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How is raising St. Bernards for food any worse than raising pigs or cows for food? Because St. Bernards relate to humans in a different way? That is blatant speciesism. The moral value of an organism isn't determined by how well it relates to humans. It is determined by its capacity to undergo conscious experiences, such as feeling pain.
My rule is simple: if I give it a name, I'm not eating it. What others do isn't my problem. As a farmer's daughter raised on a farm, I didn't eat meat for a year because it was from a steer that I named and raised -- I was about 14 or 15. I never named or raised any of the other livestock after that but stuck with horses for 4-H.
My rule is simple: if I give it a name, I'm not eating it. What others do isn't my problem. As a farmer's daughter raised on a farm, I didn't eat meat for a year because it was from a steer that I named and raised -- I was about 14 or 15. I never named or raised any of the other livestock after that but stuck with horses for 4-H.
I'm not arguing about personal preference; I'm arguing about moral consistency. The post I was responding to implied that the fact that St. Bernards are "sweet dogs" makes their killing particularly bad. It is one thing for a person to say that they don't want to eat a cherished pet. It is another to say that dogs and cats in general shouldn't be killed because they deserve some special status in the animal kingdom.
This had to be posted by a city person who only sees small farms around the city.
The majority of meat cattle, are not raised on those little family/hobby farms. They are raised in big cattle ranches, such as we have here in Montana. A state that has a lot more cattle than people. We have large counties with size that rivals the size of the smallest size states, and have counties with less than 1,000 people in them. And we are not alone in this.
The largest land holder in the state is Ted Turner the media mogul, who owns about 2,000,000 acres of ranch land in the state. He raises cattle and buffalo, with about 5,000 buffalo alone on one ranch.
In ranch country, they are not running farmers/ranchers off he land to build homes as the OP discusses. And the modern cowboy going out to ranches looking for work, does not have a horse in his trailer. He has an ATV which allows him to cover a lot more ground in a day, than a man would cover in several days on a horse. He hires on with his body and his ATV. Ranches have to patrol the fence, called fence riding duties. A big ranch could take days to patrol it on a horse having to camp out. Today they will use something like a dirt bike, do any repairs needed, an be back home for supper.
There is a lot of territory where cattle will be grown in the west especially leaving room for a lot of expansion. They grow a tremendous amount of corn her, planting the plants close together, not in rows to allow picking. They are not growing it for the dinner table, but to turn the entire plant into silage for cattle food. Hay is baled in 1,000 pound bales. It only takes one man running a large air conditioned tractor to cut/put into rows, and then a few days later to drive over the land with a round baler which stops ever so many feet, squats and lays another bale. They will be picked up by a big tractor with pick up capabilities that pick up the bales and put them onto a truck. A modern ranch is not like those old western movies, and a family and maybe a hired man run the whole operation, and not a bunk house full of men any longer. One or two men driving them with ATVs along with a couple of good dogs, replace a whole crew on horse back.
And those hired hands, will eat a lot of beef when they go home to their families at a decent home provided by the ranch owner.
When it comes to eating dogs and cats, there will be no need. There will be a lot of beef in the foreseeable future. They may even eat a broiled rattle snake to vary the diet.
I grew up on a cattle ranch, and I can tell you it is a lot different that it was 70 years ago, as I cowboyed then and have watched the modern ranch system develop. When my paternal grandfather was 16, he took a hard case gunfighters to Mexico and a saddle bag full of gold coins to buy and bring back to Montana a large herd of cattle. So ranching was in my blood, but I decided I would rather work in an office wearing a suit than drive cattle when the weather turned bad.
If you wander why he took a crew all good gunfighters with him, was back in the 1800s, there did not have wire transfer so they had to protect the saddle bag full of gold, and keep people from trying to take the cattle away from them on the way home.
I'm not arguing about personal preference; I'm arguing about moral consistency. The post I was responding to implied that the fact that St. Bernards are "sweet dogs" makes their killing particularly bad. It is one thing for a person to say that they don't want to eat a cherished pet. It is another to say that dogs and cats in general shouldn't be killed because they deserve some special status in the animal kingdom.
It's America, it's what most do , cherish domesticated dogs and cats. It is indeed part of our culture.
i was responding to someone's post who mentioned them raised for consumption in China. I had a Bernard as a kid but I feel compassion for any tortured animal. Which,indeed, includes the factory raised, and farm raised animals.
I don't even like to eat fish and can't remember the last time I ate meat.
Mmmmkay?
It's America, it's what most do , cherish domesticated dogs and cats. It is indeed part of our culture.
i was responding to someone's post who mentioned them raised for consumption in China. I had a Bernard as a kid but I feel compassion for any tortured animal. Which,indeed, includes the factory raised, and farm raised animals.
I don't even like to eat fish and can't remember the last time I ate meat.
Mmmmkay?
What does culture have to do with morality? What does popular belief have to do with morality?
My point is that we might enjoy dogs and pets due to our culture, but that doesn't mean that eating dogs or cats is any more morally atrocious than eating pigs.
No. Pets are valued as part of the family by many in our society. Meat producers are careful to keep the bad parts out of the pictures. See the cute little calf being born. Don't see it grow up and become hamburger.
But there is also a very good reason why not. Both are carnivors. Unless its survival, people have prefered meat from animals which eat vegetables. They are much less likely to have undesirable chemicals in them.
In a theoretical future? If we could grow meat without a living animal, some would be curious. There would likely be rules about what kind of meat you could grow, including no human meat. There would be no actual harm to life, but cultural constraints are very powerful.
That's reserved for exceptionally desperate situations since most people view dogs and cats as animals deserving of rights, such as freedom from cruelty and mistreatment; I think raising cats or dogs to kill and eat would count as cruelty to animals and be condemned presently. As long as we have land to grow some kind of crops and can forage, hunt small game, and buy food from vendors, I think cats, dogs, gerbils, parakeets, and other beloved household pets will be off the menu, unless someone offers some kind of bizarre tax incentive for eating cats and dogs, and I hope that doesn't happen.
Aside from that, why would the cultural taboo on eating pets fall in the United States? That's the question - what would be the reason? None that I can imagine. Furthermore, dogs and cats are carnivores. There's a reason that all of our domesticated food animals - cows, pigs, chickens, etc. - can be raised as herbivores, and that's because such diets are efficient (read: relatively inexpensive). Meat diets are not.
Horses would be commonly eaten in the United States (as they once were) long before dogs and cats. Horses are herbivores, and while they serve as pets their place is more utilitarian than cats certainly and even dogs. Yet consuming them will never likely become common. So with regards to dogs and cats, where the hurdles to such are more formidable than with horses, no - you'll never be seeing braised leg of cocker spaniel or catloaf on a restaurant menu stateside.
And rabbits. Up until rather recently (I consider the mid-20th century "rather recent" history), rabbits were more commonly eaten than chicken, being cheaper on the economic meat chain than chicken. When most of the population was still rural (all the way up to the mid-20th century), rabbits were also available free of charge and without the cost of raising them yourself.
When Herbert Hoover promised "a chicken in every pot," the then-understood message was "you will have enough money to skip eating rabbit."
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