acronos

No, I'm saying any line we draw is arbitrary. Some recent studies have indicated that fish don't feel pain. Why not draw the line at mammals. A study I read once said that plants give off an electromagnetic scream when they are destroyed. That would seem to indicate that plants feel pain. But, if we draw the line at plants, we die. My point is that the line is arbitrary. Why do we draw it between plant and animal rather than between mammal and non-mammal or human and non-human? Could I eat my cat? NO! Could I eat my pet cow? Maybe. I grew up with cows. However, my father tells a story about a cow that had a great deal of personality. It followed people around and was basically part of the family. Nobody was able to kill Melvin. Obviously I grew up on a farm. Both my uncles raise cows for both milk and the slaughterhouse. When I step outside my parent’s home, I see a thousand acres filled with cows. However, my uncles’ cows live in paradise until it is time to be loaded up and taken to the slaughterhouse. Do I feel bad about that? Sometimes. Do I feel bad enough to stop eating meat? No.

Clearly we do differ on this point. By far the strongest argument to me is "Humans are omnivores. We evolved to be omnivores. We are healthiest when we are omnivores." You as a vegetarian will probably claim that the vegetarian diet is the healthiest. Well, we differ there too.

I wish you the best of luck in your diet, health, and conscience. However, I am not going to feel guilty for being what I was born to be. I am an omnivore.

The AntiChris

You assume too much.

Although I do think that there is strong evidence that a vegetarian diet can have health benefits.

Chris

Bad Kitty

I have seen gorillas communicate with sign language and I have seen birds speaking in plain English. When they spoke, they communicated, they didn't just "parrot" (forgive the pun) our language back to us. They indicated basic desires, just as a human child would; i.e. "I want a cookie. I want a tickle". These mere animals learned to speak/sign a human language.

Pretty impressive to me, as we have yet to learn how to speak in any other animals' language. Well, I take that back, we have learned in some cases to make duck calls and "rutting elk" noises. But we've not learned how to say "I love my kitty" in elk. But coco (I think her name was) the gorilla could say that in sign language. But no matter, these signs of animals' awareness of self and the world are pretty much ignored.

Humans in today's society will eat and hunt/kill anything they want to, because -- as someone else pointed out -- "might makes right". Humans are just another part of the natural world, and if you've been watching the Animal Planet, nature and her creatures are pretty brutal and bloodthirsty. We like to believe that our higher cognitive powers make us somehow different or better. They don't, they just put us at the top of the food chain, and we exercise that position to it's fullest extent.

Regards,

Michelle