Atheism and vegetarianism

[The Omnissiunt One]

Before everyone gets all soggy about the rights of the cute little animals.

Let me remind you all that everything dies and everything gets eaten, EVERYTHING.

And in the wild most animals will die in fear and pain, then be eaten.

At least in our care they will have a painless life and a painless death.(in most cases anyway)

This, I'm afraid to say, is a straw man of animal rights, and factually inaccurate anyway. Animal rights are based on the idea that to confine the moral sphere solely to humans is arbitrary, for there is no morally significant feature possessed by all humans (including babies and the mentally handicapped) and no animals. It's not about the cuteness of animals.

The fact that animals die is irrelevant. Can we kill humans on this basis?

Many animals we breed don't have painless lives and deaths. Many, if not most, chickens are factory farmed. They are often transported miles in cramped conditions to the slaughterhouse, where they are hung upside down and have their throats cut when they are often not properly stunned.

Arguably some have a better life on farms than they would in the wild, but that's irrelevant. We don't rescue them from the wild, we breed them. So any pain and death we cause is additional to the pain and death in the wild. Again, I'm not saying that to painlessly kill them is wrong necessarily. But, as it stands, I believe it is.