Consistent “compassion”
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From Animal Ethics
In remarking about how
“even hunters try to justify their killing of animals with reasons,”
as opposed to
“I hunt because I like to kill. I take great pleasure in shooting animals with high-powered rifles or better yet with high-powered crossbows so that I can watch them die a painful, agonizing death,”
Mylan Engel Jr. takes one such “reason” to its logical conclusion.
The defense goes:
“If we don’t cull the deer herd, there will be massive starvation of deer come winter, so we are doing the deer a favor by providing them a quick death (assuming accurate shooting, which one really shouldn’t assume!) rather than a slow death from starvation.”
Arguing from this same premise, Engel concludes:
[Compassion like that almost makes one think that we should start shooting the 1 billion humans on the brink of starvation to provide them quick and relatively painless deaths rather than slow protracted ones.]
I would argue that, logically, Engel’s conclusion is a necessary one on this kind of reasoning.
Crossposted @ That Vegan Girl
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