There are potentially interesting questions here about The Limits of Obligation.[0] If killing animals is wrong, do humans have a moral duty to bring about the

There are potentially interesting questions here about The Limits of Obligation.[0] If killing animals is wrong, do humans have a moral duty to bring about the extinction (or at least genetic engineering) of all carnivorous animals? Probably not, but that begs the question: is killing animals wrong (given that it would continue to occur at roughly the same rate even if there were no humans in the world)? One way to approach questions of moral obligation is to consider the actions of the median person. As an example, we could simplistically say that someone who emits more than the median amount of CO2 is responsible for anthropogenic climate change, whereas someone who emits less is not responsible for it. In the case of animals and humans eating each other, though, the set of agents being considered might have to be the set of all animals on Earth. Under that analysis, since there are apparently 21 quadrillion spiders alive on the Earth today[1], the vast majority of which are exclusively carnivorous, any human who obtains some of their calorie intake from plants is less carnivorous than the median animal. [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2215174 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2215174 [1] https://www.allthingsnature.org/how-many-spiders-are-there-in-the-wild.htm https://www.allthingsnature.org/how-many-spiders-are-there-i...