[chongli]

I find it much stranger that violence towards farm animals is ok but not pets.

For the same reason people are more disturbed by terrorists beheading one person whose name and picture accompany the story than they are of a statistic where hundreds of civilians are killed by a dictator's bombing attack.

People are motivated by empathy which only works with identifiable beings. We just can't empathize with statistics or abstractions, as horrifying as that sounds.