George,
thanks for speaking out on the painful realities that underpin our lives. We all fail to give enough 9or any) consideration to the implications of the choices we make. Of course we once had to kill the animal ourselves and clean it before cooking, but now all such unpleasantness is kept well out of view, along with human sickness and death. It's consumer paradise; we can have anything want, for a price, and need not concern ourselves with the "real" price that's paid. Indeed, we live our lives for the most part remote from any of those more viceral realities, right up to the grand scale of climate change. We equivocate on the pros and cons of the validity of AGW, yet there's absolutely no question about the "ethics" of our impact on the biosphere and the species we drive to extinction. Just as Gill's unspeakable need for experience predominates over any consideration of another animal's basic right to life, so the teeming life on planet Earth doesn't get a guernsey when it comes to maintaining our profligate lifestyles. (Peter Singer will be discussing the ethics of climate change on Big Ideas this weekend).
As you say, ethics tends to be an "esoteric subject" rather than having the kind of inhibiting function it ought to have on human society and government, filtering down to each one of us.
Be ready to be branded a green loony, but good on you for discussing such an "esoteric" subject: human compassion and ethics!

Great article George. I have had dogs all my life. They feel emotions, happy, sad, pain, just like humans do. Anyone who says that they are incapable of suffering has got rocks in their head.

Yes, I also worry about the rights of plants. I remember seeing a documentary once in which they wired up a cabbage with sensory electrodes of some kind, and then the guy hit it with a meat cleaver. You shoulda seen it. The cabbage shrieked off the dial; silently screaming in its pain and distress, and then it kind of went on a long, low whimpering.

At one time women were excluded from the category of human - they didn't have a soul, which God had breathed on man alone. Then blacks were excluded on some other arbtirary criterion - they hadn't reached higher civilisation, or higher evolution, or higher something or other, blah blah blah. Then people excluded animals - they supposedly didn't feel pain, even though it's obvious they do.

But I say, why should plants be excluded? Some say they don't feel pain or sentience, but why should pain or sentience be the criteria? They are no less arbitrary than the criteria by which women, and blacks, and animals have been excluded from recognition of their rights not to be exploited and abused. And do not vegetables live, and have offspring?

Since becoming a breatharian I feel relieved to be so much more morally superior to the other mundanes whom I despise, and it's true I have lost a lot of weight, but now I worry about the abuse of the rights of oxygen atoms and their electrons that I so thoughtlessly exploit and abuse, o mea culpa, mea culpa. "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry".

Peter Hume,
you rightly satirise the logical extremes to which this line of reasoning tends, yet it's to be hoped that, rational creatures that we are, we can act ethically within reason, rather than abandon ethics as unreasonable. At present, the ethics of the daily meal, indeed the ethics of everything we do, are easily elided; the victims, by so many degrees of separation, being at a tasteful remove from the sanitised saturnalia of civilised life. We are thus free to aestheticise and rationalise our attenuated barbarities. Indeed, we may chuckle about the absurdity of it all :-)))

Interesting article.

I suspect that as we evolve further from our animal roots, and begin to use more of our brain, the issues raised here will become more widely discussed.

The "kill or be killed" instinct first morphed into "kill for food", and then later into "kill for pleasure". We still haven't thought through the last one very carefully. The sight of the mammoth struggle between man and fish never fails to fascinate me - what goes through the mind of the guy with the rod, as he engages in a battle of wits and strength with a 25cm yellowtail?

The article also makes the point that:

"The interests of animals are all too often discounted and discarded. They are treated as property before the law and in practice."

This extends, of course, to the keeping of animals as pets. The concept of "owning" an animal, and keeping it in captivity for the term of its natural life is also, I feel, a hangover from our more primitive days.

Definitely food for thought.

Pericles:"The concept of "owning" an animal, and keeping it in captivity for the term of its natural life is also, I feel, a hangover from our more primitive days"

My dog Max is no captive. He doesn't even have a collar and has no fences keeping him from roaming. He travels everywhere with me of his own volition. If I have to leave him home, he is not happy. He'd do just fine if he was to go bush, but he doesn't want to.

I agree that dogs are often poorly treated by their "loving" owners, but not always and not by necessity, merely convenience.

I reject any claim that my dogs are in any way chattels; they have always been valued companions and as much as possible, individuals in their own right.

You're probably right about the atavism inherent in the impulse to have a dog around. No doubt as the human population increases to the point of unsutainability such impulses will be subsumed by the drive to get enough food and dogs will become a thing of the past except as working animals.

I'm sure that by then Sony will have perfected their robotic substitute.