[C Elegans]

Originally Posted by Chimaera182

I call myself a carnivore; I prefer eating meat over any other kind of food, and most meals I eat have to contain meat in them. I don't like the arguement moral vegetarians make about eating animals, because quite honestly I don't think they've thought it through. They've basically decided that it's not okay to eat one kind of living creature, but it is okay to eat another (plant matter). They make the claim that it's wrong to treat animals that way, but who made them the referees of morality? Who says eating a plant is any less cruel than eating an animal?

Veganism sometimes holds the same features as other ideological cults, and in such groups I have found that completely irrational arguments like "cuteness"-arguments are very important. More serious moral vegetarians often has a suffering-argument, ie it's better to eat plants because they lack a nervous system and thus do not suffer like animals do. Now, it is easy to differentiate between a pig and a carrot, but in biological taxonomy the line between animal and plant is not very distinct. There is also a variety of animals who lack pain receptors, so theoretically, from the suffering-argument, it can be derived that it is equally good to eat plants or fleas. There is another important aspect though which I find more valid in this particular case, and that is the ecological effects. From an environmental perspective, it would probably be best if we all cultivated and ate insects rather than plants or vertebrate animals. This is however not a popular conclusions among moral vegetarians.

I agree, although I'd rather see more medical research on humans. After all, if the research is going to benefit humans, we have to know how such products will affect humans, and sometimes using animals as test subjects doesn't work out quite so well.

A lot of medical animal research is "model" research which is impossible to do on humans without killing them. Good though is that an increasing amount of research can be done on cultivated cells and cloned tissue. In the future I am sure we will not need to use animals for medical research, but we are not quite there yet, unfortunately. It should be noted though that the cosmetics industry use far more test animals than medical research, but strangely, at least in Sweden, there are no activists who target the cosmetics labs for their raids, only medical facilities.