Is killing of animals cruel?

Vegans (Vegetarians) have always been of the opinion that we all should be vegans, that the killing of animals is cruel, unethical and inhumane. This week on WhatsApp Conversation, we examine if killing of animals is right or wrong. Excerpts:

Bukola Adedipe

A wild animal that strays into your premises or where you find yourself can be tamed by applying the law of self-defence to prevent yourself from being hurt. See how pathetic it looks when a cow is slaughtered. The principle of individual differences applies to all.

Tosin Awoniyi

No, the killing of animals is not cruel because one would accept the fact that one can feed many people off a cow or pig. The killing of animals does provide many valuable nutrients that some other foods don’t have in them. People have retained their canine teeth and their cravings for meat this millennia which means we were meant to eat them (animals). Moreover, people who don’t eat meat do feel unhappy and unsatisfied and at times they do have poor nutrition and get sick easily. We cannot not all be vegan because it was one of the Lord’s commandments that animals are meant for our (human) consumption.

Faizat Shuaib

You could say that if you kill a cow you’re depriving it of the rest of its existence, which could also have been a happy, good existence, so why deprive it of that just because you want to eat some meat when you’ve got other healthy, nutritious, delicious things that you could also eat? I think we’ll come to view [eating meat] in the way we now look back on the Roman games; having crowds of enthusiastic people cheering on the lions as the gladiators fighting each of them to the death. So, yes, it might seem refreshing but it is ethically wrong.

James Olamidun

I believe that killing animals is wrong too, but my only argument is that it’s because it’s an unnecessary and violent act. I understand that suffering is bad, so pretty much all of the animal agriculture (or at least factory farming) is fairly unethical because of the suffering. But what about the act of killing (painlessly and without fear; the act is unethical!

Kelechi Okoro

There are a lot of views about what makes killing wrong that apply to both humans and animals. Killing deprives the victim of all future goods. It almost always contravenes a very strong preference on the part of the victim to remain alive. These are two reasons that utilitarians and deontologists can take to be important. Based on these reasons, we can think that killing a human is worse than killing an animal, because humans can experience a wider variety of future goods, and have more or stronger preferences.

Some deontologists will say that killing is just wrong in itself and not in virtue of some other more fundamental kind of wrongness. Others will say that killing is wrong because it fails to respect the victim’s agency, or (in the case of slaughtering for food) it treats the victim entirely as an instrument to be used and discarded. But this kind of reason is going to depend upon animals being the kind of things that have agency and can be treated as ends in themselves, which a lot of philosophers are going to disagree with. If we think that killing a human is fundamentally different from killing an animal, one way to argue that would be to say that these agency/instrumentality reasons apply to humans but not to animals. So what happens if these animals die on their own? Do we say the universe is cruel? Animals are for food.

Yosola Franklin

I feel if you want to eat animal meat you should do it – if you don’t want to do so based on ethics or you simply don’t like the taste then don’t. Meat has aided humans in our evolution from early hominids. By exploiting the calories and high protein content animal flesh provides it nurtured our species’ growing brains. It could be argued that eating meat was one of the best decisions that our species has ever made. Your brain uses about 25% of all the energy you consume so the meat is a very quick and efficient food for fuelling our big brains!

Having said that in our modern civilization calories are plentiful and the role of meat is not as important as it once was. Processed meat has been linked to several cancers such as colon cancer and also conditions like heart disease. It would seem that meat is a double-edged sword.

Killing of animals for their meat is not unethical; it is only a matter of principles.

Lanre Oseni

Animals are made by God to live their lives and also to benefit humans as pets or/and to eat for beings to further live their lives too. Manner of killing of the animal is what matters. Cruelly killing animals is bad, especially how it is slaughtered; shooting runs against pity. In Islam, we are to show pity before slaughtering (there are Quranic recitations). That is not cruel if the recitations are adhered to. Ordinarily throwing stones, throwing knives, slaughtering without pity or/and shooting a gun at birds is considered cruel. Because God made them to benefit us, killing them is not cruel. If a snake or other dangerous reptiles are close by, killing it/them is not cruel. What matters is killing with pity and killing wickedly. The cruel killing of animals is sanctionable in advanced countries while there is no enabling law yet in Nigeria to impose sanctions on the cruel killing of animals.

Next week’s question is: Should suicide attempt be criminalised? To be part of the next edition, send your response to 08136601345 via WhatsApp or SMS.

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