: : :Humans possess mental faculties that place them a rung above animals on the moral scale. : : And if you have a chimpanzee with the equivalent intelligence of a human 5 year old, and a severely retarded man with the intelligence of a 2 year old, then by your logic, we should experiment on the man? So much for the mental faculties argument...
: Not at all. Chimps cannot by definition have human intelligence. The moral worth of the human is in any case greater.
Excuse me but from whence do you derive the moral worth of a human? If it is from intelligence than should all those with an IQ of less than 100 be the slaves of those with an IQ of more than 100? Should we be able to kill and eat those who can't pass a MENSA test? Do tell
: As you have not even bothered to look into the matter, HOW DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THE HOPI WILL SUFFER. You make the crucial mistake of assuming that they are just like you or that they CAN be just like you.
: The question being is the suffering of the hopi going to be greater than that of a few birds. As you seem so incredulous, lets take a balanced look (drawing on what i have laready said).
: : : An aNIMAL can die only in a physical sense. A human on the other hand can suffer a spiritual as well as a physical demise. Who has ever seen an animal so broken in spirit that they have been unable to raise themselves from their bed or so sunken in despair that they throw themselves off a cliff. I myself have never seen this. (I do not doubt that animals possess some crude form of emotion but i think it a mere trifle in comparison to humanity).
: : Shows what you know about animals: zip. Anyone who knows animals, from zookeepers to people with pets, knows that animals possess rich emotional lives and can become so depressed, they starve themselves to death. As for souls, I can guarantee you that animals have souls -- it's humans, the only animals who knowingly and willfully torture other animals (including humans) I wonder about.
: That is just crap. there is noi way in the world you can equate emotional life of an animal to that of a human. Is an animal failing to eat food depression? Or is it more likely something else. Like a form of distress that falls way below any conception of human emotion. Or can you now read the minds of animals?
I really can't follow this argument. You were offered examples of animals suffering from depression and yet you blindly disregard them. Please give me a reason why we can't equate the emotional suffering of an animal with a human and why an animal not eating its food (as do a lot of humans when depressed) is 'something else'.
