Replace "male chicks" with any other baby (even human) and you may have a different reaction to masserating them while they're alive.
I guess, where I get confused is why grinding up baby male chicks is terrible, but letting chicks grow into adult-hood so we can kill them and eat their flesh is significantly...less bad I guess?
Why not just aim for the banning of killing any animal for any reason? Is it a specific "scale" problem? Killing 5 chickens or chicks is fine. But 100 is horrible? Is it 1000? 100,000? 1 million?
Letting them grow to adulthood while giving them an opportunity to experience a decent sort of "chicken existence" (i.e. able to indulge in natural chicken-like behaviours etc.) definitely seems preferable to just killing them at birth. But killing them at birth is definitely better than forcing them to stay alive in cruelly constrained/unnatural conditions. Better still is preventing their growth into baby male chickens (which presumably do have the capacity for pain/some sort of awareness of existence - as I noted in my other reply, can bond and interact with humans) in the first place.
Comments
Replace "male chicks" with any other baby (even human) and you may have a different reaction to masserating them while they're alive.
I guess, where I get confused is why grinding up baby male chicks is terrible, but letting chicks grow into adult-hood so we can kill them and eat their flesh is significantly...less bad I guess?
Why not just aim for the banning of killing any animal for any reason? Is it a specific "scale" problem? Killing 5 chickens or chicks is fine. But 100 is horrible? Is it 1000? 100,000? 1 million?
Letting them grow to adulthood while giving them an opportunity to experience a decent sort of "chicken existence" (i.e. able to indulge in natural chicken-like behaviours etc.) definitely seems preferable to just killing them at birth. But killing them at birth is definitely better than forcing them to stay alive in cruelly constrained/unnatural conditions. Better still is preventing their growth into baby male chickens (which presumably do have the capacity for pain/some sort of awareness of existence - as I noted in my other reply, can bond and interact with humans) in the first place.