Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The pigs and the dogs
While I try to square this circle, I should say that even in my most pro-swine moments, I don’t have any difficulty seeing why people are more outraged by cruelty toward dogs than by cruelty toward pigs. Yes, the two species may be equally intelligent, but we have a different relationship with dogs than we do with pigs: we’ve bred them and trained them, across millenia, to be not only our subjects but our intimates, our partners, our friends. And relationships ought to matter in making moral judgments.
I don't recall breeding any dogs in the past few thousand years, but that's just me.
Labels: social justice
