[globular-toast]

> The cow wouldn't even exist if it weren't useful to us.

I hate this argument so much.

For a start, animals are perfectly capable of breeding on their own. They don't need you. You are not their god.

Who is pretending they are something they are not? They are sentient beings whether you like it or not. You might think you are superior, but your cat and your dog are certainly not.

And who says that being alive is good? They're born into captivity, without a chance and many of them tortured for their entire life. But that's OK, because at least they got to live?

[fastball]

The problem is that, as far as we can tell, they're not self-aware. They have no concept of "captivity". Their life is their life; they don't have hopes, dreams, or desires. They eat, shit, and fuck. That's all they do in the wild, that's all they do in captivity.

The beauty of being human is that we are not controlled by our instincts. We have meta-cognition, which therefore makes us distinct from all other animals. This is why the vast majority of the earth's population agrees that killing a human and killing an animal are very different things.