The difference is that humans are broadly capable of understanding the moral consequences of their actions, and in the west we seem to have developed the concept of showing mercy to animals (stunning and sticking rather than bleeding animals out through the neck while conscious).
While some animals have more complex proto-moral behaviour, they would not be able or willing to extend these same courtesies to us, in the reverse circumstance.
We inject a lot of assumptions about the nature of non-human animals in these discussions in what I think is an attempt to keep them as mentally distinct from ourselves as possible.
What is problematic is when decision chains get abstracted out and decisions depersonalized, and a bunch of company executives in a room decide how many chickens they need to fit per square foot of space in order to turn a profit next quarter, rather than those decisions being made by the people who take care of the chicken every day.
In that light, the psychology and social systems at play in industrial farming isn’t too different from that of prisons, internment camps, etc. Lives that are abstract numbers in profit equations to decision makers who don’t have to see up too close what those numbers really represent.
OP's dog's neurosis was likely caused by something else unless the tail was cut late into the puppy's life. I'm not advocating for cutting tails at all but I certainly don't have PTSD about my circumcision...
Or in my case, when you were non-consensually circumcised as an infant, experiencing grief/anger/etc upon truly understanding what that means.
For anyone reading, you can restore what was taken from you by applying tension to the foreskin remnant (“circumcision scar”) and slowly re-grow the lost tissue via mitosis. You can’t reclaim everything (frenulum, ridged band) but you can regrow the inner mucosa and outer foreskin.
The process is called foreskin restoration, and I encourage anyone who is interested to look into it.
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Elective surgery that removes functional sexual tissue: yes.
To make it clear, do you think it’s okay to cut off a newborn girl’s clitoral hood (the analog of the male foreskin)? I would hope not.
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My parents were raised catholic, but are atheists. So largely it was done for the usual pseudo-reasons: to “look like my father”, because it’s “healthier” (completely false), etc. I’m a white american so it’s a very common practice unfortunately.
The foreskin is not a vestigial organ. Violating the bodily and sexual autonomy of a child is never okay.