Dead is dead, but almost all societies assign radically different penalties for killing a person, depending upon whether it was premeditated, a crime of passion, accidental, etc.
In that same way, I personally believe that people who eat only free range animals--animals who have led unconfined or only minimally fenced lives outside, with high quality food, sunshine, the right to nurture and spend time with their young, and breathed fresh air--are certainly much more admirable in a moral sense than people who cheerfully and knowingly eat animals who have been tortured and lived in misery every day of their lives. I frankly have little respect for those people who knowingly do that (even though I have affection for some of them) because I think it is very cruel. I just have a very low tolerance for inhumanity in all its forms, in general. I really am much more concerned with speaking out against cruelty to animals than trying to convince people to stop eating them entirely, because I think it is a much more achievable goal for the near future.
There is absolutely no one who posts at SI who cannot afford free range meat, which is readily available almost everywhere in America, and is much more healthful because it is not contaminated with pesticides and antibiotics and mad cow disease, a point which should appeal to the more selfish among us who are most concerned with the "what's in it for me" question. |
