animal "rights"

animals don't have freakin rights.

not like people do. at least to the extent that even people can be said to "have" rights. rights are only had if they are recognised, like: legally.

now unbridled cruelty in the streets in public view would obviously be a bad thing, and it is, rightly so, illegal.

and i'm not saying that animals don't think or don't feel pain or don't recognise the horrible things that are happening to them (they recognise them about as much as you would if you had been separated from your mother at a tender age and then raised in a bare room and never spoke or talked to anyone until you were fat enough to be eaten--i don't think you would be able to articulate your distress very well, and needless to say you wouldn't have anything to compare it to... but i have a feeling you would be perfectly distressed the whole time anyway.)

my point is that this is a cultural decision and that societies a lot nicer than ours have been a lot crueler to animals. the pastoral ideal that is so prevalent to our way of thinking, after all, involved the daily and wholesale slaughter of animals by the very men, women and even children who had raised them from infancy and fed and cared for them every day of their lives.

our lack of contact with animal butchery is due to the increasing specialization of our society, and it presents us with a moral dilemma.

This dilemma would disappear, however, with use. if you were hungry and had a live pig or chicken, you would kill it and eat it and

"it might bother you at first but then you would get over it"

and killing, bleeding, skinning, butchering and eating things with your bare hands would seem normal after a short while.

another point is that all those minks that got raised to make a fur coat wouldn't have been running around in the courtyside being dignified and carefree if they hadn't been killed for their fur, they would never have been born--the countryside already has all the minks it can support. so at least those minks got to be alive for a bit, right?