>Animal rights ranks well down the list of contemporary problems, IMHO, and I
>do eat meat, but, still, what's to be gained by your irrational
>insensitivity? All mammals have mid-brains that facilitate emotional
>bonding. Lower animals and plants don't. Why steamroll this important
>fact?
This is probably just my insensitivity rearing its ugly head again, but what on earth does emotional bonding have to do with the price of beef? Clearly you have failed to heed the warning about granting:
"... special rights on the basis of special virtues like rationality or genetic superiority or gender or sexual orientation or what have you, you open the door for arguments supporting meritocracies and every other types of hierarchies"
You have fallen right down the slippery slope of genetic meritocracy. Shame on you! Equal rights for fish, fowl, and cabbages!
> Dogs can't reason much about their pain, but they certainly feel it.
>Hence, there IS some material basis for the distinction you dismiss.
>Cabbages don't yelp when cut or crushed.
You may be just shutting your ears to their pain. (Whatever pain has to do with it anyhow, I tend to kill my meat before I eat it, so it isn't feeling any pain when I eat it.) Or not listening on the correct wavelength for cabbage shrieks. I always cut mine off high on the stem so that they can re-grow and complete their little lives by shedding seed. (And people accuse me of being insensitive!)
>And there's also some pretty good human reasons to encourage respect for it,
>as well as for life in general, regardless of an organism's sentience
>ranking. For example, isn't there some meaning for you in the fact that
>disproportionately many severe adult criminals were pet-torturers as kids?
It means many adult criminals were once kids. I'm not sure what light you think that sheds on the field of criminal science.
Or was that just a clumsy attempt to link the issues? Meat eating = animal torture = psycho criminal? Don't fall for that one, next thing you know meat eating will go the way of cigarette smoking and you'll have to sneak out the back to the alley for a furtive feed of red meat.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas