This is interesting, I signed up to this forum for the sole purpose of posting in this thread. Gotta love Google.
Now, I for one am an Omnivore. I eat meat and vegetables, the way humans truly are at nature. I feel bad for animals, knowing how they possibly died, but I didn't kill them. Anyway, they're in a better place away from this messed up planet called Earth.
To make some points clear, to the people who state animals aren't "rational" or animals are just automatons built for us; How screwed up can you be in the head to believe that? EVERY animal is a sentient being, just like us, we ARE also animals. Just because we realize our intelligence doesn't mean other animals are stupid, or that they don't have feelings.
The very broad definition of "intelligence" is unfair to be put on animals. Some would say a dog is intelligent over a jellyfish, but intelligence varies from animal-to-animal. All animals are intelligent in their own specific region. All animals have a capacity to feel pain and to have feelings such as fear, hate and being content.
I feel most who say "animals are here for us to eat" are most likely Bible humpers who think the universe and all its inhabitants revolves around us. Well hate to break it to ya, but it doesn't. There's evidence all around us that proves we evolved like everything else.
Where would we be without animals? Nowhere, because we wouldn't exist. But where would animals be without us? A lot better off, I'll tell you that. It amuses me how some humans like to toot their own horn and say that we are the most superior in every way, shape and form. But we're not.
Some animal babies learn to live without anyone within the second being born, whilst human babies are pretty useless for many years. Most animals are better natural hunters than a human ever could be without a gun. Hell, most animals are more compassionate to their own kind compared to humans.
If we were so smart, why would we continue to destroy our world and kill eachother? You can say "Oh some animals eat their young.", well I hate to say it but so have humans, even in "civilized" parts. Some humans cannibalize. You can also say "Animals don't have compassion.", I wouldn't agree with that. There have been animals who have broken the "instinct" to have compassion for another animal, or compassion for a human. Are you saying humans are compassionate? We see death every day on the news, tell me how many people cry for those who died? We only give a damn when it's someone we know, and even then it can be limited emotion.
Of course animals rationalize, you don't see animals jumping into volcanoes or calling for a predator to eat them. They think and decide what their actions would cause. Obviously you wouldn't alert a predator, so you hide or whatever. That's rational thinking in my book and not instinct.
We've been around for something like 20,000 years, and we have already effectively destroyed our planet and continue to destroy it. Some animals have been around for 250,000,000 years and never did such a thing. And apparently they can't be that stupid if they've survived this long compared to us, sounds to me they're doing something right.
Where did we get all this technology? Majority of it was studying animals. How do you think we got radar? By a magical fairy? No, scientists studied bats and learned how they used it. Apparently bats must be pretty intelligent to be able to use such an amazing method of catching prey. Yet even the moth knows how to avoid the bat's sonar capabilities. Obviously the moth must have some intelligence to know what to do.
People argue animals are robots because a robot can be programmed like an animal. Don't you realize they can be programmed like a human too? And even then, robots can not have feelings, they don't need to survive to eat, so how can you compare them? That's what AI is, making it to what you wish it to be. Fifty years from now, I won't be surprised if we use robotic humans at workplaces, we're essentially replacing our own kind with things that won't feel emotion, yet if they go haywire they could effectively kill us.
Also what I find interesting is that people never actually think "If I had my current mind and was inside an animal, what would I do differently?", the answer to that is simple; Nothing. Even if you had a vast amount of intelligence, you'd only be using it to survive out in the wild, it'd make no difference. The main thing that makes us the way we are is because of our limbs, without our flexible limbs, we'd be no different from any other animal. Same thing if you were a goldfish in a bowl, you wouldn't be able to do anything differently than a normal goldfish could do.
The whole "animals run on instinct" gets old. It's been done over and over again. If you relate anything an animal does on instinct, then you could essentially say the same for a human. Some animals are greedy, if that is instinct, then actually greediness is an instinct in all humans. We all have personalities that are pretty world-wide whether we realize it or not. We all have things that connect us all from one core-point. People may make their own decisions, but in fact animals do too.
We try to put animals in our definition of "intelligence". But it doesn't really work that way, humans are dumb in some aspects and same goes for our other specied-brethren. All our lives are based on things created by man, our society runs similar like a beehive. You have millions of workers with leaders (AKA "Queens"). Humans are naturally social animals, to compare the intelligence of a solitary animal versus a social one is crazy, since there are different aspects of intelligence.
In the end, do we really live our lives any different than an animal? When you boil it down to a single point, we live to survive, we survive to live. The road ends the same way for all of us, just because it's branched out between billions of species, we all head down the same path. Unfortunately humans tend to be the dumbest species on the planet and I think by the time we can fix our idiotic ways it'll be too late. Humans have dwindled in intelligence over the last couple centuries, if anything.
For the one who says we only have animals as pets or food, I don't consider my animals as "pets", I consider them part of the family. There's a big difference between having a pet and "adopting" a creature into your family.
At the end of the day, humans are animals too.