On The Respectful Emperor

Hi Mary,

It was your twitter feed which linked me to that ridiculous article on The Atlantic. I took Sara's words and tuned her story a little: http://www.snargleplexon.com/2010/02/25/last-screams-the-death-of-a-lady/

I'm not sure if what I wrote is the best way to get people to think about speciesism, so any feedback you can give me would be great.

You are absolutely right in this article. Respecting a living being begins by not murdering them. This is so basic.

On deconstructing of the notion of humane – My take:

Nothing "humane" happens in the bowels of a kill floor.

"Humane" means to be concerned with the alleviation of suffering. These beings are not ill, maimed or otherwise "unhealthy". They are not in an aging pain. They are delivered "fit for living", so there is no "suffering to alleviate". Nor do they go willfully to be extinguished. They are physically forced to their early, unhappy and unjust end. They are being slashed from this earth by a perpetual machine that must be fed… This machine is run by a conniving, yet intellectually lazy culture that says to so is "necessary". And to do so for profit is even better…

From the time we're born we're taught that animals are our irreplaceable "food". This false and archaic idea of "necessity", along with dogmatic social habits and demands, is what is required to believe the myth of "humane slaughter". Indeed the entire notion of animal use, is an idea that must be rationally inspected and rightfully discarded for the bung that it is!

And as far as Lipka and her ilk… They have my pity – They are dead and don't even know it.

One extra observation i've been making of what locovores 'accomplish'with getting their own 'meat'and eggs. They love to fantasize that they are freeing themselves of the pallid reliance on urbanity. What they really accomplish is tantamount to kids camping out in their parents backyard, enjoying a little sense of freedom and excitement but never being very far from the reassuring light of their parent's home(societal indocrination).

Hi David, and thanks for stopping by.

You write we "believe that killing is wrong, but I think it's important to recognize degree." I get stuck here (among other places) because I don't believe that there are degrees of killing. Either you kill someone or you don't. Whether you are consuming the body of someone from a factory farm or a small family farm you are still consuming their body.

I think the difference is this: You are looking at it from your perspective, and you feel better about the way the killing was performed–and it did read like a performance–because of the way you were thinking about it. The description of the "solemn and thoughtful" nature of the event comes from *you*. Meanwhile, I am looking at it from the point of view of the chicken. No matter how it goes down, the chicken dies. And the most important thing to the chicken and every other sentient human or nonhuman animal–is to stay alive.

Almost all of us were once people who ate animals. One of my favorite foods was always charred, medium rare filet mignon. It doesn't make me sick to look at it or to smell it. But I have to recognize that I don't need to kill anyone, and that to do so simply because I like the taste of his or her flesh is selfish to the extreme.

Finally, what irks me most is the idea that this has anything to do with respect. It sounds to me like just another attempt by humans to feel a bit better (and you do) about killing someone or having someone killed when you don't need to. And for the record, I do not believe in the death penalty for the same reason: it is barbaric no matter how it is done. At the end of 2009 I wrote about a NYT editorial I agreed with called "There is No 'Humane' Execution" http://www.animalperson.net/animal_person/2009/12/nyt-opens-the-door-to-the-humane-myth.html . It's not how you kill someone that's most important to them, but *that* you're killing them.

Thanks again for stopping by.

Daniel said :

"…is the consumption of the most poorly treated animals who live short, agonizing lives before a savage death–in large quantities seven days per week without a single thought to its origin–exactly the same?"

In some ways, the disconnect makes the act more understandable. The intimacy of seeing the whole being and then each conscious step that follows only shows the depth of objectification that you allow yourself to indulge in.

Peter,
Most would agree that humans are omnivores. Some claim we are herbivores. None claim we are carnivores.
The classification of our teeth is in no way related to whether or not killing someone when you don't need to is the right thing to do.

As for the food chain, there really isn't one where we are concerned, but let's pretend there is. If you were to meet a lion, you would be his prey, would you not?

Next, we have the ability to choose whether we will kill an animal. And in the developed world in 2010 we have plenty of nutritious, delicious options that don't involve killing any animals. The kind and just thing to do is to refrain from killing.

And finally, you say "cruelty to animals is wrong." Killing someone is wrong if it cannot be considered self-defense or euthanasia. There's nothing I need to get over.

Just for your personal edification, I don't publish comments that are abusive or that don't add value to the conversation. Your questions/issues are not new and I'm happy to entertain all of them if it appears that they are a legitimate attempt at discussion.

So much to get to, here.

1. We don't have "meat-cutting" teeth. Our "canine" teeth are short and blunted, like a herbivore's. We don't fit neatly into any of the taxonomical classifications but we're usually described as "omnivores" based simply on the fact that we've adapted to meat eating over time. This is essentially as flawed as claiming that all cats or all dogs are herbivores because *some* cats or *some* dogs have adapted to eating vegan food. It's irrelevant. We can choose. Most of the time, we simply choose to ignore suffering because we like the way animals taste. That's still insufficient justification for optional, easily avoidable killing, though.

2. Of course, it's a gross oversimplification to claim that the act of intentionally killing an animal is the one and only ethical consideration here. Is what Daniel is doing "as bad" as factory farming? In one sense, no, it's not *as bad*. But it's still entirely optional. It's still the murder of an animal for utterly trivial reasons, in this case: Daniel enjoys the way chickens *taste*, and wishes to excuse the fact that killing chickens is (for him) entirely optional by faffing around and calling this *particular* death "honorable."

This is very much a first-world, very ABSTRACT human perspective.

Would the chicken consider this a "noble sacrifice" of her body to please your tastebuds?

She'd simply get away from you, given the chance. Given that you absolutely DO have a choice, and the ONLY reason you're eating animal products is trivial – you're not starving, you have easy access to non-animal foods – there's absolutely no REASON for you to kill this particular animal, no matter how many different ways you try and dance around the notion of this animal's death being made somehow "honorable" because you did it *this* way instead of *that* way.

Yes, slaughter on factory farms is worse. Yes, it's much, much worse, in simple terms of the scale of suffering caused.

But what you're doing is no less optional (and therefore, no less unethical), just because something else IS worse.

"Do you really not recognize at all the efforts of those who are trying to become more conscious of our meat eating culture in a way that is perhaps less enlightened than yours? "

One other bit to get to here:

Do you really think this is a meaningful distinction?

The issue isn't the degree of my supposed "enlightenment" (or yours, for that matter). The issue is simply this:

Given a choice, the chicken you killed would get away from you. She would act in her own self-interest. You overrode that interest for selfish, trivial reasons. This has nothing at all to do with any effort to become "more enlightened" about meat consumption. That's as meaningless as claiming that rape or torture (of humans) can be done in a "more enlightened" or "civilized" way – the rapist or the torturer may tell himself these sorts of things, but in the end, the raped person is still raped, the tortured person is still tortured. The chicken you killed is still dead, for no good reason beyond "Daniel thinks chickens taste good."

The whole question of how you're performing the (again, entirely optional) act is irrelevant. It's irrelevant entirely BECAUSE it's optional.

Can you honestly not see this?

"If not there, then why not a plant? As a biologist, I think one would be hard pressed to draw a strong distinction between the sentience of a plant vs. a "lower" animal. It's a slippery slope so far as I can discern."

Not really.

1. The chicken you chose to kill is every bit as sentient as your dog or your cat; those animals you choose to see as worthwhile (i.e. not food), while the chicken exists *solely* as a thing, as a piece of property you can keep, or kill, as is your desire. That desire is selfish, and trivial, where killing her *in order to eat her* is concerned.

2. Now which of us is being fuzzy? Define "lower" animal, please. Mussels are more sentient than plants. You're not actually suggesting otherwise, are you?

I'm willing to go with the notion that not absolutely every animal possesses sentience or abstract thinking capacity equivalent to humans, but the reason we draw the line at plants is because there's a leap in sentience – a clear one – between plants and animals. Plans – so far as we know – are insentient. It's possible – not likely, but possible – that plants possess some as-yet-undefinable rudimentary awareness of their surroundings, but that's a far cry from the *very clear* sentience evidenced by cattle, pigs, chickens, dogs or cats. You just arbitrarily choose to see some of those animals as "food."

"At any rate, morality is ultimately an expression of preference."

Perhaps, but you're edging close to claiming here that moral relativism is ideal. No, it isn't. Some things are simply wrong, period, or society stops functioning. What we're doing in the animal rights movement is working to expand the sphere of moral regard to most other animals, because there's simply no good reason *not* to.

"To call it identical is incorrect, as it represents a different preference."

Again, that's a moral-relativism dodge. Some things are simply wrong, period. It's wrong if I choose to break into your house and kill you and eat you. That's not a matter of my personal preference, and it's not defensible on those grounds no matter how many different ways I choose to claim it as a preference. Why is killing and eating you different from killing and eating a chicken? What makes humans deserve special moral consideration that other animals – possessed of at the very LEAST very similar sentience – do not also deserve?

"I was only suggesting that you might be right and I might be wrong…"

No, I think you're being disingenuous here. I think you used "enlightenment" for exactly the same reason you chided Dan for comparing your actions to the actions of a sociopath: you're attempting to shame us for taking a hard moral position that eating animals is wrong, because you want to continue eating animals, and for some reason, you expect vegan, animal rights advocates to make a exception, just for you, because you killed a chicken one way instead of another.

That's silly.

"…but somehow you've altered that quite significantly"

Not really; what I'm saying isn't all that hard to understand. Is what you did to that chicken different than the typical factory farm scenario? Yes, it's different. No, that difference isn't significant. The mere fact of its difference does not make it acceptable for you to kill and eat chickens.

"…and I can't see why you wouldn't think it is when the result is less meat consumption of animals with far better lives."

Because what you're essentially arguing here is that "a little" rape is okay. No, it isn't. If eating animals is entirely optional (you've already allowed that you're neither starving to death or a subsistence hunter), then there's no moral justification for murdering animals for your selfish pleasures, even if you only do it "a little."

"I see that killing is killing and the choice to do so is not necessary, but the two scenarios are not equal."

The simple point you keep dancing around is that nobody disputes that the contexts are different. What you're unwilling to really consider is that that difference doesn't make optional, easily avoidable killing for selfish, trivial reasons acceptable.

Daniel L.,

We may be hard pressed to draw a precise line somewhere between bacteria and mollusks, but certainly no more hard pressed than you to draw a line between humans (particularly certain humans) and dolphins, dogs, pigs, and even chickens. (Plants? C’mon, you’re a biologist? You can’t possibly be serious about plant sentience.)

In fact, that is precisely what speciesism is: looking at species membership to draw some bright, cocksure line of moral certitude that ignores morally relevant characteristics like sentience. The point is that because characteristics like race and species, per se, are utterly irrelevant, we should not use them as criteria to determine, for example, 1) whether one should be given an opportunity to obtain a higher education if, say, “black” (intelligence is the relevant criterion regarding such an opportunity, not “blackness”), or in our case 2) whether one should be spared unnecessary, intentional killing if, say, a chicken (sentience is the relevant criterion regarding such avoidance of unnecessary, intentional killing, not “chickenness”).

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s move on to your claim that morality simply doesn’t exist except as an expression of any given individual’s (or group’s) preferences. Under your meta-ethics of pure subjectivity, what any tyrant or violent regime did in any given genocide in the world is not necessarily wrong. That is, it’s wrong to the victims and those who empathize with the victims, but it’s not wrong to the tyrants or violent regime. And of course that would go for all of the most hideous acts of torture involving vast power differences between individuals or groups. Such a meta-ethics implies that a genocidal tyrant’s moral statements are true (because everyone’s are true), that moral disagreement is impossible (because “we’re both right”), that all agents or cultures are morally infallible (because everyone is right), and that arbitrary feelings generate obligations.

Morality does not fail “because [it] is a human construct with no basis outside of our culture and minds” any more than mathematics, logic, or color evaluation fail because they are human constructs with no basis outside of our culture and minds. Moral, logical, mathematical, and color concepts all have roughly the same ontology. None exist empirically except color and some geometry; that is, we cannot touch, smell, taste, see, or hear them, and even color and some geometry we can only see. But all exist perceptually, intuitively, and cognitively. And all are extremely useful and very real, each in their own way, in navigating our way through our world.

As for epistemology in these subjects, if you point to sky blue and say “that’s red”, I’ll say you’re wrong, and be cocksure that I’m right. If you point to purple and say “that’s red”, I’ll be less certain, and claim that it seems to have some blue in it, too, so maybe it’s purple, but who knows? Geometry and morality are the same way. If you say “unnecessarily and intentionally killing an innocent being is at least moral permissible”, I’ll say you’re wrong, and be cocksure I’m right. If you say “there are times when intentionally killing another being is morally permissible”, I’ll say you may be right, depending on the situation; and depending on the complexity of the situation, I may not know the best answer (not to say that there is not a best answer; only that I couldn’t know that I had it).

I challenge you to re-think your own certitude regarding 1) your “justification” for killing that or any chicken; and 2) your moral subjectivism. Regarding your “justification”, consider putting yourself in a less culturally and personally biased condition; be more objective. Regarding re-thinking moral subjectivism, consider reflecting on how moral subjectivism implies that a genocidal tyrant’s moral statements are true (at least for him), that moral disagreement is impossible (because “we’re both right”), that all agents or cultures are morally infallible (because everyone is right “for themselves”), and that arbitrary feelings generate obligations.

Here's an article about plant sentience:
http://www.greenfudge.org/2009/12/01/plants-display-sentience-and-social-behavior/

I think plants show as much sentience as lower animals, i.e. corals, bivalves, jellyfish, sponges, etc.

It's correct that certain preferences would cause society to cease functioning. For better or worse, eating animals or even torturing them isn't one of them, as is self evident. I don't think moral relativism is ideal, nor do I even think it's a choice, I think it's the way things are. We tell ourselves killing (humans) is wrong, but most people are perfectly okay with doing so in wartime or to egregious criminals or whatever. This is not a preference that I share, but it's a case in point. Whether or not I think it's "good" is irrelevant. If you think things are inherently wrong, please prove it to me. I've studied ethics at length and have never found that to be the case.

I never asked anyone to make an exception for me. I'm perfectly fine with your viewpoints and I have no interest in convincing anyone to eat meat. I'm not seeking permission. Furthermore, I'm not trying to convince you that what I did was okay or acceptable. I was simply trying to get an acknowledgment that it is different, which is already forthcoming. Again, I agree that eating meat is selfish and trivial.

Do you drive a car or live in a house made of wood? If so, that is easily a more selfish and trivial act than my choice to eat meat. The amount of animals killed due these processes is very high, but I doubt anyone posting here is living a life doesn't result in the death of thousands of animals through a choice to consume products that do so. I believe that those who focus on animal rights in a test tube often forget that our entire culture is built around selfish, trivial actions that destroy the planet and kill the animals in it. The meat industry is only one part of this. Having worked on an organic vegetable farm, the amount of animals and insects killed in the process is quite high. When farmers find rabbits or groundhogs living in their fields, they usually don't allow them to continue doing so. Pest infestations result in insect holocausts. Plowing the fields kills hundreds of worms per acre. Clearing the land obviously results in the death of many "higher", "sentient" animals. Windows in houses and the power lines feeding your computer kill staggering amounts of sentient birds. Your homes were surely built in a process that led to the agonizing starvation of the animals who used to occupy the land where you now comfortably live. The medical products that we take for granted were all tested on hundreds of thousands of rats and mice, killing countless numbers of them in the process. These actions too are selfish and trivial (we simply want to have electricity in nice, windowed homes, and we desire to cure our diseases and eat vegetables), and the choice involved is no different from my choice to rarely eat meat. If you don't accept moral emotivism (relativism), then you must acknowledge hypocrisy and irrationalism, unless you eat food that falls to the ground and live in a cave while somehow managing not to step on bugs while going about this existence. If you believe that causing animals suffering is categorically wrong in all cases, than this is your only option.

Daniel L,

First, the plant sentience essay (and the related studies) you linked to is humorously naïve and unscientific. I highly recommend it as an example of very poor, unscientific thinking. There is no doubt that plants “react” and “behave” differently depending on hereditary survival mechanisms. After all, such survival mechanisms are inherent in virtually all carbon life due to natural selection. But to postulate intention or sentience as the basis of the mechanisms rather than much simpler and parsimonious non-sentient hormonal and chemical explanations is laughably naïve (and downright embarrassing if you’re a scientist who postulates it without qualitatively different evidence). If you want to read a far more sophisticated and scientific account of the likelihood of plant sentience, consider this one:

http://unpopularveganessays.blogspot.com/2009/06/plant-sentience.html

If you studied ethics at length, it appears you ignored a large swath of the subject in your studies, because your analysis lacks depth (to put it politely).

What is morally right and what is actually carried out are often, if not usually, disparate. But to say that “what happens” is “what ought to happen” is moral imbecility. We should always attempt to evaluate with careful reasoning where lines should be drawn, and ignore those who can’t be bothered to think of anyone but themselves in the process.

Further, I’m just as cynical as almost anyone else about human capacity for moral behavior. As I’ve said elsewhere, genuine morality in humans is rare, as the number of vegans in society today demonstrates. What passes for "moral behavior" is actually herd behavior motivated by social approbation and fear of social rejection.

But others’ lack of moral capacity has nothing to do with how I (or anyone else) should think, speak, or act. No matter how cynical I am, I’ll always take the morality of my behavior and the reasons supporting it seriously.

I see now that since you couldn’t successfully shame us for taking a moral stand, that now you’re attempting to shame us for being hypocrites because we have fallen short of utter perfection in the art of (unintentional) non-harming. Yet I assume you are against human chattel slavery and the unnecessary and intentional killing of humans. Shall we bring back human chattel slavery and legalize murder (at least of some humans excluding ourselves) because we pay taxes in a country that kills innocents in morally dubious wars? What about human fatalities on highways and people who we let die because we won’t (can’t?) provide them health care? Shall we legalize murder because society has fallen short of perfection? Shall we stop attempting to draw lines because we can never achieve perfection?

Vegans draw regarding nonhuman animals lines very similar to lines drawn against human chattel slavery and murder. Vegans ask, what if the victim was human? Because in the end, there’s no moral difference between humans and sentient nonhumans. All of your examples, Daniel, are examples of going to extraordinary lengths to achieve perfection. Ought implies can, and when evaluating what we can do, we ought to be reasonable. Veganism is reasonable. Your proposal of absolute perfection is unreasonable whether we’re discussing humans or nonhumans.

For more reading, consider the following links. (The essays linked were written because I hear the same tired old claims ad nauseam from people trying to justify excessive, intentional, and unnecessary harm and violence):

Veganism as a minimum standard of decency:

http://unpopularveganessays.blogspot.com/2009/02/veganism-as-minimum-standard-of-decency.html

Do vegans violate animal rights?

http://unpopularveganessays.blogspot.com/2008/01/do-vegans-violate-animal-rights.html

Contrasting harms: vegan versus non-vegan

http://unpopularveganessays.blogspot.com/2008/01/contrasting-harms-vegan-agriculture.html

Daniel L,

Since we’re now onto meta-argument (evaluating the arguments presented rather than adding new points or making new arguments), I’ll throw in my evaluation of the discussion over the past few days.

Nobody has even implied that you think veganism is morally wrong. Indeed, even the most violent sadists would admit that veganism is no worse than morally neutral. You’re the one putting words into others’ mouths here.

You were, however, accusing us of too much certainty in our claims that consuming or using animal products, or exploiting animals is wrong. You were claiming that what you do, and we find reprehensible, is morally permissible. You were implying that our claims are hypocritical because we don’t live in a cave or kill ourselves in order to achieve perfection.

Perhaps if you stepped back to the 19th century and put yourself in the position of abolitionists debating with slave owners who were claiming that you, as an abolitionist, are too certain of your claims, that slavery is morally permissible, and that you are a hypocrite because, while you’ve freed your slaves and gone as far as you can reasonably go to rid yourself of the products of slavery, you still haven’t achieved perfection by dropping out of society to live the life of a monk. Consider listening to this nonsense repeatedly from different slave owners over years. You might start to get a sense of how much it sucks to live in a world occupied by people who are so beyond honest and rational dialogue when it comes to their personal habits, trivial pleasures, and cultural prejudices against innocent others. When I say you are exactly like a very polite racist to me (and you are), I really don’t mean to insult or attack you personally; it’s just that that’s literally the truth about how I see your position, your stubbornness, and your obvious inability or blatant refusal to see your own prejudice.

If that article was in a respectable biology publication, all it shows is that humorously naïve and unscientific thinking occasionally (but not too often) makes it into otherwise respectable publications (which shouldn’t surprise us if we are critical thinkers; I’ve seen it happen at least a few times). Appeals to authority don’t impress me, Daniel.

I’ve already annihilated your moral emotivism and moral preference meta-ethics earlier in the discussion and you never even attempted to refute it, so I won’t say too much about it here. I will repeat that what really is right or wrong is *independent* of our judgment of the matter. In other words, we can think something is right when it is actually wrong or vice versa. We have certain basic moral intuitions that are just as certain to us (assuming we have the mental capacity) as basic logical and mathematical intuitions. We are usually on firm ground about these basic intuitions reflecting what is truly right or wrong. We are on much more uncertain ground when our basic intuitions conflict, such as in a moral dilemma. It’s not that there is not a right (correct) answer, it’s just that we may never know if we have judged a complex situation properly to get the right answer.

Just because we have such basic intuitions doesn’t mean we all take such intuitions seriously, and I’ll admit that just like there are people who cannot intuit very basic logical connections, there are also people challenged in the same way regarding moral intuitions. But the vast majority of us have them, and they are not necessarily accompanied by any emotion or preference. Seriously harming innocent others when there is no reason for it provides an example of such an intuition. Placing ourselves in the situation of another is also a basic moral intuition. We can then reason with consistency to reach more complicated conclusions. In genuine dilemmas, we cannot know we’re right, but we can know that some answer is the best one, and therefore the right one. There is no theology or dogma about it any more than there is theology or dogma about basic logical intuitions. (I’m about as far removed from religion-based or theological morality as one can possibly get, which is subjectivism, btw (something is right or wrong because god says it is)).

Anyway, since you did indeed miss a major part of ethics in your studies, I highly recommend reading W.D Ross’s book “The Right and the Good” and Michael Huemer’s book “Ethical Intuitionism”. Both are professional philosophers. (W.D. Ross is now long dead.) Neither writer, to the best of my knowledge, was/is an animal advocate, but both have a superb grip on meta-ethics and moral reasoning in general.

Finally, I do think emotivism is plainly false as a matter of fact, regardless of whether or not it is “desirable” (and desirability is utterly irrelevant). However, I do happen to think it would be highly undesirable if it were true. It would literally entail universal moral absurdity because Hitler would be morally right about thinking the Holocaust was right (or at least permissible) and so would the Jews be morally right in thinking the Holocaust wrong. Emotivism entails millions of similar absurdities. It also would entail the absurdity that claims about itself were both right and wrong, depending on any given person’s emotions about it. Further, it would be undesirable because, if it were right, I’d honestly have to say that genocide is not really wrong. It’s only wrong to some people who get weepy or angry about it. No, there is right and wrong. We may not always know we have the right answer, but we can always reason through it by putting ourselves in the place of others; considering their interests equally with ours; and ridding ourselves of irrational prejudices such as race, sex, and species membership in objectively and impartially assessing the moral reality of the situation.

Now then: the one thing you're either strawmanning or you've honestly missed (it's difficult to discern which) is this:

"My arguments seem to be typically refuted as if I'm saying veganism is wrong or as if I condone murder (of humans), rape (of humans), slavery (of humans), etc.. Moral emotivism does not conclude that murder…"

No, Daniel, that's a *comparison*, intended to get you to think.

No one has said (or implied) that you *condone* the rape, torture or murder of humans. We're drawing comparisons between the rape, torture and murder of humans and the rape, torture and murder of nonhumans *in an effort to get to you think* in a less speciesist way. The simplest way to do that – which you've either intentionally ignored, or you're so mired in speciesism that you simply don't see it – is by drawing obvious comparisons between your treatment of the oppressed class ("food" animals) and having the *same* treatment happen to you or another member of the non-oppressed class, i.e. humans in general, that we *presume you have some empathy for*. This doesn't say you condone horrible things being done to humans. It says *exactly the opposite*.

Think it through: I've asked several times, which you've dodged again and again and again:

What is the moral difference between a human and a dog, a cat, a pig, a cow or a chicken? Is it intelligence? Are stupid humans acceptable to eat? Is it language / self-advocacy? Are infants or comatose humans acceptable to eat? Is it tool use? Is it some claim to inherent *human-specific* rights? If so, why should those be limited to just humans?

We've been asking you serious questions, in an attempt to take your presence here seriously. In return, you've claimed that you've studied oodles of ethical systems and concluded that moral relativism is the best we can possibly hope for, and that plants are every bit as sentient as shellfish.

Sorry, kiddo, but that's simply inane, on both counts.

Rather than rinsing, lathering and repeating, here, why not take a chance and try answering the real question: WHY are chickens food, and not humans with similar IQ's?

Wow…the lengths some people will go to justify their behavior is incredible. I'm reminded of a quote from Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals:

"Killing an animal oneself is more often than not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep." (102)