Are you saying you wouldn't?

Of course I would, and I agree we humans are indeed exceptional among animals. Why does that mean our consciousness, cognition, emotion, and pain are more valuable?

We need a subject or observer to assign value right? I agree that our ability to understand (or doubt our understanding of) our suffering makes us interesting animals and it seems to separate us from almost every other animal on the planet. Where we diverge is that I don't think a human's ability to contemplate their suffering makes their suffering much more or less valuable than a dog's, cow's, or pig's.

Most animals don't even understand the passing of time beyond a few hours.

Any animal with a hippocampus probably has some time cells, which means they certainly have an intuitive understanding of time. Maybe cows lack the computational machinery to assign symbolic meaning to abstract shapes and use them to record the passage of time in an external machine, but I wouldn't be surprised if eventually neuroscientists found a representation of much longer sequences of time in dogs, cats, cows, pigs, and other more complicated mammals. The experiments would be heinous and I think this sort of thing should only be probed noninvasively, if ever, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were representations of experiences that occurred over days and weeks in dolphin and elephant cortices. I think there have been experiments on food-storing birds that showed surprisingly long episodic memory.

The problem isn't cows in a barn, the problem is thousands of cows (per site) in metal pens too narrow to turn in being continuously forcibly impregnated, drugged, and milked until they are not good for the purpose and slaughtered. Only a minority are calling for a fatwa on Old MacDonald's Farm, they have a more serious problem with the industrialized molestation, torture, and slaughter of countless creatures in sites that literal Holocaust survivors have compared to concentration camps.

, you somehow believe cows in a barn is the same thing as THE FUCKING ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE

cOmPaRiNg tHiNgS ThAt sHaRe mAtErIaL SiMiLaRiTiEs iS IdEnTiCaL To sTaTiNg tHeY'Re tHe sAmE ThInG

I, and other vegans, are obviously not saying animal agriculture is exactly the same as the atlantic slave trade. The comment you're mad about made a glib, maybe flippant, remark on certain similarities between vegetarianism, which carries a facade of prioritizing animal welfare by not eating their flesh, but still does incredible violence to animals without their consent at a geologically significant scale, to a law that sought to appear to be reforming a slave economy by prohibiting imports of slaves, while allowing the continuation of the slave economy. This is a pretty apt comparison imo.

Please take a few deep breaths and if you want to have a real conversation about this instead of yelling at vegans on the internet for comparing two similar but distinct instances of violence I'm happy to resume. Otherwise, please disengage.

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