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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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It bothers us because we know that dogs are relatively intelligent, often kind, feel pain and get sad. In many ways they act like children. We know this because many of us have pets or know people who have dogs as pets. Same thing for horses, to a lesser degree. This makes it harder to lie to yourself or ignore their suffering, and makes us feel bad about eating meat and the suffering that inevitably entails. If pigs, who are surprisingly intelligent, were common household pets, we'd feel bad about that too. But they aren't, so we get to pretend that they're stupid and don't die in pain and in fear.
In many ways, it's not much different to how most of us decide to pretend that child labour or slavery no longer exist, despite regular revelations about the suffering our consumerist purchasing decisions perpetuate. Or how we're happy to buy unnecessary nonsense, replacing perfectly good clothes, replace a functional phone with the newest shiny thing, spend money on content that we could easily do without, rather than donate to a charity that could have prevented children and innocents dying needlessly. We know deep down that we're choosing to let people die, we pretend we don't so we can buy some more luxuries.
People are often evil. This is the baseline of human behaviour. We like to convince ourselves we're not, by occasional acts of goodness.
Pigs are absolutely excellent companion animals in the same way, it's well documented. My farmer friend has one for years and he was delightful. She had chickens who had wonderful funny personalities. There's videos of cows playing with children and sleeping in their laps.
The logic just doesn't make any sense. I see what you are saying, don't get me wrong, but I just don't get how people can "rescue" dogs and yet talk about how much they love bacon.
Social expectations. I raised a few pigs in 4H and while they were as smart as dogs, they were raised to be eaten and after being sad about my first one, the established idea that they exist to be eaten made it different than a dog who existed to protect the animals from wild predators. Heck, outside farm dogs and cats also have a different relationship than indoor dogs and cats becsuse of how everyone treated then when I was growing up.
So while I known in my mind that dogs raised to be eaten are seen in some places like pigs are here, it is just established as a different thing socially. Kind of like how many people are averse to eating squirrels and rabbits because they see them as small animals that hang out in their yards, not a food source.
The logic absolutely makes sense. One is more familiar to an average person and other is less. It's not that hard to grasp lol.
Doesn't make it any less of a double standard. Same with squids which apparently are relatively intelligent and we still eat them but for some reason dolphins are a no-go (are they endangered? Idk.).
My friend had a pet pig with 3 legs. When I asked why the pig only had 3 legs he said "a pig that good, you don't eat all at once."
Pigs aren't suitable pets outside a farm. They're too big, too strong, and far too intelligent. Remember watching a BBC documentary where they discussed how pigs are more intelligent than small children. They escape constantly exactly because they're incredibly intelligent. Feral pigs are also dangerous and cause untold damage.
Neither are cows. Cows are much like dogs. They like playing fetch, playing football, listening to music, cuddling, etc. But they're far too big and strong to keep as pets for most people.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that it's more moral to eat a pig, dog or cow.
I'm arguing that people are more able to lie to themselves that eating a cow or pig is less bad, because they have less experience interacting with them. Just like the kid who died mining ore in a Congolese mine, that makes it easier to ignore their suffering.
e: here's a short fragment from a BBC documentary about pigs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mza1EQ6aLdg
Shows how 6 week old piglets can grasp how a mirror works relatively easily. Something human children take far longer to grasp.