Raw, brutal hunger simply does not exist in advanced societies anymore. You have the privilege to be allowed to question your and others' eating habits. For most of our history that wasn't really a possibility.

That is exactly what I mean. We, the not ultra intelligent specie might not have even a clue about how they could benefit from raising and harvesting us :) Maybe that is what some people call faith/religion. Some believe it, some disregard it as low level primitive behavior.

Of course we all are part of some systemic oppression one way or another in the products we consume, but with the availability of information on how brutal and sadistic factory farming is, nobody has an excuse in the first world.

Hyperbole aside, I think we can all agree that farming and killing animals isn't as bad as mass executions of people.

Its not even apples-to-oranges to compare humans to chickens. Its apples-to-something-that-isn't-even-a-fruit. Apples-to-French-poetry...

Regardless of how you feel about chickens vs humans, I don't see why it's binary. Life is life. Suffering is suffering. There's plenty of inside footage of how chickens and turkeys are treated, no conscious being should be subjected to that.

What about the 121 million pigs slaughtered a year? The 29 million cows?

I bet 100% of people visiting farms in the third world would be absolutely reviled by the "modern" human condition with how crop farming is currently done. And 99% of vegans/vegetarians disregard the human violence and food shortage behind that quinoa in their plates.

The more I read this comment, the less I understand it. Following your train of thought, there'd be LESS people enduring that misery and LESS strain on the world's environments if we ate less meat -- we would need less land to grow mankind's food, and would require less imports from third world countries in doing so.

less cruel to whom? I made it very clear that for me, your plant based, "more sustainable" way of consuming cause misery to lots of human-beings, and for me this is more vile and cruel than raise animals to eat nutritious and healthy food.

It might be best to split human and non-human slaughter into entirely separate categories. You don't need to make comparisons between one and the other; you can just accept that both are unacceptable.

The very idea of one species caring for another, which many humans do, seems completely unique in the animal kingdom.

I would say the rest of the natural world is very ruthless. Humans have empathy for other species, nothing else in nature seems to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcs-H5p-MYw

It's an extreme situation that created this, but I think if you take species in which empathy has been observed, and put them in a secure environment, where they are all well fed, I don't think it's crazy to imagine that they too will have the luxury of inter species empathy, without any human involve in that regard. In general, "That's actually why people keeps mammals in the home and not turtles or snake or something like that who don't have that kind of empathy." (Moral Behaviors in animals | Franz de Waal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk)

I don't think empathy is uniquely human. That would be very unusual for a trait to have emerged fully formed for only one species in all animal kingdom--I think most things are on a gradient.

A quick youtube search would provide you countless counterexamples to this.

http://oceanwildthings.com/2018/06/what-humpback-whales-can-...

They also have mirror neurons that have been an important component in theory of mind.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061127111607.h...

> And the species that do display empathy at an individual level will also display cruelty.

Sounds like that applies equally to humans. There are cultures where cruelty towards dogs and cats is more common that empathy, and even in places where empathy is more common, individuals can still be cruel.

A "Save the Whales" campaign may seem like empathy towards another species, but it only exists because humans hunted whales so vigorously, and are also in the midsts of ruining their environments, so neither of those sound like examples of true empathy towards another species.

An invasive species (or if an imbalance occurs such as predators become scarce and prey population explodes) will just outcompete other species for resources with no empathy. Humans can certainly do that, but we also sometimes worry about preserving species and habitats.

In any case, I'd argue that this isn't real "empathy." We feel intellectually that we've done something wrong, and we even feel sadness about it (although possibly in a similar way that we'd feel towards abiotic ruin, like destroying all the arches in arches national park), but I don't think we truly empathize with the, say, beetles who are going extinct, as we cannot comprehend their minds in any way.

Since this whole discussion is about theory of mind, we should use empathy correctly: "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another."

If you reverse this line of thought, we are psychopaths in our relation to animals. Our relation to animals is selfish, callous, and remorseless use (interpersonal-affective factor) and chronically unstable and antisocial lifestyle in or relation to pets (social deviance factor).

Humans have also tendency to act like predators towards our outgroup. Maybe this ability selfish, callous, and remorseless behavior is important part of being a human.

Now we can certainly come with statistics of tendencies, but to my mind they seem to be condemned with cultural biases. Not only the human brain plasticity is molded by the culture where it is immersed, so any data will tell us more about the result of such a culture than about "human inherent tendencies", but even the way we will decide to analyze them and consider/interpret the outcomes will depend on our culture (and our current mood or other more "local" psychological factors).

With that in mind, it's hard to categorically conclude that humans are fundamentally "psychopaths in [their] relation to animals". Dominant cultures, offspring of predatory cultures, surely help to foster such a behavior. That doesn't require it to be an intractable instinctive trait.

I don't think that's the case. It's just ignorance that can lead to cruel behavior, which is just amplified the bigger our society is. That's more actionable than simply judging our species as cruel (call me naive, but I honestly think most of us want to be good).

I'm all for acting ethically. And mostly because we are the creature to compose the concept of ethics.

Nature is an idea; a human idea... or a bucket of ideas. One that different people or cultures put different things into. One needs to be highly suspicious of anybody who appeals to nature for some value in itself, or as a source of natural laws. People tend to see in 'nature' what they already believe.

And I think a similar principle holds for how we apply ethics in relation to the not-human, natural world. Careful.

Pretty sure empathetic behaviors existed before anyone identified and conceptualized them.

Roses, names and all that.

Alternatively, aliens with more exploitative intentions might be just as bad as some humans are. Perhaps, because we are still in our technological infancy we have little to take advantage of for now. Even less to warrant the work/energy expenditure required to plan a visit to our neck of the galaxy.

I can't believe someone downvoted this. Show me one counter example, I dare you.