Animal rights and things
From Telkoth.net
Today we talked about... the title wasn't "animal rights," but it was basically the same thing. The gist of the argument, as proposed by our vegetarian philosophy circle leader, was that disrupting a thing's interests - for example, the interest to move from here to there, or build a house, or whatever - isn't coo'. Eating an animal, like a chicken, would no doubt interfere with its interests. It was admitted that the number and/or scale of interests before you shouldn't eat something is debatable. For example, does a fly have interests.
Another argument was that a sense of self-awareness, and awareness of the future, implies some rights. If I can think about what I might like to do tomorrow - or even a second from now - you shouldn't eat me.
I had some objections to the above. First of all, how can we know whether something has interests, and what those interests are, but more importantly, when interests conflict, which should override the other? For example, it's in my interest to obtain Vitamin B12, something that cannot be found except in animal products of some kind. That chicken over there may not be fond of me sticking it in a cage so it can lay me eggs. Who wins? It is worth noting that I can obtain Vitamin B12 these days from pills, but vitamin supplements of this kind have only recently become an option.
Another point that came up is that even if we must eat animals, or animal products, the way in which we do so doesn't seem very nice. You wouldn't stick a human in a cage, even if you fed it and gave it some games to play, so why should you do it to a cow just to get milk? I quickly brought up the point that we have a kind of symbiotic relationship with cows and chickens and things. Certainly, these animals would not survive very well on their own if we set them free. In exchange for protecting a chicken from the elements and from predators, I ask for a few eggs (and yes, perhaps later its meat). It was briefly suggested that we should not domesticate animals to rely on us, but there was also the counter that ants domesticate aphids; they milk them. Should we tell the ants to cut it the hell out?
We tossed around ideas after that, like "at what point should other animals stop eating meat, if they don't have to," and "if I find meat lying around, is it cool to eat it," which would lead to "if I find animals attacking another animal, can I have what they leave behind / can I take their kill?" and it starts to get tricky there.
In the end, vegetarians are silly, and vegans more so. I've evolved with pointy teeth for a reason, and I intend to use them. If ants can milk aphids for ants, people can milk cows for me. The fact is, people are just another type of animal, and it seems to me that the only difference is that we don't have predators, so we somehow think we shouldn't be a predator. There has to be a top somewhere, and I don't mind being it.
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[gets some pepper jack cheese]
