Animal Cruelty and PETA
October 13, 2009 by TheLogicGod
Does animal cruelty really matter?
The answer to me at first was no, of course not. The world is constantly simplifying and industrializing everything since the first factories cropped up. I attributed animal cruelty concerns to certain humans heightened sense of morals and ethics that are outdated in this scientific age. However, technology can’t protect us from everything. There are many changes that “necessary animal cruelty” cause to the animals. Higher stress levels and of course forced cannibalism in cows produces unpredictable and deadly results to the final yield.
An issue of ethics and morals?
Maybe I’m biased, but I believe heightened morals are going to be the true test of modern science in the coming decades in regards to gene testing/treatment and radical human improvement. When it comes to animals I think people are being too sensitive. Animals can feel pain yes, but they lack the ability of higher thought. They can’t long for green pastures or dream of bounding in a field of grain which they have never seen. People attribute human emotions to animals in the form of their pets and those destined for the slaughterhouse. There is a fundamental misunderstanding in the difference between our brains function compared to an animals and this misunderstanding causes many people to obsesss over animal cruelty to the point of equating it to child abuse and above.
At my college I saw many PETA signs and they were handing out fliers. On the fliers an animals life and “predicament” is constantly put on equal footing with the civil rights movement and pregnant mothers. Humans far surpass animals in cognitive function, so these comparisons are detrimental and only serve to hurt PETA’s cause.
The true and logical concerns.
We’re breeding, raising, and killing pigs and cows in an artificial world each day. Though an animal lacks heightened reasoning, desires to mate and eat in particular ways do exist. We shouldn’t stray too far from their natural instincts. The day we can engineer an animal without higher cognitive function (which there isn’t much of anyway) is the day that all concerns can disappear. In fact, we may as well biologically engineer meat or a meat-like protein substance cheaply and leave the messy and unpredictable business of animal slaughter behind.
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