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Kill the Puppy Dogs
Eating Horses
The Principle of Utility
Abortion
GM Food
Military Salute
Religious indoctrination is child abuse
Don't Eat Me!
Give Peace a Chance
Is Sex With Animals Always Wrong?
Aborting Babies
9/11 Inside Job?
Animal rights
What rights do animals have? Clearly the simple answer is none at all. Nature is cruel. Bambi has no right not to be killed, eaten or orphaned.
Predators do not respect the rights of other animals. They kill them and eat them. They don't generally kill prey animals and not eat them not out of respect for their lives or so as not to waste food or endanger the security of their future food supply they don't kill when they're not hungry simply because they don't want to waste the energy or take a risk of injury. Predators do kill other animals that they don't eat. Lions will often kill cheetah or leopard cubs they come across not in order to eat them but in order to kill them and so remove competition. This instinctive desire to kill competitive species can be seen also in the domestic dog's propensity to attack and kill foxes and cats, an instinct which can be either nurtured or suppressed by training.
Herbivores also will kill some other animals and people in defence of their territory. Rhinos, hippos, elephants and Cape buffalos are notorious for it but many large animals will kill when they feel their territory has been invaded. Of course the defensive aggression of bulls has been developed by selective breeding into a pantomime in which men in tight trousers measure the size of their cojones.
We are also aware of animals who kill or inflict severe injury either to defend themselves or for other reasons in such a way as they provoke us to attack them. Snakes, spiders, scorpions and several species of wasps and ants fall into this category as well as sharks. The shark that takes a big bite out of something to see if he wants to eat the rest obviously has never read any universal charter of animal rights.
Nature is also quite content to allow the cruellest and nastiest forms of animal exploitation imaginable. It was this fact more than any other which led Charles Darwin to lose his faith in an all wise god. How could there be a god in a world in which hundreds of types of insects routinely laid their eggs inside the still-living but paralysed bodies of hapless victims? Parasitic wasps do this as a matter of course, in every generation, killing their hosts in the most barbaric way imaginable, being eaten alive while paralysed but fully aware. The wasp has to keep her victim alive, it wouldn't do for her children to be eating rotting flesh, by paralysing rather than killing the meat stays fresh. Unlike in human operations in which chemicals are given to ensure paralysis the wasp has no reason be concerned enough to bother to add any chemical to stop the nervous system reporting or analysing the pain.
A lot of nonsense is spouted about the way animals respect other animals. A lion does kill efficiently in a way that is relatively painless and stress free, almost humane. But the reason why a lion does this is simply explained: lions are lazy cowards. Lions do not waste energy and they don't want to take any chances of being injured, both these factors have led to lions evolving jaws and teeth capable of dispatching prey quickly. An injured lioness will soon starve and her cubs with her, there is no place for sympathy in nature.
No animal has any feature which is designed to end the suffering of another animal. Nature has evolved painless bloodsucking in leeches, gnats, vampire bats and mosquitoes and probably some other species too but this is not for the benefit of the victim it is for the benefit of the blood sucker. Such animals inject local anaesthetics and anti-coagulants so that their host doesn't notice the bloodsucking until the bloodsucker has drunk her fill. In the case of fleas, bed bugs and mosquitoes this injection-extraction site often reacts later producing a terrible itchy rash, no doubt many victims would have gladly given up twice as much blood if that would have meant they didn't have to be bitten. But nature is unable to strike such bargains. Co-operation and symbiosis cannot develop out of a protection racket, or out of a general social contract.
Animals are unable to grasp the idea that we plan them no harm. Animals are either instinctively wary of us or not. Most of those which are not instinctively wary of us are extinct. The dodo is the classic example, these awkward overgrown flightless birds which had evolved from stranded pigeons (presumably not good homers) waddled up to sailors out of curiosity or because they didn't treat the sailors as more of a threat than trees or rocks. The sailors, used to game that played the game would simply club them to death because they were there. Ha ha, that'll teach 'em. It might have taught them, eventually, if the supply of dodos hadn't run out before genes for wary dodos had time to become expressed in the small dodo genepool.
Animals can't grasp that we mean them no harm and they can't agree to change their behaviour. You can't bargain with nature. There can be no social contract between species that do not share sufficient intelligence in common so as to make a contract possible. With some animals it seems we are almost there, we can almost bridge the gap in understanding, empathy and communication. Dolphins can empathize with fellow air-breathing mammals and they seem to recognize some crude levels of intelligence within us and some of them have managed to succeed in training us to do tricks. But for most animals making such inter-species communication and mutual understanding is not possible. That is why I see it as being futile to be vegetarian.
Animals don't trust us not to eat them and they don't seem to be that bothered by the idea. Being eaten is the normal fate of most animals even if they are not directly killed by predators. It is ridiculous anthropomorphic nonsense to suggest that farm animals are living in constant fear and dread of being eaten. Most farm animals will have less stress than their wild relatives.
Animals do not treat meat eaters and vegetarians any different, they would be just as scared of Paul McCartney or Brigitte Bardot as Marco Pierre White or Nigella Lawson despite the fact that only the latter pair would be dreaming of pulverizing their liver or eating their chilled bone marrow with a spoon.
Animals don't have the right not to eaten and don't have the capacity to make a pact not to be eaten. People as a rule don't like the idea of being eaten and we certainly don't like the idea of being killed to become food. We can communicate this between ourselves. While not every person can communicate particularly effectively with every other person enough people can communicate with each other to know it is reasonable to make a pact with members of our own species that we don't kill and eat each other. We can be confident that all but a tiny handful of people around the world are familiar with the concept that eating people isn't done these days, it isn't civilized and if anybody does it they can expect to be given a really hard time over the matter. On the other hand it is clearly not going to be possible to extend this understanding to other species. We can forgo killing animals if we choose to and in response they can let us not kill them. They can't pay us back in any way. We will still be prey for lions, tigers and bears. Oh my. Sharks will still chomp off the odd limb and spiders and snakes will still shoot venom to kill.
If we decide not to eat animals there will be no animals farmed or kept or owned in such a way as to establish a duty of care. It is nonsense to suggest that allowing animals to live is in some way doing them a favour. There is nothing to grant this favour to until they exist and then it is already too late. Do not ever mistake the interests of animals for those of the genes they carry. For chicken genes Colonel Sanders is the greatest possible ally to have, the desire of humans to eat chicken ensures that chicken genes are passed on in huge numbers and stand no chance of being eliminated unlike the genes for dodos, passenger pigeons, giant ground sloths and the great whales. Farming is a great boon for chicken genes. Unfortunately chicken genes are just strings of DNA with no capacity to suffer, make plans or appreciate existing. Genes are replicators, genes make things happen, genes are the interests which animals serve. But genes cannot appreciate the power they have. There is no nobility to be gained in serving the interests of genes, whether they are your own or those of other organisms. Looking down to a lower level for your purpose makes no sense, genes don't appreciate existing and they don't suffer even when they don't exist. You can have a billion chickens in a shed or none, chicken genes and chickenkind does not care because the capacity to care cannot exist at the level of the gene or the species. The chickens will want to continue to live if they are alive but if they were never alive they won't curse you for not giving them the chance to live.
In America chickens lay white eggs because Americans believe white eggs taste better. In Britain chickens lay brown eggs for exactly the same reason. Selective breeding (and slight adjustments to diet) ensures the customer gets the eggs, and by extension the chickens, that they want. Have American customers murdered brown egg laying chickens? Of course not, any more than I am responsible for Daisy, Sam and Amber (and millions of other potential children I didn't have) not being alive. Chickenkind and chicken genes have no reason to thank us for keeping chickens because they don't exist in a form that is capable of thinking or unthinking gratitude. Benefits, rights and duties only make sense on an individual level.
Do we have a duty to look after animals? If so where does it come from?
I do feel responsible for my cat. I would not feel good if I had caused her suffering. My conscience tells me that I have a duty of care for my cat because she is mine, if she suffers because of an action or a failure to act on my part then I know I will feel guilty. The voice of my conscience isn't as strong when it comes to animals I don't own. I don't want other animals to suffer but I don't feel responsible. My conscience doesn't annoy me too much on these matters as long as I don't do anything directly to cause animals to suffer. There is a dull background guilt signal buried in the white noise of all the hundreds of other things I could care about but haven't got the time or strength to focus on. Nobody can be guilty of everything, not even carefully trained Catholics. If you try to take on the guilt of the world on a personal level you will probably end up with terminal moral rectitude or some bugger will crucify you.