Animals you consider too smart to eat

[Darth Wagtaros]

I was recently told that though the Chinese eat dogs and cats they find the eating of Lobsters barbaric.  Most Chinese households have a pet lobster and it's not uncommon to see people outside walking them on the sidewalk.  Different cultures I suppose.

I deleted what I originally wrote. 

Walking lobsters? Really? On little leashes?  Do they take them out on Incan torpedo boats for summer holidays?

What did you originally write?

That that was ridiculous.

[saskganesh]

As opposed to corn (or chickpeas, or wheat, etc.) fed beef.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedlot

corn fed beef

and that's why you are fat and have heart disease.

[Eddie Teach]

and that's why you are fat and have heart disease.

I'm fairly certain eating steak once a month isn't the reason I'm fat.

[Caliga]

It is: glandular!

[Ed Anger]

I eat loads of meat and I'm underweight. However, my turds are: massive

[Viking]

Nordic savages 

if you only knew how good they taste then you'd be one of us as well at the next BBQ

[Eddie Teach]

It is: glandular!

Nah, carbs.

[Josquius]

Well, they're raised in little herds specificially for their meat in Peru.

Quite horrible to think of those cute little critters being killed in their hundreds but its also sort of funny to imagine them being farmed...Thats one seriously lame breed of cowboy.

[Caliga]

No no, people actually keep little herds of them in their houses.

[Valmy]

No no, people actually keep little herds of them in their houses.

Fine kill my dream of a massive commerical Guinea Pig herd.

The noise of thousands of them squeaking at once would be amazing alone.

[garbon]

Nordic savages 

if you only knew how good they taste then you'd be one of us as well at the next BBQ

Doubtful.

[Strix]

Quite horrible to think of those cute little critters being killed in their hundreds but its also sort of funny to imagine them being farmed...Thats one seriously lame breed of cowboy.

On a similar note, I was watching the weather channel which had a program on about the Dust Bowl and the things that resulted from it.

One of the things was an overpopulation of Jack Rabbits. They had film of hundreds of people rounding up 40,000+ Jack Rabbits into a little pen in less than four hours of work. They stopped showing the film as the people entered the corral with clubs and bats.

[BuddhaRhubarb]

This thread is making me want to be a vegetarian. :p

ok not really. I'm not eating any animals that eat garbage as their main source of food. I've tried a lot of meat that is hunted. If butchered, and cooked properly there's lots of great sources of protein & deliciousness in the wild.

I would be adverse to knowingly eating Dogs or Cats due to acculturation.

I have no interest in eating whales (dolphins are apparently small whales according to Japanese fishermen) pigeons, ducks, geese, weird wild birds.

have had Bear, meh. too strongly wild for my taste. Deer and Moose are the cows of the forest.

Lobster is delicious. sea insects like these are the only insects I would eat.

I like calamari a lot. Octopus if it's done right - yummy

[The Brain]

1. Why wouldn't you eat an intelligent animal? I'm not interested in eating great apes but that has more to do with their hairy humanesque looks and HIV rumors. Whale or elephant isn't served a lot in Sweden but if I got some I would eat it without giving the possibly high intelligence of the animal a thought.

The most ethically sound method of assigning rights to anyone is by determing what degree of sentience and sapience they possess.  It is axiomatic that to cause pain is bad; it is axiomatic that destroying a mind is bad.  These are, of course, unproveable, but if they are assumed, you can derive rules of behavior from them which insist that animals, other than humans, deserve protection from pain and destruction.

Categorizing animals is a difficult process, but certain points of reference can be well established:

Eating a shrimp is completely acceptable, because a shrimp is just a machine without conscious awareness or with so little that it doesn't matter even to itself whether or not it actually lives, only that it's genes are perpetuated.

A chicken can feel pain and might have some dim inner existence, putting it in a gray area, but a chicken's insignificant feelings do not adequately balance my desire to eat it, although I would prefer that its pain be minimized.

Cats, dogs, pigs and possibly squid have thoughts and feelings, dreams and emotions.  They must be, I suppose, off-limits.

Elephants, primates, and cetaceans, octopi and cuttlefish are thinking, feeling, even reasoning creatures with rich inner lifes, and it would be a moral wrong to take its life without justification or excuse.

A human is worth more than any elephant, or a number of elephants, of course.  The exact ratio would be hard to pin down.

I suppose it must follow that some transhuman intelligence would be worth more than a number of humans, but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.   A weakness of this moral calculus can also be demonstrated by showing that it would create categories of varying worth within humanity itself.  However, these ethics impose only the same negative rights--rights to not be hurt, rights not to be killed, rights to not be imprisoned.  Thus, even if the ethical logic assigns different values to different humans, this variance imposes no practical difficulty of application.

The only other method of assigning or accepting the rights of others that immediately occurs to me would be to do so based on selfishness principle, and categorizing beings as worthy of protection or not depending upon genetic relatedness.

In our case, this would create a hierarchy beginning with oneself (or one's twin, I suppose :p ), with the next level including children, siblings, and parents, and a few levels down the human species itself, with apes existing a few steps below that, and octopi occupying a rather unprotected position as our billionth or so cousins.

Fully alien life forms or artificial intelligences of entirely equal intelligence to humans would be entirely outside morality.  This fact may demonstrate a weakness in the premises here, as it seems self-evidently wrong to kill, say, Skynet prior to Judgment Day--as well as being stupid, since human panic is what caused Skynet to launch nukes at Russia in the first place, pointing out a potential practical difficulty with failing to take into account the moral existence of intelligent, non-human life.

2. Pigs are bright, that is well known. Our Western tradition of not eating cats and dogs has nothing to do with the perceived intelligence level of the animals.

Looks like I'll be shopping at kosher delis, then--although I'd actually probably have better luck with halal stores around here.  I don't really eat much pork, anyway, although it takes pizzas down a peg in tastiness.

I would never claim that your are morally wrong (I don't know what that is) but a couple of observations:

1. Ironically you may be overthinking food.

2. Are you sure you're not a woman?

[garbon]

I would never claim that your are morally wrong (I don't know what that is)

I'm not sure what "Your are morally wrong" is either.