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Comment by dvdbloc | Hacker News Reader

I’m not taking a stance on either side here but how can you make this case when animals are killing other animals all the time for food? Or is the case that humans are “above animals” in that we don’t slaughter anything?

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We can reason about what we do and make conscious choices about our diet. I don't believe other animals can. That power gives us a special responsibility.

We are also omnivores that don't need to eat meat to survive. Maybe for instance dolphins can also reason about what they do, I don't know. But their biology gives them less choice.

Also humans now eat so much meat that the mammals we breed for food are 15 times as much biomass as all wild mammals combined. It's almost irrelevant what other mammals do, there are so few of them.

Even so, it's a personal choice. It happens that I made a choice to be vegetarian, but that was only five weeks ago... Other people make their choice. But it's different from the case of other animals killing for food.

Careful using this argument it's an appeal to nature and can be used to excuse just about any behaviour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

> I’m not taking a stance on either side here but how can you make this case when animals are killing other animals all the time for food?

We're not in a survival situation, we have options that don't involve killing animals whereas animals do not, and we don't base our moral choices on what animals do to each other.

My cat isn’t in a survival situation either and has options that don’t involve killing. Hell, when she does kill a rodent, she doesn’t even eat it.

"we don't base our moral choices on what animals do to each other"

Also: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/veggie-cat-food/

> Unlike dogs and other omnivores, cats are true (so-called “obligate”) carnivores: They meet their nutritional needs by consuming other animals and have a higher protein requirement than many other mammals. Cats get certain key nutrients from meat—including taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamin A and vitamin B12—that can’t be sufficiently obtained from plant-based foods. Without a steady supply of these nutrients, cats can suffer from liver and heart problems, not to mention skin irritation and hearing loss.

Unlike cats, we can survive without meat.

Sure. My point was only that cats kill even when they are already well fed. The larger point is that nature can be cruel.

I suppose I should have written a proper more detailed comment, I absolutely do believe that humans should hold ourselves to a higher standard and definitely shouldn’t be doing cruel things to living creatures because we do know better and can do better. But nature is still a pretty messed up place sometimes.

Be careful about drawing conclusions about broader nature from the behavior of the domestic cat. The cat’s behavior is, like the dog’s, very significantly the result of human driven natural selection. In the cat’s case, humans have favored them for 1000s of years because they kill pests like rodents. That was their ancestral “job”, their role as a domesticated animal that lives in harmony with humans.

You can probably find some other animals in nature that kill for no apparent reason though. There is apparently a term for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing (though the term confusingly conflates unnecessary killing with caching the excess for later)

Fair. Although, that surplus killing link does list a number of animals that weren't affected by human-driven natural selection.

> Or is the case that humans are “above animals” in that we don’t slaughter anything

Certainly, IMHO. While many animals show varying levels of compassion, we are capable of doing that on a coordinated, global scale; which is unique.

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