From Wild Kratts (apologies for quoting kids programs but it's what comes to mind): > there's no bad guys just predators and prey. My rather simplistic logic

From Wild Kratts (apologies for quoting kids programs but it's what comes to mind): > there's no bad guys just predators and prey. My rather simplistic logic is that humans are predators and I have nothing particularly against that. For 100,000+ years we were hunter-gatherers and very good at it. Humans would kill animals because they wanted the food. Lions kill whatever they can for food, so did we. From Jared Diamond's book "Collapse", the inuit survived because they would kill whales and seals and keep the blubber for months until it was in a putrid but still edible state and managed to outlast other humans. However I have two issues: 1. We now have very good farming methods that allow us to avoid eating meat 2. We completely abstract the killing of animals to factories and trawlers and wrap it up in economics and talk about 'efficiency' of killing and wanting our meat as cheap as possible In some ways I mind less about the killing of whales because it's really hard to kill whales and they live a free life until they are killed. Factory farming of pigs, lambs, chickens and cows seems much more cruel. So where as I understand the rather animalistic nature of humans, I wish we would use our intellect to stop the cruelty. > Where do we get this sense of superiority? There was a recent article on HN [1] about the history of vegetarianism [0], there it talks about that Plato and Aristotle reasoned that humans were the only creatures with immortal souls (Pythagoras had argued earlier that animals did have souls) and the universe was for human use to do as they please. Further they argued that there was a hierarchy of beings with plants and animals at the bottom, and they didn't deserve justice because they couldn't reason. Edit: the words of Plato and Aristotle remind me of George Orwell's pigs in Animal Farm, where as Pythagoras had argued that all animals had souls and so were to some extent equal, Plato and Aristotle came back saying that humans have immortal souls or equivalently "some are more equal than others". [0]: http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2010/08/the-hidden-history-of-greco-roman-vegetarianism/ http://advocacy.britannica.com/blog/advocacy/2010/08/the-hid... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17807278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17807278