Childhood indoctrination

[littleendian]

This is why I don't get into vegetarian/vegan arguments...

I agree they get messy and hateful sometimes, but they are none the less very, very important because we might be committing a terrible crime and maybe someday our grand children will ask us why we didn't do anything about it.

I think a better discussion is how to change farming practices (put pressure on big Agra) to make them better for the environment and more humane for the animals in question. Trying to convince people not to eat animals or wear leather is very much an uphill battle.
Incidentally, I'm having a lunch date this afternoon with a vegan friend... This may be my reoccurring theme for the day.

There is no such thing as a human slaughter, which defeats "humane animal agriculture" right away. If someone came to me in my twenties and told me he thought that by now I had a decent life and he's now going to kill me now very humanely by bullet to the head and cook me for dinner, I'd tell him to fuck off, and so would any humanely raised cow. They slaughter the animals in their prime because that's when the meat tastes best.

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Well, do instincts constitute enought argumental power to make a case for legal rights?

They obviously do for severely mentally handicapped people, just because they're reduced to instincts doesn't mean we grant them fewer rights.

Basically the animals are our dumb little brothers and sisters, they don't know shit, they're even dumb as hell often times, but that only makes our responsibility toward them all so much greater. What we're doing now is we're letting hate and cruelty rain down on these innocent creatures. Humans are better than that.