Dogs VS Pigs
Hi there, fair warning ahead of time, this article deals with serious subject matter. If you're the type to be easily upset by animal cruelty this one might not be for you. You've been warned.
What's the difference between a pig and a dog? I'm serious. Think about it. They tend to come in about the same , they're around the same intelligence level (although pigs are sometimes reported to be smarter), they're very sociable and friendly, they can be potty trained. Best guess puts the domestication of pigs somewhere around 8500BC which isn't quite where dogs are, but I think it's fair to say the relationship between humans and dogs is pretty serious. our legs, a tail, a nose, fur, two eyes. All in all, a very similar animal to dogs. And that's after 10,000+ years of purpose built breeding to make dogs "Man's Best Friend" and pigs "Man's Third Best Meat Source."
And no, it's nothing to do with the quality or taste of the meat either. If you see a strong, lean dog out on the street it's easy to say that there isn't a lot of food on those bones. Especially compared to a pig. But even past the fact that pigs are genetically designed at this point to get fat, they're also fed a specific diet to make them as rotund as possible to get the most bang for your buck when they're ready to harvest. Can you imagine a world where we decided to keep pigs as pets instead of dogs, and instead used as our livestock? It's probably hard. It's almost certainly uncomfortable, but I don't think it's that much of a stretch.
Where is the line drawn between an animal we find acceptable to kill and eat, and an animal that we see as our child? That's what I want to get at at the end of the day here. There's so much hate against zoos because we give the animals in our lives a sexual outlet. But you'd think if someone says they want to come and cut off my head and feed it to the pigs, that they'd be even more upset when they find out what the pigs are actually being fed. Which is why I want to try and use the logic of the most animal loving people in the world, anti-zoos, and see if a thorough understanding of why having sex with animals can help me understand why eating them is okay.
Let's start off simple. They say dogs have the intelligence of a 2 - 9 year old depending on who's misquoting the study. And since that means that dogs are "just like children" would you say that eating a human child would be the same level of unacceptable morally as eating a dog? And if pigs are comparably intelligent to dogs, then is eating a pig the same as eating a human child too? How smart do you have to be to consent to being eaten? Or is it a lack of intelligence that makes that okay? Chickens are certainly less smart than dogs, but if pigs are more intelligent then I'm not sure which direction is more important. If we started factory farming chimpanzees or dolphins, is that better or worse than if we started eating cats? When we decide what animals make the cut (literally) do we consider whether the animal is going to know that they're being farmed? Does it matter that they're smart enough to be sad about being foodtobe their whole short life? Fish, for instance, are pretty low in terms of the intelligence charts. Would you say that morally it's more acceptable to eat some salmon than it is to eat a sheep? And of course, animals learn throughout their lives the same way that humans do. Does that make it more or less acceptable to eat animals when they're young? Or does that just come to letting them develop the most possible meat before we kill them?
Of cours, this whole discourse around intelligence boils down to consent at the end of the day. Because a dog is the same as a 5 year old child, and a 5 year old child can't consent, then by extension a dog can't consent.
Now, I'm no farmer, so maybe I'm just ignorant on this topic, but if someone could explain to me the ways that a pig accuratly communicates that they're ready to be slaughtered, that would be really helpful. Or the ways that a chicken consent to thousands of generations of specific breeding in order to make them as perfect as possible for a nice juicy breast. Or our aformentioned dogadjacent pigs. If you say that there's no possible way that a dog can communicate that they'd like to have sex, I'm very curious to hear what pigs o o communicate they want to die. Do they oink oink? Do they stand really close to a knife? Do they roll on their backs to show off that tasty tasty belly? What's the process there?
Or, possibly, does the consent of the animals involved not matter to the slightest, but we discount that because someone gave the thumbs up on eating them, and the thumbs down on eating dogs. And don't even get me started on whether or not being caged your entire life and then killed for meat is more or less harmful than getting a handjob.
I want to address something really quickly here as we get to the point. There's going to be people who read the headline of this article and say "Okay eating animals is bad but having sex with them is bad too!" And we can go back and forth on that, but that's not the point. This article isn't about trying to justify zoosexuality in any capacity. Feel free to hate us. But if you hate us so much that you have "KYS Zoophiles" in your bio, you're in anti-zoo Discord groups, you follow us just to spend time posting reaction memes whenever they pop up on your timeline, what are you doing about factory farming? Sure you dislike that people fuck ido, but presumably you'd be *really* riled up about literal billions of animals going through literal hell every day. Right? And hey, if you're really into the rape angle, you should look up how more animals are made to keep the factory farming industry going. I'm just saying, if zoos really wanted to sexually abuse animals there's some really profitable ways to do it legally.
Surely you're vegan right? If you care about animals enough that you're willing to spend hours every week harassing people on the internet for dating their cat, of course you also care enough to not support animal genocide. In fact, I'm sure you're a staunch animal rights activist in all facets of your life. You boycott products created via animal testing, you speak out about problems like deforestation, and climate change. You recycle, and never litter. And in terms of your activism, I'm sure you're spending your time being much more productive than just bullying people on Twitter. If you have time to do that, I'm sure you're writing your senators, throwing protests, promoting an animal positive world.
But chances are you're not doing that. Between joining in on a hate campaign on a marginalized group online and actively sacrificing for a cause one of those things is much more fun and much less effort. And I get it. There are plenty of zoos aren't vegan either. Hell, I'm not perfect myself. But this is the hypocrisy that we mean when we talk about the way that care for animals is divvied out. Especially when it comes to "anti-zoos"
There's one argument for zoophilia that's so strong, and so perfect, that you can win any discussion with it no matter what. It's also awful. It's an argument that I would never make. It's objectively wrong. But based on the way that society treats animals it's also objectively true.
If we allow the existence of factory farming, if we confine, rape, traffic and murder billions of animals every year for food, those animals by extension are no longer people, they're a commodity. And commodities, much like factory farmed animals, don't have rights. They're property. Similarly, when you have an animal in your possession, you own them. That's *your* horse, that's *your* dog. They live in *your* house, eat *your* food. In the same way that a pork farmer owns his pigs, you own your dog. What's the difference? If a farmer decides one day to go out and shove his fist into a cow's asshole to get them to breed he can do that because that's his property. So if you want to go one day and shove your fist into your horse, that should be fine too right? If you're going to subject animals to harm unimaginable, hey why not get off while you're doing it too.
We might have laws that say that one is okay and the other is not, but why? Morally speaking, what's the difference?
What's the difference between a dog and a pig? Social perception. As a society we're going through a mass psychosis so we can see Spot as a perfect little angel, and the pork we pick up from the grocery as an ingredient. Maybe if you really care about animals, you should spend less time searching for Zoos to harass on Twitter, and instead open your eyes to the horrors of animal abuse all around you.
Article written by Tarro (February 2024)
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