Quote: Original post by jackolantern1
The burden of proof that there is a difference between animals and humans is not with me.

I think it is. At least in this case because you made the accusation that anyone who equates killing animals to human genocide is insane. That's a pretty harsh accusation to throw at a group of people without backing it up. Now you are saying that you don't have to justify your accusation and the burden of proof lies with the accused.

That's not entirely fair of me though. After all, you can argue the same thing with respect to those who equate killing animals with human genocide. They are essentially calling meat eaters mass murderers. It is up to them to argue their case as well.

Let me back off on that for a moment, though. I don't want to spend a lot of effort arguing about this if you believe some of the things it seems you believe.

That is, you have made the case that the burden of proof is not with you to maintain the status quo. Is that at the societal level or at your personal level? I mean, presumably you have some sense of 'rightness' and 'wrongness'. You probably have a personal system of ethics even if it isn't exactly the same as other people. As part of that system of ethics, don't you desire to hold a consistent set of beliefs or do you just defer to the status quo all of the time for all beliefs? At what point do you take personal responsibility for your beliefs? Did you simply decide your beliefs were 'good enough' and stopped trying to improve them?

If you did then having an argument with you is, almost by definition, pointless.

Quote: Original post by jackolantern1
Both of these problems can only be truly fixed by being able to produce more with less.

According to wikipedia "Livestock production occupies 70% of all land used for agriculture, or 30% of the land surface of the planet." So it seems we don't really *need* to do more with less. If we ate less meat we'd be able to eat the food we grow directly instead of growing food for animals and then eating the animals.

If God didn't want me to eat meat, I wouldn't have canines. [grin]

Quote: Original post by nobodynews
Oh, and by the way? Making the argument that humans and animals are sufficiently different from each other is harder than you are giving it credit for. That is, see if you come up with a check list of differences between animals and humans that will a)not exclude *any* humans and b)take into account other (hypothetical) intelligent beings that we might discover.

Here's a very simple test:
If you were given a choice between killing an animal, killing a human or being killed yourself what would you choose?

For me at least I would choose to kill the animal and I suspect most people would do the same. There are other variations of this that are more difficult to answer, such as human vs. human, adult vs. child, man vs. woman, human vs. intelligent alien, etc. For those variations I don't know what I would I do.

Quote: Original post by necreia
Sometimes I wish that still living vegetables would scream, just to put things into perspective for some.

Well, you're in luck

Quote: Original post by nobodynews
Oh, and by the way? Making the argument that humans and animals are sufficiently different from each other is harder than you are giving it credit for. That is, see if you come up with a check list of differences between animals and humans that will a)not exclude *any* humans and b)take into account other (hypothetical) intelligent beings that we might discover.

easy

A) is the creature I want to eat actually myself? YES -> don't eat, NO -> continue
B) is the creature I want to eat poisonous/diseased/otherwise directly bad for my health? YES -> don't eat, NO -> continue
C) is the creature I want to eat a creature I knew personally? YES -> don't eat, NO -> continue
D) is the creature I want to eat already dead? YES -> eat, NO -> continue
E) would killing this creature bring significant harm to me from other creatures that knew of the killing? YES -> don't eat, NO -> continue
F) am I too tired to be bothered to kill it? YES -> don't eat, NO -> eat


hmm, seems good enough for now. This rather linear decision path also applies to plants as well. Rather interestingly, it also precludes trying to eat a piranha in the middle of a schools of piranhas, which is rather sage advise, I might say.

Quote: Original post by capn_midnight

So by D you would eat basically any human corpse, huh? I think you need to switch the order of D and E around. Unless you really are totally fine with eating dead human corpses. Also, E would seem to mean that you would be willing to eat a human provided you thought you could get away with it. At least the way you worded it. I'm sure with a little bit of rewording you could fix the holes in your decision path.

Nice job of showing what pure selfishness can accomplish though.

Quote: Original post by thooot
Here's a very simple test:
If you were given a choice between killing an animal, killing a human or being killed yourself what would you choose?

So the difference between animals and humans is between what you already believe to be differences between animals or humans? That's a bit of a tautology. You already know what you'd do because you've been raised to believe that animals are less worthy of life than humans. Also, the point of vegetarianism isn't "between the choice of killing an animal, killing a human, or being killed yourself" its that "between the choice of killing an animal, killing a human, being killed yourself, and eating something vegetarian" what would you choose?

If it came down to the choice of killing something, say because I was starving, I'd probably kill the animal by going through the same decision path capn_midnight uses. In fact, if the human was already dead I'd still probably eat the animal first (because I'd put E before D and I know if I ate a human being while there was a cow nearby there would be hell to pay when I got rescued. You try explaining to a judge that the guy was already dead and that you didn't kill the human for food even though there was a perfectly fine cow nearby).

I've always found it kind of strange that people are so concerned about the welfare of animals when 10,000 humans starve to death every day. Shouldn't we get our priorities straight? Or perhaps dying animals are more important than dying humans.

Quote: Original post by Machaira
If God didn't want me to eat meat, I wouldn't have canines. [grin]

Interestingly, according to the Bible, God originally made humans vegetarian. He didn't let humans eat animals until after the flood.