Why do you, and many contemporaries with you, doubt you'd be able to kill animals? Especially when apparently our ancestors had no such qualms. I venture this

Why do you, and many contemporaries with you, doubt you'd be able to kill animals? Especially when apparently our ancestors had no such qualms. I venture this is a matter of exposure, we rarely see animals butchered. In fact, most animals we see are pets, contant with wildlife is very minimal. So we recoil at killing animals, because pets are like family, and most of our experience with animals are with pets. Thus, we see animals as much more human than our ancestors. What then, does this say about the ethical status of animals. Certainly, it seems like our lack of exposure to butchering is why we now care much more about animals. The issue would be much clearer if things had happened the other way around. That is, things would be clearer if we stopped all butchering animals because we thought animals had rights. That is not to say this means animals have no rights, it might well be that by no longer killing animals as a manner of habit we realized their ethical standing. However, this is less evident than most other cases where we (the caucasian west) have given other groups more ethical standing. With slavery, we first realized it was wrong, and then stopped having slaves. The counter point might be that in this analogy we are still before the point of abolishment. I think all I can conclude is that 'not being able to kill animals' is not a sufficient arguments for animals having more ethical standing. In the end though, it might boil down to ethics not being absolute but instead being relative to culture.