First off, it is clear to me that many animals have powerful abilities to think thoughts and feel emotions. They learn, dream, communicate, form social attachments, and sometimes even invent new methods and new tools for themselves. However, human beings dwarf animals in these regards by an enormous factor. In fact, the comparison is so drastic that we can almost say that animals are completely incapable of doing those very same things in the way we understand human capabilities described with the same language. However, the reason for this is not obvious by any means.

If all life is “equal” where one form of life should not be considered of a higher value than another, then it should be just as easy to argue that we shouldn’t eat or kill plants either. Simply because we need them to survive shouldn’t make a fundamental difference if we are fundamentally identical. In this sense we should at least regard the consumption of plant life as a necessary evil. Certainly we can find relative differences in “value” between one plant and another plant, between a plant and an animal, between one animal and another animal, between animals and humans, and even between one human being and another human being, but if our fundamental potential is the same, there is no moral distinction between any kind of life, and the value of everything is merely reduced to utilitarian concerns.

I believe there are fundamental differences between plants and animals, and between animals and humans, despite the fact that we all share certain fundamental qualities. It is these observable differences in our fundamental natures that define the rights of human beings, animals, and plants. Rejecting this set of logic and reasoned priorities is a foolish approach to the world and can lead to evil, unethical behavior on our part (I’ll touch on that in a bit).

Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
Sarcasm aside, if forced, would I sacrifice a non-human animal for a human? Of course. I'd be sad about it, but, ultimately, I do hold human life in slightly higher regard than animal life. Our intelligence is much superior to that of other animals, but most humans seem to take some ego trip with that statement. Or the statement in the Bible where God puts man in charge over the animals. Most people don't seem to realize that that makes animals our responsibility rather than our playthings to do with as we wish.

I agree with that statement completely. Human beings should care for the natural world and animals in particular. Animals are not there for us to abuse, or treat without regard for their mental capabilities. It is morally wrong for us to destroy them for unwise or cruel reasons.

Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
Ever since ancient times, man has used animals for food, shelter, and a myriad of other purposes. Why? Because he had to. Just like animals have to eat other animals to survive. Well, guess what? The world isn't like that any more. As has been stated, we are superior to animals. We don't have to kill other animals to survive. We have been inspired and have created other means of sheltering and feeding ourselves that don't necessitate us to resort to murder. That's why I'm a vegetarian.

Now I must disagree somewhat. First, human beings “need” animal protein. Second, human beings “need” animals as a natural resource to support many different parts of our economy. Third, animal populations (such as those of seals) “need” to often be kept in check (particularly with the way our “advanced” society affects the natural world in unnatural ways) and a good way to do this is to allow human beings to harvest animals. Fourth, human beings “need” to stay in touch with the natural world and its cycle of life and death, and harvesting animals keeps us tied to this beneficial reality.

Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
And it's strange. As advanced as we are now, we give much less respect to what we kill than our ancestors, who had to kill animals did. Ancient tribes respected the life that had to be lost to sustain theirs. They were grateful to the animal and didn't waste a part of it. But nowadays, we raise animals on factory farms, who have no other life than being prepared for food. They are abused and slaughtered. I'll start faulting animals for their part in the food chain when I see a tiger herd up a bunch of antelope and keep them all around in horrible conditions until he's ready to kill them.

I completely agree that many modern techniques for raising animals for slaughter are certainly undesirable (from the standpoint of compassion and health). Thankfully the free market seems to be offering alternatives (though at higher prices) and we can consume animals that have been raised for slaughter in better conditions if we choose.

However, I would highly disagree that factory farms are evil. They offer generally clean food at amazingly low cost. This can have many benefits, not just in our “advanced” society, but in others as well. For instance, considering the level of starvation in the world, such techniques could do a lot of good. What you “need” is often relative to what you want to do.

Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
By the by, I also find it quite hilarious how all of you seem to think we equate factory farms and meat eaters with Hitler's genocide of the Jews when Hitler himself was a vegetarian. Yeah, kinda hard to live down (you don't see many vegetarians hyping that aspect of the history), but I still find it quite humorous when you make that bizarre and ironic of a comparison.

We aren’t equating animal consumption with cannibalism or Nazism. We’re simply asking people like Mark or LS to describe the level at which they equate humans with animals. Also we desire to have them describe the consistency with which they approach their view of the world.

I actually find it quite interesting that Hitler was a vegetarian. It might actually point somewhat to the ethic that allowed him to devalue human life in pursuit of personal power. The Nazis were generally strong environmentalists in a Darwinist sense. They saw us human beings as animals that had evolved to our level because we were the strongest, and the strongest always survive (supposedly). They then saw other classifications of human beings (“races”) as expendable in pursuit of superiority in the same way that one animal will treat another animal as expendable in order to advance its evolution (according to Darwinism). They believed that man alone had a unique destiny, and they believed they were collectively working to bring about the ultimate form of mankind. It’s crazy shit, but pretty complicated and impressive in terms of a reasoned, teachable ideology.

While modern “animal rights activists” are quite different from Nazis in the sense that they seek to preserve all life, they are similar in the sense that they believe animal life and human life to be fundamentally the same. Both ideologies believe that humans competed with animals and took on a higher-evolved form of animal life. The difference is that one sees our fundamental equality as something that we all seek to evolve away from, with competitive survival and distinctions of utilitarian value as the ultimate goal of life, while the other sees competitive survival and distinctions of utilitarian value as a necessary evil of lesser-evolved beings, with the fundamental equality of all life being the most important concept that we are all evolving toward. But, both fall into the trap of making life a concept to be valued only practical reasons and reject the fundamental basis for our system of ethics. I firmly believe that human beings are not simply of a higher value than animals in some relative sense like this.

When we approach the idea of “animal rights” from the standpoint of basic ethics (the way we determine what is normally right or wrong), we can very clearly begin to see that animals cannot have rights in the way human beings do. Human societies protect the lives and the freedoms of human beings because that protection reinforces the idea of mutual respect. I respect your right to live and your right to exercise your authority as a human being because I want you to similarly respect my equal rights as another human being.

Animals, almost by definition, do not and cannot respect human beings as if they were making an ethical choice to do so. From a scientific standpoint, animal life flows toward equilibrium with the rest of the natural world, a state that is unchanging over time unless acted upon by external factors, much more like our physical surroundings than any kind of being with a historical, moral mind like our own. Just as plants, weather, rocks, and other aspects of our environment have no understanding of right or wrong (good and evil), animals also display the exact same kind of neutrality.

Unless we consider a non-human capable of displaying a moral consciousness on our level, we should never, ever equate the fundamental value of human beings with other forms of life. Our higher value is not just because we can accomplish more, it is because we have a mind that can discern right from wrong, and then act on the basis of that very discernment. That is the fundamental basis of our laws and all of our human morality. And while we certainly have animal aspects to our nature, we have something more than that, and I will not back down from people who wish to cheapen human life by ascribing the fundamental worth of an ethical being to animals when they clearly exhibit no such thing.