[stickfigure]

If the little bird was tasty it might have gone on the bbq too.

We humans are capable of empathizing with different creatures differently. Some people have their empathy dial set up so high that they anthropomorphize plants. Some have it set so low they're psychopaths. Most functional people are in the middle.

Personally, keeping chickens has almost completely put me off empathy with them. Roosters are assholes. Into the pot with you.

[AxEy]

> "Personally, keeping chickens has almost completely put me off empathy with them. Roosters are assholes. Into the pot with you."

What a relief that we don't generally take this policy toward asshole humans.

At any rate, it's one thing to eat one asshole chicken and another to systematically farm asshole chicken to be killed.

[jajko]

What do you mean, in many places around the world we kill people society or state considers assholes, including US.

Then we can discuss where is the cutoff line for enough assholishness to go for a slaughter and where something less severe, but practice is here and not going anywhere.

[AxEy]

> " in many places around the world we kill people society or state considers assholes, including US."

Not really the same as systematically bringing into existence a species with behaviors you find objectionable, keeping them in your proximity so you can experience said behaviors, and then slaughtering them with the excuse that they are all assholes is it?

> "Then we can discuss where is the cutoff line for enough assholishness to go for a slaughter"

When you say that roosters cross this line do you mean with respect to their behavior towards you? I'm guessing this can't be that bad since you're much more powerful than they?

Or do you mean towards other chickens? If so, and if it's really that bad, then surely the best thing is to just not bring them into existence in the first place (not systematically breeding them with the intent of slaughtering them)?

[vintermann]

Whether you feel empathy to someone/something or not, is really quite different from whether you have moral obligations to it. I do not think I have moral obligations to a chicken, but then again, I think everyone agrees the chicken has no moral obligations to me - jokes about asshole roosters aside, I don't think you really think the rooster has wronged you by being as it is.

Maybe moral obligations can be one-way, but then only temporarily as I see it. Someone who's sleepwalking, or a baby, don't really have moral obligations to me, but they will when they wake up / grow up.