This is another social issue with a very wide field of beliefs and a constantly changing view of what is considered ethical or acceptable. The beliefs
are as diverse as "animals are people too", in which case it is perfectle acceptable to injure or even kill people to prevent injury to animals, to
"all things were put on the earth for our benefit, but we must care for it" under which philosophy eating meat and testing drugs on animals are
perfectly acceptable as long as we try to be humane about the ways we treat them, to "nothing is more important than a human life" which justifies any
testing that might potentially be useful, to "it's my livelihood", which justifies wholesale slaughter of predator species and pests, to "what the
heck, it's only an animal" which justifies... well, almost anything. At one time, any predator capable of taking down even a relatively young or ill
person was hunted to extinction anywhere that humans lived, and that was acceptable behavior. Now, large sections of desirable real estate with
harvestable resources are declared off limits for development due to the presence of a small population of relatively obscure animals.
The question "why would we get so upset about ____ when we still ____" applied to anything in this discussion is a completely useless discussion. The
groups of similar minded people on any particular topic are so diverse that even the concept of "we" isn't particularly helpful.
|
.
