Ungrateful bastards!
I'm gonna eat them for that!
Well, you can't eat them all. Farmers will always keep some for breeding. In fact, if we eat more meat, they will, unless they are complete idiots, breed more of them.
It's actually funny that so many people suggest that humans are distinct from other animals by sapience, that is, higher cognitive functions. I think that this is, more than anything else, our culture of carnism that makes us assume such things, and that that's why Moravec's paradox is even called a paradox. Brains are like computers, and, for a computer, it takes way more intelligence to walk and recognize things around them than to do the math and logic. And one of the reasons we assume that other animals don't think about those things is because they don't communicate about them. Well, do you know how much more computing power is needed for a computer to communicate the basic math than to do it? If you program in some low-level programming language like Assembly language or a machine language, you will have a much harder time printing "2+2=4" on the screen (even if using high-level functions or BIOS interrupts) than to making the processor (ALU) add those two numbers. It is also way harder to make speakers pronounce the sentence "Two plus two equals four.". And is it even possible for today's computers to articulate that sentence using the speech organs? And do you have any idea how hard it is for a computer to understand what "10*(11+12)" means, and how easy it is for it calculate that once it understands that? I have made an entire thread on that:
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=66603.0
And is it even possible for today's computers to understand the question "Quanti bis terni sunt?"?
The question that could be asked is whether the animal brains are actually Turing-complete. Well, human brain obviously is, we can simulate simple Turing machines in our heads. As for the brains of other animals, look,
what's the probability that such complicated systems aren't Turing-complete? I think that the burden of proof is definitely on one who claims that animal brains aren't Turing-complete (and therefore being capable of thinking about whatever other computers, including human brains, can think about), but, anyway, here is an example of a neural network of only a few neurons, far less than most of the animals have, simulating Turing-machine.
http://stackoverflow.com/a/28852111
So, my suggestion is, take everything you think you know about sapience and throw it away! Sentience is what matters morally. And if you are going to invent hyper-computing human souls to escape the problem, then you are not a reasonable person.
I think I will go vegan when I grow up. I've been on some forum with vegans and they told me what wasn't so pleasant to hear. You know those diagrams that show that milk and eggs are better for the environment and more humane than meat? Well, they are entirely misleading because they don't account for the byproducts: new animals. No need to talk about the incidences of cows being raped when arguing for veganism, as some people do, and as I was doing before. And if we don't eat meat, those animals, truly, won't be slaughtered. But, you know what they do in India with old cows? They set those animals free and they starve to death. I mean, that's how grazing animals die in nature, they starve because their teeth get ill, but why not to just relieve them of that entire miserable existence by not breeding them? I was expressing worries that if we free those animals we will produce less plant food, because we are not feeding them, so that plant food will become more expensive. Well, actually, "Carum est quod rarum est." isn't true. This is the example they gave me: there is less shit than food, yet shit is not expensive at all, because it's not valuable. What will happen if entire world goes vegan is that the food will become less expensive because we will reuse the old machinery, now having to use less land. Oh, BTW, those vegans knew how to answer my puzzle about physiology.
I don't think I'll post here any more.
