[blendergeek]

When a lion kills a gazelle on the savannah, is that "kind and respectful"?

No, it's just part of the "circle of life".

Humans also interact with their environment and eat non human life forms (plants, cows, etc).

If we prove that trees have consciousness, will we need to stop killing them as well? Where does it end?

[sweetheart]

The morality of our actions isn’t determined by what lions do.

As for the tree hypothetical, why don’t we cross that bridge when we get there.

[toss1]

Where it should end is with humans creating engineered (whether genetic-engineered, or using fungi, etc. is irrelevant) foods and materials such that we don't need to be farming, brutalizing, and killing animals and plants on industrial scales, deforesting vast regions to graze cattle, etc.. We are likely generations away from that, but it does seem to be the direction we're headed.

[smogcutter]

The irony is that argument also ends in the effective extinction of most farmed animals, or at the very least a massive die-off.