Why is it a sickness of soul to abuse an animal that’s been legally defined as a “pet”, but not to define an identical animal that has not been given this arbitrary label?
I don’t know what’s with this “legally defined” and “arbitrary label”. If someone adopts a stray cat as a companion, legal definitions are not involved. The law is not involved. “Pet” is not an arbitrary label, it is a word with an ordinary meaning that everyone knows. You may disagree with my acceptance of livestock and rejection of maltreating pets, but your faux-naïf framing is not an argument.
You use the word “torture” a lot, but torture has a specific meaning: suffering deliberately inflicted in order to coerce or punish someone, or as an end in itself. (“The purpose of torture is torture.” — O’Brien, in “1984”.) This is not the reason for the suffering of livestock, which is a side-effect of the intention of making food. No farmer, on discovering that the conditions of his animals are more humane than he thought they were, will deliberately go out with a cattle prod to make up the loss of the suffering he thought he was inflicting. If market conditions change to make crops a more profitable use of his land, he will switch without a thought of all the animal suffering he is missing out on.
They’d not identical.
First, they have a different status, much the same as citizens and aliens have different rights.
Second, different species of animals have different relationships with humanity:
Dogs are bred to be symbiotic companions
Cats are parasites if allowed, pest control if tolerated
Rats are disease vector scavengers
Chickens are livestock—they lay infertile eggs for human consumption!
Why is it a sickness of soul to abuse an animal that’s been legally defined as a “pet”, but not to define an identical animal that has not been given this arbitrary label?
Intent.
I don’t know what’s with this “legally defined” and “arbitrary label”. If someone adopts a stray cat as a companion, legal definitions are not involved. The law is not involved. “Pet” is not an arbitrary label, it is a word with an ordinary meaning that everyone knows. You may disagree with my acceptance of livestock and rejection of maltreating pets, but your faux-naïf framing is not an argument.
You use the word “torture” a lot, but torture has a specific meaning: suffering deliberately inflicted in order to coerce or punish someone, or as an end in itself. (“The purpose of torture is torture.” — O’Brien, in “1984”.) This is not the reason for the suffering of livestock, which is a side-effect of the intention of making food. No farmer, on discovering that the conditions of his animals are more humane than he thought they were, will deliberately go out with a cattle prod to make up the loss of the suffering he thought he was inflicting. If market conditions change to make crops a more profitable use of his land, he will switch without a thought of all the animal suffering he is missing out on.
They’d not identical. First, they have a different status, much the same as citizens and aliens have different rights. Second, different species of animals have different relationships with humanity: Dogs are bred to be symbiotic companions Cats are parasites if allowed, pest control if tolerated Rats are disease vector scavengers Chickens are livestock—they lay infertile eggs for human consumption!