Animals have no soul therefore we can eat them and treat them as inferior to us.
Christian theologians believe that animals have no eternal soul. This might be one of the reasons why so many people by default are thinking about them as inferior to humans, as if they are not-beings. I feel the gravity of this thought on how I used to think of who my dog and other animals are.
We are animals with the ability to remember and construct time
For the first few hundred million years after their initial appearance on our planet, all brains were stuck in the permanent present, and most brains still are today. But not yours and not mine, because two or three million years ago our ancestors began a great escape from the here and now, and their getaway vehicle was a highly specialized mass of gray tissue, fragile, wrinkled, and appended. Via
While 75 percent of US adults believe they usually buy 'humane products', only one percent of farmed animals are raised on non-factory farms
Using data from the 2017 USDA Census of Agriculture ... it is estimated that 70.4 percent of cows, 98.3 percent of pigs, 99.8 percent of turkeys, 98.2 percent of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat are raised in factory farms.
Do animals consciousness is less vivid? Can they feel pain?
Lord Brain, one of the most eminent neurologists of our time, has said:
I personally can see no reason for conceding mind to my fel- low men and denying it to animals.. . I at least cannot doubt that the interests and activities of animals are corre- lated with awareness and feeling in the same way as my own, and which may be, for aught I know, just as vivid.8
The author of a book on pain writes:
Every particle of factual evidence supports the contention that the higher mammalian vertebrates experience pain sen- sations at least as acute as our own. To say that they feel less because they are lower animals is an absurdity; it can easily be shown that many of their senses are far more acute than ours-visual acuity in certain birds, hearing in most wild animals, and touch in others; these animals depend more
than we do today on the sharpest possible awareness of a hostile environment. Apart from the complexity of the cere- bral cortex (which does not directly perceive pain) their nervous systems are almost identical to ours and their reac- tions to pain remarkably similar, though lacking (SO far as
we know) the philosophical and moral overtones. The emo- tional element is all too evident, mainly in the form of fear and anger.9
In Britain, three separate expert government committees on matters relating to animals have accepted the conclusion that ani- mals feel pain. After noting the obvious behavioral evidence for this view, the members of the Committee on Cruelty to Wild Ani- mals, set up in 1951, said:
. we believe that the physiological, and more particularly the anatomical, evidence fully justifies and reinforces ~the commonsense belief that animals feel pain.
Nearly all modern-day scientists agree that at least mammals and birds are almost certainly conscious of their emotions. The "Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness" was one clear expression of this consensus
How much hours an animal has to spend on the factory farm per food source?
How much hours an animal has to spend on the factory farm per food source?
"Eating certain types of meat may cause more suffering than eating the same amount of another type of meat under otherwise identical circumstances." If you want to approach veganism with the primary reason of reducing suffering, start by eliminating:
- farmed fish from your menu, then
- battery-caged eggs, then
- chicken
Here's a great table By Brian Tomasik explaining this link
On synthetic meat
Meat is inefficient β 9 calories in (in forms of crops), 1 colorie out (in form of chicken meat β the most efficient meat)