as "friendly" despite not offering a symbiotic relationship, rather than directly as a result of behavioral conditioning with positive/negative stimulus.
I think a better indicator of the difference between us and pets is that we keep pets, and further, that we sometimes keep pets purely for emotional benefits. Incidences of non-humans keeping other animals as pets is extremely rare and seemingly limited to primates. [0] I think that says a lot about our psychology. But it's a little pointless to debate about whether other mammals experience meaningful emotions. They do. Meaningful emotions are actionable. That's why our emotions seem meaningful.
[0] https://bioone.org/journals/Neotropical-Primates/volume-13/i...
The source is in Russian from a zoologist who studied wolves: https://sovet.blocknote.info/articles/443/serdtse-volka-semy...
Some behaviors are instinctive, some are taught, some are the result of emotional conditioning (hence people taming and domesticating animals).
You agree with me.
Your pet would eat you, if you had a stroke in your flat- lying helpless on the floor. All the nice moments, are just a function of the surpulus, that is provided by humanity via ecocide.
Not eating another human has nothing to do with the fact that we share a species and everything to do with the conscious psychological decision to have respect for the life of all highly cognitive beings which can live complex lives, and not arrogantly place my own need for survival higher than theirs...
But nuances aside, fundamentally I don't differ from the deer, birds, or squirrels in that I'm wired to do almost anything necessary to satisfy my hunger impulse. So I'm not sure how what you're saying makes any difference.
I did cry the first time I butchered a chicken.
You're doing that. Not paying 18 people away to do it for you.
And the chicken probably had a better life.
The butchering can certainly be more emotional that the killing... it might 10 seconds to grab an axe and swing and then at least 30 minutes to cut the skin and pull it off of the body, to cut the body cavity open and to slice out the internal organs. It feels different than say preforming an autopsy in biology lab... you might have this moment as I have where you realize that the story you tell yourself, that you're a killer with a higher purpose, is just that -- a story. It doesn't make the animal you murdered feel any better about the fate it met at your hand. I would guess it is a significantly different feeling in cultures where a large portion of the population kill what they eat. Even here where I live, in rural Pennsylvania, people will often look at you like you're a sociopath if you tell them you killed and skinned and ate any animal other than a deer, and yet, the first day of hunting season there were often many empty chairs in school because dad wanted to take his kid out to celebrate a time honored tradition. Those kids don't often cry when they kill their deer, they often feel an overwhelming sense of pride. And then they pay a processor $50 so that they don't have to do the hard dirty work themselves.
We're certainly capable of it. It remains unclear whether other animals are capable.
It's possible to show empathy and respect without grief.
I keep engaging in morbid thought experiments to figure out how certain people feel when they commit certain acts and whether I would be able to do the same provided the circumstances are hard enough. A few examples:
if I could blink my eye and all the valuables and money of everyone in this room/house etc would suddenly be mine, how much would that be, and would I do it?
if I could blink my eye and everyone in that room/building would vanish from the earth would I do it?
if I could blink my eye and 2/3 of the earths human population would be wiped out by x/y/z would I do it?
if I would be forced to work in a concentration camp being tasked with horrid acts against humans ... maybe with the alternative of being killed myself or having my family etc (spin that further what if I didn't have a family and just my dog that would be sacrificed if I were to refuse) ...
...
the answers always terrify me.
We talk about it all the time. We have industries built around it. We write books about it. Maybe bears could read our books? Whoops! They can't read! Or tie their shoes, or set the dinner table. Maybe we're special after all ...