Not even close.

There's no excuse for unnecessary cruelty to animals; the majority of people in the UK appear to show a certain level of maturity on the matter in that they accept there is a problem. From what I've seen, most Americans would rather make cheap jokes about vegans and post videos of themselves heroically cutting down a defenceless animal with a shotgun.

For the offensive things, it's people going out of their way to find the animals and hurt them, or force them to breed and hurt them.

Killing a mouse in your house that might damage your furniture, make a mess, eat some of your food or whatever is defensive. I mean, in the simplest terms, a vegan still swats at flies in his or her face.



Regarding "widely accepted", i.e. accepted by the average person, that's because the average person isn't deeply critical of the ethical implications of their actions, at least to such a degree that it convinces them to break away from the norm when they find that the norm is unethical.

Animal rights activists universally condemn everything you listed except killing a pest in your own house.

Deer hunting is required to keep the balance of the ecosystem. Deer don't really have natural predators so if their population isn't controlled. The ecosystem they inhabit will have problems and then the deer will cause humans problems on farms/living space.



Just a matter of perspective. I place more value on the treatment of humans.

This post was edited by sir_lance_bb on Apr 13 2016 01:54am

Red herring though

Compared to 1xxx,xxx,xxx farm animals killed per day it's probably not even a percent of a percent of animal suffering at the hands of humans. And it's a different issue since it entails another consideration of the ecosystem that controlled animal farming does not.

E: nvm I see you're replying to his post about hunting. Still a very picky example since it's probably still not even a percentage of cases for that

This post was edited by Nathan on Apr 13 2016 01:56am

You'd have to value humans an overwhelming amount more for it to be equal. I value humans more as well, in general, and think humans probably suffer (slightly) more due to metacognition and self-reflection and such (though I could be wrong and animals could suffer just as much). The sheer difference in magnitude and scale between slavery throughout all of human history and factory farming is just so enormous. Among land animals alone, about 10 billion are tortured and slaughtered every year, human slavery is no comparison in scope.

Abusing animals like that is obviously a moral wrong.


This

& this

...worse than genocide ?

I don't have many thoughts on it, except that I don't care much at all about it. I consider the suffering of human beings vastly more important than animals, because I think humans have vastly more moral value. I don't consider killing billions of animals a year for consumption as morally wrong.

That said, I wouldn't run a circus myself, and some of those factory farming videos are pretty gross.

I think we should worry about homeless adults and malnourished children before caring about animals. Fun fact, there are 27 times more animal shelters than homeless shelters in the USA.