Right, this is what I was thinking. Like with a quick Google for "wet markets" prior to 2019 I see tons of articles warning about the dangers and calling for China to close them:
Meat as a staple food is literally not genocide, because an actual animal genocide would literally lead to famine. Making silly comparisons like this doesn't make your position sound reasonable.
Not at all. What's the war? Do animals even have a concept of war? Don't two parties need to know they're at war for it to qualify as war? Humans aren't killing other animals because animals are a threat to their way of life or their values.
Maybe you want to call meat eating a moral crime, and you can make that argument, but you keep pulling in these tangential human-centric concepts like "war" and "genocide" in an attempt to make the normalized meat diet seem as morally perverse as possible, but I think the hyperbole is doing the opposite. If your position is the rational one, you shouldn't come across as irrational.
No, humans are enslaving and torturing multiple species because they taste good. And I'm the irrational one? Because I value not causing suffering over personal pleasure? If that's irrational, then fuck whatever is considered rational. It IS morally reprehensible. Just because they aren't human doesn't mean they don't suffer. If there were a group of humans that were perpetually imprisoned, tortured, and eventually murdered, we would call it what it is: genocide. It fits the definitions laid out by the UN.
Everyone in the first world causes vast amounts of suffering to humans across the globe just to maintain our standard of living. Just by being on the internet, we've all decided we're okay with this, and won't voluntarily stop causing suffering for our pleasure.
I have reflected upon it, and decided I don't care. Anyway, animals would be the last on the list of things to help if I decided to act truly ethically. It feels nice to pretend you're ethically superior though, posting photos of vegan food with an iPhone, so I won't blame anyone for it.
The argument that there are groups of food animals that constitute peoples in the sense used in the definition of genocide and that destroying them as a people is a necessary instrumental method to meat production is...not obvious.
2007: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-foodmarket-idUSHKG2...
2012: https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/12/wet-markets-in-china-...
2013: https://qz.com/141596/chinese-bats-carry-viruses-primed-to-c...
2017: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-z...
I was more aware of this danger and I guess the lab leak theory sounds more like a sci-fi plot to me before the pandemic.