> A secretly-taped video showed slaughterhouse
> workers hacking the legs off cattle and
> skinning them while these suffering beings
> were still fully conscious!

Sounds pretty horrific, huh? But are you similarly horrified when a cheetah does much the same thing to its prey? Why not?

Perhaps you see the cheetah as being "different" in some manner that leads you to hold the cheetah to a "lower" standard than you do of a human. Why is this? Have you "otherized" the cheetah?

If the defining question is, as Bentham puts forward, "Can they suffer?", then does it make any difference whether the animal's suffering is caused by a slaughterhouse worker, a hunter-gatherer, or a wolf? And if we, as elitist humans -- the self-appointed "cops of the bioregion" -- conclude that the animal can suffer, then what should we do? Should we intervene... come crashing onto the scene with our sirens and flashing lights in order to interfere with the wolf's suffering-laden feeding patterns?

You claim that everything went to hell when humans began to practice animal husbandry AND AGRICULTURE. So why do you then proceed to rant about the evils of the slaughterhouse, yet never once decry the brutal patriarchal domination that is reinforced every time I plant another row of organic tomatoes in my back yard?




> As gatherer-hunters, we saw ourselves as part
> of the natural world. At that time, most
> humans believed every being, including animals
> and plants, had a soul and was sacred. When
> hunters killed an animal, they apologized to
> its soul since they knew the animals were
> their relatives.

Assuming that this is true,