Is it morally wrong to eat my pet dog? Why is it right to eat beef and pork, but our pets?

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Who thinks that is right to eat beef/pork but not dog? Certainly many cultures do. No doubt our culture is squeamish about it -- dogs being so cute, and all, and enjoying such intimate personal relationships with them -- well that would suggest that if we cuten up pigs and cows and get to know them better we'd be opposed to eating them too! But anyway, what does cuteness and intimacy have to do with the permissibility of slaughter and consumption? there are plenty of non-cute humans with which I am not intimate, but that hardly seems a grounds for eating them; but then lack of those things is not be a grounds for eating them either. What I'm getting at is that whatever grounds you choose to be a vegetarian almost surely apply equally to all non-human animals (or at least those with advanced enough sentience to be worthy of earning 'rights' or 'interests)' -- so the disintcitno between the dog and beef/pork cases one is not likely to withstand scrutiny ....

hope that helps

I agree with Andrew: the dog/pig distinction won't get us anywhere. And I might even be persuaded that we shouldn't eat animals at all. But there's a sliver of a distinction that may be worth noting.

If a stranger asks me to drive him to the grocery store, I don't have any obligation to say yes. If my friend asks me (and if it's not a lot of trouble to do it) then it's not so clearly okay for me just to say no. If my daughter asks me, the obligation seems even stronger. Our relationships with people can make a difference to how we ought to treat them.

We can and do have relationships with our companion animals. And those relationships could make a difference to how we should treat them. I have an obligation to feed my dog, for example, but not to feed yours.

Now it may very well be that it's wrong to eat animals at all. But even if it's okay to eat animals in general, it doesn't simply follow that it's okay to eat my own pet and the fact that it's my pet is the reason why it doesn't follow. The moral dimension of our special relationships with some of our conspecifics may well have an analogue in our relationships with our pets.

All that said, the point I've made is a very weak one: it's only that my special relationship with my pet might have moral weight. That still leaves us with the serious question of whether it's ever okay to slaughter and eat other creatures.

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