[split] "Some people eat animals, some don't."

[JustLikeYou]

So-called 'humane' meat is just killing, or maybe raping and killing, without the torture. Yeah, it is less cruelty, but is that really saying a whole lot? "Oh, I just don't torture them first before I kill them." Does that farmer get a medal? Does the person buying it get a medal?

This question is similar to the abortion question. Where do we draw the line? Obviously, we've all considered that you can't live without incidentally killing something else, whether it's a bacterium, a carrot, or an animal. Monica, you seem to have a specific concept of where that line is drawn, but I don't see why that line is engraved in stone. It seems to me to be a sliding line. Some say you shouldn't eat anything that isn't offered for your consumption---i.e. fruit. Similarly, nuts and seeds have evolved to be difficult to digest precisely so that creatures do not eat them before they germinate.

I have raised chickens. We raised them for eggs, though we slaughtered one or two when they got injured. It was an interesting experience because my brother and I were their primary caretakers (the girls were afraid of the rooster), but they never felt quite like pets. You couldn't make them pets if you wanted to. The rooster's presence might have contributed to our distance from them. In any case, even in retrospect, it didn't feel violent or cruel to eat their eggs, whether fertilized or not. To not do so would have been similar to not spaying or neutering an outdoor cat. On the occasions when we slaughtered a chicken, it was only disturbing because my father didn't know what he was doing, so he made a sloppy job of it. I've since seen humane methods and it's really not disturbing to me at all.

I'm sure you've also heard commentary about life in the wild: animals kill each other all the time. In fact, when we raised chickens, we only stopped doing so because some creature would sneak in at night and take chickens. The one thing that I think was cruel about the whole process was what my parents decided to do with the rooster. We had a coop where we kept the chickens and they were generally safe in it, though it seemed like we sometimes lost them from in there, too. Anyway, when it was down to a couple of hens and a rooster, my parents said f*** it, just leave the rooster out. Apparently there was a pretty brutal fight between the rooster and whatever was hunting the chickens. I thought that rooster deserved a more noble death. A gunshot to the head would have been far better, but my dad didn't have a gun.

What do we owe these creatures whom we tend? What do we owe the grass beneath our feet, the cabbage in the garden, and the millions of bacteria that are born and die everyday? If we are STO, then we owe them what service we can provide. My fiancée and I were working on an aquaponics project in which we'd use fish water to fertilize plants. We abandoned the project for a number of reasons, but ethics was not one. We carefully considered the prospect of killing fish because that would determine what kind of fish we raised. I asked her, "would you kill Holstein [our cat] for food?" This was a repulsive thought. Holstein is a pet. That raised a new question: can you raise animals whom you love and respect in themselves, without them feeling like pets? That is, can you raise animals the way you raise tomatoes? Her reflection on the cattle ranch she was raised upon and my reflection on the chickens my family raised led us to the conclusion that some animals just couldn't be pets---at least not without lots of effort.

The measure for STO is not a specific set of actions. Even Ra said that the more you evolve, the more you turn toward right being rather than right action: "The adept then begins to do less of the preliminary or outer work, having to do with function, and begins to effect the inner work which has to do with being" (75.23). The measure of STO is the attitude you have toward yourself and the world around you. If you view yourself and the world as tools to be manipulated at your own discretion, then your attitudes trend toward STS. If, on the other, you glorify self and world as beautiful and worthy in themselves, you trend toward STO. The specifics of circumstance in which these attitudes manifest are left unstated because they are unique to each individual. To some, it is impossible to kill a certain class of living organisms without viewing them also as an object whose only value is as food. To others, lovingly raising livestock for eventual slaughter brings no value clash with it.

Indeed, to love an animal is an act of service. What makes any of us think that killing is an act of disservice? In the case of human beings, it becomes far more clear because human beings have a self-reflexive sense of free determination. That is to say, you are infringing when you kill someone else. 2D, however, does not have this sense of free determination. Those few animals who clearly do have some form of self-awareness, however, we find ourselves unable to kill: pets. But in the animal kingdom, pets are rare. In raising livestock lovingly, you render a service to those animals that you would not have otherwise rendered. You give a space for human investment of love to animals that you would not choose as pets. If we only kept pets, we'd have the opportunity to invest far fewer animals than if we raise livestock. Livestock is simply not as capable as a pet of returning the favor---otherwise the animal would be a pet. The energy exchange, then, must come elsewise: we give livestock love and tenderness through providing them a peaceful and content existence, while in exchange they provide us with food when we judge the time is right. This may sound cruel, but that is how all farmers harvest, whether they are harvesting animals or plants.

Killing is not STS when done with gratitude. The animal will live again. The species soul is not harmed by death any more than a human soul is. The real service is how you treated that animal while it was alive, because that is the experience the species soul will harvest. I don't enjoy killing ants and termites, nor do I see them exclusively as pests. That did not stop me, however, from setting up poison bait stations around my house because of the potential risks of infestation. We regularly make decisions about which animals live and die because they animals themselves are not capable of making them, which is precisely the reason we are repulsed by making decisions about whether humans and pets live or die: they have a conscious opinion on the matter.