| Of course we value more the life of beings more closely related to us than the life of beings more distantly related to us. However, there are more differences between the domestic plants and the domestic animals than that. The life of most animals that are eaten by humans can really be said to be destructed from the day when they are born until the day when they are killed, because they are forced to live in a way different from the life for which their body is made for and that they obviously do not enjoy. On the other hand, there is no significant difference between the life of the wild plants and that of the cultivated plants. From the plants that are perennial, we take some parts, e.g. fruits or seeds, which would have been discarded anyway. The annual plants like wheat are killed during the harvest, but they would have died anyway after spreading their seeds, and until the harvest they have lived in the same way as a wild plant. Before the last century, the lives of the domestic animals were usually much better than now and they frequently could be said to live as well as similar wild animals. For example, the chickens grown by my grandparents were certainly happy during all their life. They had a very large space where they could wander all day and eat whatever plants or insects they liked besides the corn that supplemented their diet. They raised their young and did everything else that wild chickens would do, until the day when they were caught and killed. As a small child, I have played a lot with those chickens. So, unlike the cultivated plants, most of them had their lives shortened, but, except for duration, their lives were not altered in other ways. Unfortunately such animal raising methods cannot be scaled to feed billions of humans. |
I think it's worth noting that your position is not the same as GP's, however.
One small objection: I assume you lead with "of course" in your first sentence because that value is intuitive to you. It's intuitive to me, too, but I don't have an argument for why it's moral.