QatzelOk wrote:Would you prefer to be a cow locked in a pen, or a wild animal, free to roam and do as you wish?
The other wild animals are also free to do as they wish -- including kill and eat me, not necessarily in that order.
Or, as a penned cow, are you even able to imagine what it would be like to have free will and the legal right to act on your instincts?
And be eaten alive by hyenas.
And if farmers do a lot of productive work, does this really excuse the slavery of the animals whose lives they diminish through a lifetime of imprisonment and social isolation?
Animals are not people. Only people have rights because only people are able to respect others' rights.
Are they doing as much for their cows as their cows are doing for them?
Certainly.
Didn't slave-owners ALSO have to do some maintenance work on their slaves?
No, they just told other slaves to do it. It was remarked at the time, as a justification for chattel slavery in the antebellum South, that African-American slaves were actually materially better off than contemporaneous landless European peasants. Perhaps you are having difficulty with the concept that unlike slaves, cattle can't just be told to look after the other cattle.
Did this make slavery equitable for all involved, in your mind?
It was roughly as equitable as private ownership of land.
Cattle farmers are also part of the parasitic relationship between modern, tool-abusing mankind and the rest of the animal kingdom.
Nonsense. "The rest of the animal kingdom" is not an organism, just a description, and tool use is how we roll.
So the relationship between the 1% and their cattle .
No, I already explained to you why that is not the case. The privileged are abrogating everyone else's rights without making just compensation. Cattle have no rights, but get a lot of compensation.
I don't disagree with you that the 1% are parasitic. But if you think about how much the lives of caged and penned animals are diminished from birth to death... you can see how cattle farmers provide the same diminished livelihood to their cattle as the controlling 1% give to their cattle (us).
No, because there is no doubt that the lives of wild animals are in general much more difficult than the lives of domesticated livestock, and most livestock would die slowly and painfully in the wild.
And every once in a while, farmers slaughter their cattle for meat. Aren't we at the starting gate of the 1% doing the same thing to "their cattle" in another world war?
No, that is not a valid analogy, as already proved.
After all, now that we are no longer afraid of going to hell or of not worhipping our king... we have become too "unpenned" for the farmer class to squeeze much more surplus labor out of us.
Check out how long people still "willingly" toil and scrimp just to buy the little postage stamp of land under their dwellings.
Plus, most Western countries are bankrupt. This means that the only "meat" that the 99% can provide them with... is their own.
More of the same false analogy.