This is a fair question, but I don't know if I have the time to give a well-thought answer. I'm not the kind of person who spends a lot of time thinking about animal ethics. I just thought it was important to point out the perspective of many people where it tends to differ from the stereotypical HN user.
Keep in mind that the idea that animals are not fundamentally different from humans is a breathtakingly recent idea in human history. One of the key reasons Darwin's theory was so despised initially and still today by a scary number of people is because it put humans and animals on the same plane.
A crude answer to your question is that we're smarter and more dangerous than animals and bigger and stronger than many of them. If a fish could eat me, it would. But instead, I'm able to eat it, so I do.
I also think a human life is worth more than an animal's life. If I ever find myself in some contrived scenario where I can save a bus full of people or a bus full of cute fuzzy puppies, I'm saving the people, with zero hesitation or regret. Even if bus A only has a single person and bus B has like a thousand puppies.
This doesn't mean that I think animals lives' are worthless. (My vet bills the past few months are sad evidence of that.) We should do what we can for them, and cooperate with our non-human companions on Planet Earth when we can. But part of being a living thing is also competition, including competition for the most precious resource — the calories locked up in our bodies.
> Keep in mind that the idea that animals are not fundamentally different from humans is a breathtakingly recent idea in human history.
We haven’t yet all understood the proper moral conclusion from that - that we humans and all animals suffer and can experience pain. Also the relative timeline of Darwin's ideas is irrelevant as their have been advocates for animal rights since Pythagoras.
> A crude answer to your question is that we're smarter and more dangerous than animals and bigger and stronger than many of them. If a fish could eat me, it would. But instead, I'm able to eat it, so I do.
What do you mean here by crude? You're probably smarter than a baby and the mentally handicapped, would it be ok to kill them? Or people who are bigger and stronger don't deserve more rights than the weak.
> I'm saving the people, with zero hesitation or regret.
This is a false dilemma fallacy. I.e. what happens in an emergency doesn't justify what we do day to day. Another way to see it is that if bus A has strangers and bus B has your family, choosing to save your family doesn't excuse killing strangers in the day to day. Choosing to save a human over an animal does not excuse the needless killing of animals every day.
> This doesn't mean that I think animals lives' are worthless. (My vet bills the past few months are sad evidence of that.)
But you probably wouldn't kill and eat your pet. That's because cultural conditioning tells people which animals to eat, and which to have as pets. I'm sure you've heard about the Chinese eating dogs. If you find that repulsive, ask why it's then ok to eat a pig, which is more intelligent and aware than a dog. Also consider the aspect of familiarity - someone might have a pet pig while continuing to eat pigs because their particular pet is familiar and close to them. This is analogous to xenophobia - if something is distant, it's ok to treat it differently. This is morally inconsistent.
> Cows are routinely commodified—undergoing forced impregnation, painful mutilations, and separation from their calves shortly after birth. Dogs, meanwhile, receive special treatment and veterinary care as pets. [1]
> We should do what we can for them, and cooperate with our non-human companions on Planet Earth when we can.
Yes, which is why everyone who is able should be vegan. There is no physiological need for animal products, so there is no need to take away another sentient being's right to live. We are out of survival mode. It is no longer necessary for our species to kill to survive. As humans we have the amazing gifts o awareness, intelligence and moral agency which we should use to reduce the suffering of all beings - human and non-human.
> But part of being a living thing is also competition, including competition for the most precious resource — the calories locked up in our bodies.
For humans, calories from plants will always be more efficient than calories from an animal.
Doesn't all this come down to whether an individual (or culture, or society) views humans as fundamentally different from non-human animals?
You are replying point-by-point to another poster, of course, so your post shouldn't be expected to fully cover your perspective on this, but you only mention "humans and all animals suffer and experience pain" as evidence for non-distinction. That strikes me as a little sad -- surely there is more to life and more to the human (and animal) experience than pain and suffering?
The "pain and suffering" usefully separates some living things (animals?) from others (plants?), allowing us to continue surviving without only eating fruits. But why is that the line?
Couple other points:
> ...everyone who is able should be vegan. There is no physiological need for animal products, so there is no need to take away another sentient being's right to live. We are out of survival mode. It is no longer necessary for our species to kill to survive. As humans we have the amazing gifts o awareness, intelligence and moral agency which we should use to reduce the suffering of all beings - human and non-human.
This doesn't necessarily follow. To be intentionally provocative: just because we can avoid taking away another sentient being's right to live, doesn't mean we should. Reasonable people disagree on, e.g., the death penalty, incarceration, and other avoidable, intentional harms inflicted on other humans.
Plus, if there were such a physiological need, would you be ok with killing animals?
> For humans, calories from plants will always be more efficient than calories from an animal.
Not strictly "always" -- there are ecosystems where the peak efficiency is "land grows grass" -> "animals eat that grass" -> "people eat those animals". (People, unfortunately, can't eat grass.)
I just mean not super well-thought out or expressed. The answer itself is crude.
> I'm sure you've heard about the Chinese eating dogs. If you find that repulsive, ask why it's then ok to eat a pig, which is more intelligent and aware than a dog. ... This is morally inconsistent.
No, it's not. This is something a lot of vegans don't seem to understand.
By declaring something "inconsistent", you are saying pigs and dogs are equivalent.
But they are obviously not the same. Pigs have curly tails and many dogs do not. Dogs are furry. Pigs and dogs have many differences.
So you have an implicit definition of "equivalent" that is really "equivalent for properties that I declare meaningful". You imply, for example, a person's cultural history towards an animal is outside of the properties that are allowed to matter.
But that set of properties is itself a choice. Eating pigs and not dogs isn't universally inconsistent, it's only inconsistent given some set of choices around which aspects of them you care about. When you claim other people are inconsistent, what you really are is oblivious to the fact that they consider some properties of animals important that you choose to ignore.
There had been lot of theories but to every theory there had strong counterpoint found. For example, speech, language and math was considered unique to humans but several animals have been found to speak, have elaborate language and even do counting and addition. Then there was belief that animals can’t do counterfactuals, for example, making decisions based on simulating what-if scenarios but that also has been proven false. My take is that there is no fundamental lack of ability in animals but the fact that those abilities are a magnitude or two lower than humans and animal species tend to specialize on very specific abilities.
There is book written on this subject that argues that most fundamental human abilities not yet seen in animals is building nested scenario such as telling a fictional story and desire to share knowledge among each other:
> My take is that there is no fundamental lack of ability in animals
Yes I agree.
> building nested scenario such as telling a fictional story and desire to share knowledge among each other
This doesn't justify human dominion over non human animals [1], because there are humans - infants and the severely mentally handicapped - who also lack this ability.
[1] It's not explicit that you're arguing for or against this, but I just want to make my point clear.
