Oh gosh, this always happens to me. I don't have an immediate response, but then I think of something five days later and there's no polite or sauve way to slip it into conversation. Boo.
I think the question of whether or not veg*ns anthropomrophize is an important one. Death is probably not the same for a dog as it is for a human... they probably DON'T sit around worrying about where they go after they die, contemplating the ephemerality of life, etc.... And if you kill a spider, its family probably doesn't miss it (because their family dynamics are very different from ours...). Omnis will think we are crazy if we literally equate the death of a human with the death of a spider. Or even if we equate the death of a dog with the death of a spider.
But of course your response (the one you thought of eventually!) was dead on. It doesn't matter that their experience of life or death or love or pain is different. Frankly, we will NEVER know exactly how they experience these things. What they do have in common with us is that they are concious (have a brain) and feeling (have nervous sytems), so it's wrong to kill them even if their experiences are vastly different from ours.
I don't know, I always sound like a jackass. I seem to have much better luck when I feed people vegan cupcakes and talk about the health benefits of going vegan. Obviously that's very frustrating since we don't go vegan for health and good food, but it gets the job done. My mother is now a psuedovegan (cheating vegan?) for health reasons, and if nothing else, that means fewer animals are being exploiting.... My fiance, on the other hand, was talking about going vegetarian for a while, and then I think I turned him off it by talking about animal rights and veganism too often. Should have just kept feeding him cupcakes.
I understand part of it: "I don't see what all the fur fuss is about. If it's okay to eat animals, hunt animals, keep animals as pets, and wear the hides of animals in the form of leather jackets and leather shoes, why is not okay to wear animals' fur too?"
In other words "If animals can be treated as property in a dozen other circumstances, why can they not be treated as property in this one circumstance?" And I think he's right. It doesn't make sense to eat meat and protest fur. The pet thing is a little iffy, as pets (like children) are treated by law as both property and living agents. I think he threw it in to confuse the veg*ns.
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