Main point to me: "What this suggests to me is that people who care should be working not for animal rights but animal welfare–to ensure that farm animals don’t suffer and that their deaths are swift and painless."
AFAICT animals don't worry about dying in the same way people do. They may miss Wilbur but they don't sit around wondering what happened to him and extrapolate it to concern for themselves. My moral sense is that treating them well is much more important than not killing them.
I have witnessed birds who mate for life act very disturbed on the loss of said mate -- for long periods of time. Of course it is not possible to determine what they are thinking exactly, but this is part of the problem.
Most people are so disconnected from animals. You might have a pet or 2 in your lifetime -- some people never have pets. Even if you have had pets in your life, then you might understand dogs or cats, but you don't understand the daily lives of the millions of species of animals on the planet (I googled for the "millions" bit, but actually I don't really know how many different animals there are). And finally, even if you know dogs or cats really, really well, you tend to know them as pets and not in terms of the culture they might have if given free reign.
So we extrapolate greatly from our very limited understanding of what an animal thinks. For the most part we don't observe them for more than a few seconds at a time and have no way of understanding how they might express sadness or happiness. In fact, last night I was subjected to watching "Frozen" (again) and I couldn't help but notice how the reindeer acts like a dog. Is it because dogs are more expressive in their emotions than reindeer? Or is it because nobody in the target audience would have any reference point to understand the emotions of a reindeer?
I have kept fish in tanks before in my life and watched them enough to believe that I could discern when they were happy or sad or stressed or carefree. There was once an unfortunate incident when a small fish had a mishap with the filtration equipment and I happened to witness it. The rest of the fish seemed absolutely shocked for the rest of the day. Were they traumatized by the event? Were chemicals (or blood) released into the water by the killed fish that affected their attitude? Was I injecting my own feelings into the fish. These are things that I don't, and for all intents and purposes, can't know.
I don't know one way or another, but it seems likely to me that animals think and feel in some way that is similar to humans. It is more my lack of exposure to their forms of communication and culture that makes it difficult for me to understand and emphasize with their feelings. At least, I think this is more likely than an animal's brain and nervous system working in such a different way from a human's that they do not have these kinds of feelings.
From that perspective, it seems reasonable to err on the side of caution and do your moral reasoning as if animals had at least some capacity for these ideas and feelings.
I think you might have missed my point. I'm an animal lover and have lots of pets. I'm confident that they have rich emotions, feel pain, etc. But as a pet owner, I think it's much more important to provide my animals with a great life than it is to provide them with a prolonged life.
The problem is, where is the line between empathy and anthropomorphism? How can you tell if the animal is actually feeling the way you think it is feeling, and that you are not just projection your own emotions and assumptions onto it?
I suppose I could ask the same of humans. How do you know a human things and feels the same way you do and that you aren't just projecting your own feelings onto their actions?
I'm not trying to be glib. I think it is actually a difficult question to answer (and I have misunderstood other people's feelings many, many times!).
I agree with many of Singer's arguments, but there's one crucial distinction that needs to be made: We may care about animals, but animals don't care about people. Almost all animals are sociopaths. The biggest reason your cat doesn't kill you is because it's not big enough. Big cats do kill people. Even our closest relative, the chimpanzee, has been known to kill and maim human adults and children without provocation.[1] They have even, without warning, viciously attacked humans who raised them.[2]
While I don't think it's ethical to breed and slaughter sociopaths for food, I do think animals' lack of morals means we should care little about their well-being.
A lot of dogs could absolutely kill you, but they don't. My cat could be 100 lbs and she'd still be more interested in kibble and pillows than mauling me. So, no not all animals are sociapathic (I'm not sure that's the right word in any case). Wild animals are wild and do wild animal things, they absolutely live and die by a different code.
But this whole argument, I think is spurious. Simply because they follow a different set of rules doesn't mean that they don't deserve our caring and protection.
Your argument sounds a lot like the one people make about other groups of people who find themselves morally superior versus another group. Replace "animals" with "muslims" or "jews" or "communists" or whatever and it may sound familiar.
That we recognize and respect that animals have needs and feelings even if they are not beneficial to us is exactly the point of this.
I also note that this idea that people care about animals and not the other way around is hard to respect given which direction the killing typically goes.
For the most part animals ignore people. For the most part people kill animals.
AFAICT animals don't worry about dying in the same way people do. They may miss Wilbur but they don't sit around wondering what happened to him and extrapolate it to concern for themselves. My moral sense is that treating them well is much more important than not killing them.