[YellOh]

If the only reason you are kind to humans is because it's practically useful to you, I can understand why you don't care about animals. While I'm sad I have to exist on the same planet as this kind of thinking, I'm glad someone is at least saying the quiet implied bits of the human-centric mindset out loud.

(Just in case you edit/delete your comment later... my current favorite quote is "Please note that if torture pigs made the bacon even 3% tastier, I'd be calling my senator right this minute to demand that he allow farm workers to tasering them for shits and giggles.")

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Why would I edit it? Do you believe yourself to have supernatural powers of shaming or something?

You're the one that is dangerous, the one people should be worried to share a planet with. When your only principle is whether you feel something is a person or not, then nothing stops you from just suddenly no longer feeling the rest of us to be people.

[YellOh]

Unfortunately I've spent time on Reddit, where people in a controversial conversation would sometimes drastically edit or delete their messages (or mods would delete them), making the conversation unreadable. I hope your comment stays up; it doesn't seem like HN has the same problem.

Theoretically, even if I gave up on the entire project of ethics, there would still be self-interested reasons to be kind to humans. That's what your previous comment was pointing out, right? If I stopped caring about my current ethics, you'd only have to get along with another person with similar thoughts.

Also, as a side note, I don't particularly care whether something is a person or not. I only care whether it's capable of feeling pain. Even if we somehow "discovered" that plants were people, I have zero moral feelings about plants since (as far as I'm aware) they are incapable of pain. I don't think mice are people, but I care about them because I think there's a reasonable chance they can experience pain.

[myshpa]

Sorry for this in advance.

> allow farm workers to tasering them for shits and giggles

That's happening anyway (just watch Dominion).

The practice of beating dogs to death, believed by some to make the meat more tender, is carried out in parts of China and Vietnam.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/community/article/211370...

10 million dogs and four million cats are slaughtered for their meat on the mainland each year. Many are beaten to death because the promoters believe this method makes the meat more tender and tastier

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/inside-horrors-yuli...

Inside horror of Yulin dog festival where animals are tortured and boiled alive

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/yulin-dog-meat...

Yulin Dog Meat Festival: Dogs blow-torched alive in footage from China

https://www.animalsasia.org/au/media/news/news-archive/china...

"Typically they suffer a death that is far from efficient. They are snared around the neck with metal hooks and dragged from their cages. Then they are either bludgeoned or stabbed in the neck or groin to be “bled out”. Other methods of killing including being hanged or electrocuted. This happens dog by dog so other dogs are likely to witness multiple deaths ahead of their own. This further spreads panic."

https://www.quora.com/Do-Chinese-people-really-raise-dogs-fo...

"Even if they do, who gives a fuck bruh? You eat pigs which are filthy to Muslims and Jews, and cows which are sacred to Hindus, and eggs from female chickens whose male siblings are crushed to death by grinders because they're commercially useless, and venison from deer that display empathy and mourn and bury their dead, and lobsters that you know have been boiled alive because they taste better that way than when they're killed outright, and sushi in authentic Japanese restaurants which for all you know could be sourced from super-intelligent whales and dolphins that are going extinct, and fish which are extracted by modern fishing vessels dragging huge nets across the bottom of the ocean for a monstrous catch. The vessels then throw out the least valuable fish, which are already dead and just rot in the water."

Yes, it's difficult.

The Psychopathy of Eating Meat | Interview with Philosopher John Sanbonmatsu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUmmN3lnUhY