Feel free to go and busy yourself making the world better for rocks or something? You draw your own line at making the world better for things that sufficiently ‘like you’, too. I deem humans sufficiently ‘like me’, and there are plenty practical reasons for encompassing all humans in a just world, too. You just deem animals also sufficiently ‘like you’, but I don’t personally see sufficient reasoning to extend that far.
you really need to self crit and think about why you think beings only like you deserve safety and freedom from oppression. that really is so incompatible with everything we talk about here
“Oppression and subjugation of a living thing is fine so long as it can’t speak to me and tell me it doesn’t like it. Extra points if it’s tasty!”
There is actually adequate scientific evidence that many animals have a much greater awareness and emotional intelligence then we often attribute to them, this includes most if not all of our domesticated animals. You could argue that the act of meat eating isn’t in itself amoral, but the mass suffering facilitated by the conditions within the meat industry certainly is. Not to mention the conditions it subjects its workers to. There is no ethical industrialized meat consumption.
Recognizing the capacity of animals to understand and suffer is basic science, not idealism. People with pets understand this and we know they should protect the health and well-being of the animals they keep. In fact, they often support laws requiring that pets are treated well enough.
But the moment it’s a designated food animal, this goes out the window and brains shut off.
So anyways are you gonna eat dogs and cats or are you an “idealist”?
It has nothing to do with where I personally draw the line, asshole. It has everything to do with the scientifically established reality about who is capable of suffering. Rocks can’t. Cows, pigs, etc. can. Just because your sphere of empathy is arbitrarily drawn to reinforce what’s convenient for you doesn’t mean that by necessity everyone else is so shallow, cruel, and morally inconsistent.