What is unethical in our treatment of other species? What is the line one should never cross or is there none?
Thank you for your further comment FNR. Why are there no humans in zoos? Why are there no humans in cages to be gawked at by other animals? Why are there no big game hunter animals stalking humans? Do you think perhaps one day it will come to that? Humans are the dominant species. It is humans who engage in large-scale death and destruction. It is humans who invent the weapons to wipe out one another. I am not aware
of other animals doing that. I'm not trying to be sarcastic. I just think animals don't have a chance at the hands of humans. They are murdered/killed/ignored/abused/abandoned all the time,. Animals don't have stuffed mounted heads of humans on their walls as trophies of their kills. Planet of the Apes gave us a window into what the shoe on the other foot would be like. I wonder how close to true it was?
Like I said, our ability to walk upright and our opposable thumbs give us a distinct advantage over other animals. When we combine that with our intelligence, moreover our unique ability to persuade other humans to aid us, or support our endeavors, we can achieve both amazing and terrifying things. We run in packs like many other animals, pack-carnivores always present a legitimate threat; whether it be a pack of lions v. one human or a pack of humans v. one lion.
I'm not saying that I like this parallel, only that I recognize it. I think we humans tend to greatly overestimate our personal abilities / self-worth, it's our achilles heel, and this is usually the area in which that is exhibited. Just an observation on my part.
Lucky you, Rosie,
To have such an exquisite person in your life.
I'll wager a bet, you were one of the influences in who he grew to be.
As long as it is done in a humane way and the resource is needed.. Also the resource should not be over exploited.. It should be managed well...
I don't think nature was put here for the benefit of humanity.
Humans might be at the top of the food chain as a carnivore, but the role of such a species in a balanced ecosystem is to prevent herbivores from overbreeding to the point of starvation and extinction.
Personally, I'm not in favour of killing animals for their meat, fur, or other byproducts.
But for those who do raise and kill animals, I think the methods must avoid cruelty. The animal's life must be allowed to be as natural and free as possible. Not factory farming. No long trips to abattoirs in trucks, with some animals having broken legs and other injuries. No starving of food prior to slaughter. No seeing the corpses of their own kind on hooks in the slaughter room. No smelling of adrenaline, death, and gore. And the bolt that kills must be fast as a bullet and never miss.
Until 60,000 years ago, our species was just one among them all, sharing the same discomforts and risks in nature. But about then, we began to develop language and to be able to share our learning. From that point on, we had an unfair advantage over other animals. We convinced ourselves that we had inherited the Earth. That we had the right to be profligate with our inheritance. And our greed has consistently led to disaster.
Yes, it is unethical. It is also rather bad economically. The US could feed a lot more people if the proportion of meat consumed was quartered. Mostly it would be healthier too ;-))
We aren't at the top of the food chain. Stick a human out in the wild forest with nothing, you'll soon see... they'll soon see, they are not the top of the food chain.
Humans aren't the only "animal" that kills other animals for food. If you stick a rare and almost extinct gazelle before a hungry lion, do you think the lion will stop to take into account that this gazelle may be the last of its kind, before it has the gazelle for dinner? I think not.
As time goes by it gets better, as an example: Today we dont take a canary in a cage with us down into the mine, a handheld piece of electronics can do an even better job at detecting dangerous gases. And it is cheaper that buying all those canaries.
But progress is slow, always slower than we want. And as progress happens the 'line we should never cross' shift towards ever more humane treatment of animals. It has shifted a lot already.
Dear Sara Palin.
No we are not at the top of anything. We are supposed to have better sense. We are supposed to have enough sense to realize that everything on this planet is a GIFT. The creatures and the planet are not ours to rule or destroy or whatever we feel like doing. The proof is in the fact that we ARE doing just that and the earth is answering with famine, climate change, ecological disasters we can no longer control and loss of so many species, it is beyond counting.
So, to say we rule and we can run amock is so foolhardy, only those with severe mental challenges would think this way. Only the bible-thumping children of the right-wing Tea Party take their guns and their hunting gear and decimate animals that they perceive are in their way. Or because they feel like filling their freezers.
The days of killing animals for food and clothing have passed. We are dying. We are eating animals with animal fats and hormone injections, pesticides, etc., and dying daily of cancer, heart attack and obesity. We stuff them in slaughterhouses for their whole lives. These animals have it worse than any sufferer from Auschwitz, which we also were responsible for.
What creature would do this and announce they are superior to anything?
The only thing that makes us superior, is we can evolve and better ourselves. Animals do not have this luxury of looking around and feeling shame for bad actions. Behaving lower than the animals who never kill outside of their needs, makes us lower than any animal.
Looking around and seeing the pain and tragedy we have caused this planet as a species, at least allows us to feel guilt over it. But until we actually do something about it, we are doomed.
Thank you for your reply m2c! :)
Thank you for your reply AAPAD and Happy Sunday to thee! :)
Indeed. Greed has no end or boundaries. Thank you for your thoughtful reply hartfire
:)
Tell that to meat and potatoes folks! They are not interested. They do not give a rat's a** about that. All they care about is satisfying their appetites. Sadly. Thank you for 
your reply JakobA! :)
You equate human beings with wild animals? Why? Are they intellectually equivalent?
Thank you for your reply FNR.
I sure hope you're right! Thank you for your reply JakobA . I sure hope you're right! :)
It's a Circle of Life thing....;-D...
To be serious for a moment, no life forms/species (exepect, perhaps, some very simple single-cell microbes) survive except by profiting from the death of others. Even plants benefit from soil nutrients which come from the digested/decayed remains of other life forms. If we're going to eat something, we have to kill something.
Our need to consume other species is in conflict with our sense of empathy, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. If we do have to consume other species to survive, but we can do so without being unduly cruel to members of those species, than I believe we should be as minimally cruel as possible. Unfortunately, many of the practices involved in food production which do strike us as excessively cruel are related to production efficiency. We don't stick cattle in manure-strewn CAFOs and feed them nutrionally-dubious grains because we want to be mean to cows. We do so because the meat produced in this way gets to market faster, in greater volume, and (nominally) more cheaply than raising cattle under more humane methods.
And that's where the tricky bit comes in. Trying to balance various human interests against our desire to be humane towards other species. It's complicated and difficult. There are no easy answers.
"Humans are at the top of the totem pole." said the humans . . .
Had you read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (and the other three or four books in the "trilogy", it's complicated) you would know that humans are #3, behind mice and dolphins.
Just don't lose your towel and you'll be fine.
That is the most amazingly stupid book written. It was totally sophomoric back in the 70's and you are still quoting THAT? It was a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's style and ability to satirize, but it fell far short of anything new or interesting to offer. When you take the absurd to absurd heights, it falls short of interesting or relevant. It's a copy of a copy of a copy of nothing much.
Your lack of understanding of the sarcasm and political satire expressed in that series of books speaks to your limited intellect, not the the author's. (And it was and '80's "thing", not the '70's; first edition wasn't published until the very last months of 1979.)
And, of course you're dead-ass wrong about it being a copy of Vonnegut's style; not even close. One again showing your severely-limited intellect. (Maybe too much vodka?)
I am somewhere between you and Salty Herbert on this subject.
I think the original first volume of Hitchiker's Guide was a VERY clever book which effectively lampooned many subjects, particularly many science fiction tropes which richly deserved being satirized.
However, I think the subsequent books fell somewhere between a naked cash grab and a futile attempt to weave the threads of the first book into a coherent overarching plot. There were some clever bits here and there, but the overall feel was one of "OK, here's another deux ex machina to resolve the contradictions in our previous story line."
Maybe you had to be a fairly dedicated sci-fi fan to get Hitchhiker's Guide?
We are indeed part of the animal kingdom, why wouldn't I equate humans with animals? There is even evidence of animals in the wild taking up other animals as domestic pets.
What separates us from other animals isn't necessarily intelligence, rather our ability to walk upright and our opposable thumbs. Were we to use pure intelligence as our measurement, dolphins would dominate us, their intelligence being superior to our own.
I thought that the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was a pretty fair effort too, not as good as the Guide, but not bad. The series did go down hill rather quickly after that though.
