In my world, the only obligations anyone or anything has, are to defend yourself, and to treat others in the manner that you would want to be treated.
Exploiting a superiority over another species just because you can, in my opinion, is an indication of that one hasn't transcended inferior instincts.
All personal opinions of course, I could be wrong about everything.
Yeah screw trying to provide consistent source of protein for 7 billion people. We torture and mutilate cows and chickens just because we can.
I'm also arguing that it is not necessary to be cruel to animals, even if you have to eat them. Beating and torturing a chicken doesn't provide any more protein than if you treated it humanely and slaughtered it in a quick and painless way.
You can even argue that being a part of our diet actually benefits the species as a whole. You don't see cows and chickens on an endangered species list, but you don't see them in the wild either.
To go even further, we will eventually have the ability to create synthetic meats that don't require us to slaughter animals.
My point is in order to do something you wouldn't like done to you to something else, not out of necessity, but just because you feel like doing it, you may have missed an update or two from evolution's package manager.
I wouldn't for the sake of it willfully maim or destroy a plant.
That said, I'm also not the kind of guy that watches his footsteps to avoid stepping on ants or grass.
But what do we mean by making things better? Most modern talk on this matter is a mere argument in a circle -- that circle which we have already made the symbol of madness and of mere rationalism. Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it helps evolution. The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise on the elephant.
Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human or divine theory), there is no principle in nature. For instance, the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that there is no equality in nature. He is right, but he does not see the logical addendum. There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature. Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value. To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it. Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable. But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.