> Hello Todd,
>
> There may be pain,suffering and there is death. If you relate this
> happening to
> a human being you would say any one of these would surely be unpleasant to
> say the least.

Hello again, Mike, and thanks for taking time to answer so thoughtfully. 
I think this is a very important issue, and one that doesn't get enough
attention.  I'll try to be as thoughtful in my reply to you.

> It's interesting on how people can get all worked up about the welfare of
> their
> pets but can't make the transfer to other animals such as cows/sheep/pigs,
> etc...

We can say that pain is, if you will, inherently unpleasant.  It is the
nature of pain to be aversive, i.e., something that we seek to avoid.  And
by "we" I mean all creatures capable of experiencing pain.  There are some
questions about the extent to which we can attribute the experience of
pain to other creatures.  Behavior is an unreliable guide, since sometimes
pain behavior may be present when there's no pain experience.  But I'm
going to set all those questions aside and grant, for the sake of
argument, that the animals we eat all experience pain much the same way
that we do.

As for death...I don't think it's nearly so simple as your statement
suggests.  Is death "unpleasant"?  Setting aside afterlife conjectures, I
think the ancient philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius were right to point
out that for something to be unpleasant it must be experienced, and since
death is the cessation of experience, it can neither be pleasant, nor
unpleasant, nor anything at all (They didn't say "unpleasant" etc, but I'm
paraphrasing for purposes of this discussion).

The point I'm making is that when we think of death of a loved one, or
anyone, as a Bad Thing, as we certainly do, it's not because we think the
state of being dead is unpleasant.  But if that's not the reason, what is?

The answer can only be: When we die, we *lose* something.  What do we
lose?  We lose the possibility of more life.  More precisely, we lose the
*value* there might be in more life.  I use the word "value" here because,
as long as I'm alive, some experiences have more value to me than others. 
This is why we sometimes see, in the very elderly, a transition to a state
of almost serene indifference to the approach of death.  This isn't
"depression," as it's sometimes mistakenly described.  It's simply that
for these people, the value of their remaining future experiences isn't
very much, for various reasons.  So if they die, they don't lose much. 
And when they do die, we don't call their deaths "tragic."  Instead, we
say they had a full life, and so forth.

And in some cases, of terminal illness and intractable suffering, the
value of a person's remaining future experiences may be all negative, and
such people may welcome or even hope for a swift death.

I hope it's evident why I'm going into this at such length.  I'm trying to
make a point, and that point is: The value of life, and the disvalue (if
you will) of death, is relational, not absolute.  It is a value to (or
for) the person whose life/death it is.

The value of a human person's life, and the dread with which that person
might contemplate death, is a function of what that person stands to lose
in dying, and *that loss* depends in great measure on the value that the
person *hopes* to experience in the remaining days, months, or years, of
life.

Now we have to ask, what is the value of life, or the disvalue of death,
to a cow or a chicken?  This has nothing to do with the instinctive
survival drive.  To the extent that a cow, or chicken, lives in the
present moment, without hopes or expectations, the duration of its future
*cannot* matter to it.  And if it can't matter, then its loss can't matter
either.

The point is that the life of a person has (or can have) greater value to
a person than the life of a cow can have to the cow, because the person
has an ability to value that life that the cow lacks.  And value is
relational, not absolute.

How do we know that the cow lacks this ability?  Well, we can say it
because we now have a pretty good understanding of what makes it possible
for us to have the ability.  It is our highly developed cerebral cortex,
particularly the pre-frontal cortex.  We know that this area of the brain
is far more developed in the human brain than in any other animal. 
Moreover, we know that cows, and even dogs, notoriously lack the ability
to make and execute even simple plans. Without plans there can be no
hopes, and without hopes, no valuing the future.

My view is that it makes good moral sense for us to care about the
experience that cattle and other animals have while alive, because their
interest in the quality of their immediate experiences is pretty much the
same as ours (except for our ability to willingly accept present pain for
the sake of some future goal).  But it makes no sense for us to think of
the value of their lives and deaths as having parity with ours, because
they lack the capacity to value them the way we do.

Todd Moody