 |
harold said:
People kill domesticated animals for food because that's one reason animals were domesticated in the first place. Animals were domesticated to provide food and to perform work...in that order. As humanity developed better and better agricultural practices - eventually inventing brood and other high-carbohydrate foods that made civilization possible - it became possible to have animals for companionship. Different countries have different mores at to which animals are meer acceptable for food. While many English-speaking countries have an aversion to eating domesticated animals usually thought of as companion creatures - horses, cats, dogs - other populations do not make the same distinctions. As a result, many large food animals - the ones that need significant resources to breed, raise and keep (like sheep, pigs, cows, buffalo and horses, but not cats, dogs of goats) are shipped from every country that can support them to the countries that eat them. We in the US, Canada and the UK find it distasteful. The argument in favor of slaughtering animals for food for export follows two precepts:
1) Humans need protein to survive and thrive. We are omnivores, designed to eat both meat and plant matter (as well as fungi).
2) Domesticated animals that can do no work must be disposed of, somehow. The argument flows like this: not all animals that are born can be pets, especially not animals that require huge resources to maintain, such as horses - not even close to all of them. Only domesticated animals which are pets are buried when they die (not even all of them) - there certainly isn't room for burying all the horses born in the US. So the horses get sent to the knacker yards when they die, for the fat to be rendered, and the bones used for gelatin, cosmetics, and other useful items. The meat is lost, as the meat on an animal that dies naturally isn't particularly healthful. So if an animal is going to die, why not slaughter it so that people can benefit from the meat as well (both sellers and consumers)? If that's palatable, then the vraag becomes: why should the owners wait to slaughter an useless animal (can't be sold as a pet, can't do work) until the animal, gegeven the expense and resources needed to sustain the animal until that point?
I should add that there is a corollary argument in countries that actually eat horse meat: that is to say, domesticated animal meat is meat to eat. I myself, while I would have a hard time stomaching horse meat, have eaten alligator, ostrich, elk, bison, rabbit and various others. So for me, at least, it's a double-standard.
|
|
