db said:
- i believe in the food chain
- i believe that, thanks to evolution and industrialisation, we are at the top of that food chain
- i believe that a human life is more important than an animal life (don't start bleating on about eco-systems and how the whole world would end if bees disappeared - i'm obviously talking about the philosophical argument)
Those three are more or less the same thing.... so, on what (philosophical) basis does a human life take precedence over an animals?
Does our evolution not also confer some responsibilities?
- i believe that the vast majority of people eat meat
In the developed world, yes.
- i believe that this will not change
History is full of examples of things changing that people thought would remain fixed....
Change could happen for a couple of reasons. In the same way that the principle of equality has brought most people round to the view that racism and sexism is wrong, that same principle should be applied to animals. However, changes like that don't happen over night.
The other reason for change, which is more likely in the shorter term is one of resources and the environment applied to food supply. Feeding such an enormous quantity of crops to animals isn't sustainable economically or environmentally. Something will give...
people eat animals.. we have done for millions of years, we have just got better at killing & preparing them as a society (yes, a society - that means we work as a collective and get others to do the stuff we don't want to/can't).. don't start trying to draw erroneous analogies (
"we used slaves for hundreds of years, doesn't make it right http://i44.tinypic.com/fyicy9.gif", etc.), i'm talking about basic animalistic "circle of life" shit that has been going on forever..
What's the objection to analogies? They're a very good (and valid) way of illustrating gaping inconsistencies in how people think and act. Slavery is a relevant parallel to draw, so interesting you wish to disregard it...
It's also interesting that you raise working as a collective, since it is in precisely that way by the blurring of who's responsible for what in a large scale killing industry that enables both workers and consumers to more easily seek to absolve themselves of guilt.
One last point - the way in which we treat animals directly impacts on how we treat other people too. The two are linked.