Or you get some people who claim to be vegetarian but still eat eggs. I think a meat chicken lived a better life than an egg chicken which is stuck in a small cage for their whole life.

Peta has no priorities.

Oh and just to add in something; generally people who wore fur for warmth (like natives and such) didn’t really have many another options and they ate the animal they killed also.

Do not defend your boots because you like them- stick to what you’re going to say, or don’t say it at all.

Anyways, peta is sticking their nose in a place where it shouldn’t be.

It was necessary for survival to wear fur thousands of years ago, it is not necessary anymore. To say I need to wear fur to survive today is false and leads to what Hume calls a contradiction. Believing that the future will be the same as the past is a serious error. Only roughly 20 years ago there was no internet, iPhone, Twitter, Blogging, wireless data transfer, HD 3D TV’s, etc, etc, etc. It is impossible for the past to be the same as the future.

Do you still hunt for your food like the cavemen did? What about electricity? Planes, trains, and automobiles? Politics? Science? Medicine? Referencing cavemen to support your behaviour is rather silly. You just burned yourself.

Primitivists and their “what if” scenarios amuse me.

When I stick a knife into you or an animal it bleeds, it screams, it winces in pain. Of course we are unable to verify the ‘subjective’ experience, or ‘relative’ experience (as you mention) of pain but the animal reacts in the same way you or I would, so we must assume pain is being felt at the same level as you or I feel it. Like when a piglet is torn away from it’s mother, the mother reacts violently and becomes extremely stressed, followed by extreme depression and sadness after losing its baby. Judging by its external and observable actions It is feeling the same thing as you or I would if someone harmed one of our loved ones.

Even then, I have no idea how you “feel” or subjectively experience the pain. How to measure one’s subjective experience of pain is currently impossible. It is merely recorded as electrical impulses interpreted by the brain. It is easier for us to “imagine” another humans feeling pain because we are human – we can easily place ourselves in another person’s shoes and think, “well if I feel pain when ‘X’ happens then they must feel it also. So we conclude doing ‘x’ to another human is wrong. We cannot prove they feel the same as we do, we can only assume. It is more difficult, and takes a more awakened mind, to place ourselves in other creatures shoes, and understanding that inflicting ‘x’ (pain) is wrong on, not only our fellow human beings, but on all creatures with a central nervous system. I say “with a central nervous system” because of the recent debate about the word ‘sentient’. As plants are ‘sentient’ beings and so meat supporters argue that we hurt plants also, so we (vegans) should not eat plants either if we follow our own advice. This is ridiculous as we have to eat, and it is still the lesser of two evils when compared to meat. Plants are fed to animals and then the animals are eaten, thus under utilitarianism, and this ridiculous meat supporter argument against vegans, it still cause less pain to the world to eat a plant-based diet than an animal one. Anyways, we still have problems even placing ourselves in other humans shoes, especially if they are from a different race, culture, religion, gender, etc. so it does take a worldcentric view, not an ethnocentric or egocentric one, to become a vegan. Or to avoid the all or nothing scenario, I would be happy if people merely reduced their meat intake to once or twice a week. They would still be benefiting themselves, the environment, and animals, by reducing their meat intake. I do understand that some people cannot become full vegetarians or vegans.

I take the stand that animals, and other living creatures feel pain more intensely than we (humans) do, based on the fact that they have heightened senses. Thomas Nagel’s article on what it’s like to be a bat delves deeper into this subject and the problem of subjective experiences or “qualia” as neuroscientists or philosophers like David Chalmers refer to them as. Also see Daniel Dennett’s arguments and Antonio Dimasio’s, and V.S. Ramachandran’s.