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Notes -
I think that's a good point.
This comment brought to you courtesy of the seagulls crying outside my window (because it's bin day and the little buggers are smart enough to have figured out that on certain days stuff is left outside that sometimes drops tasty morsels).
If you're used to seeing gulls and crows following the plough when the farmers start ploughing, because they're eating the worms and insects turned up when the soil is ploughed, then this is nature to you. To be brutal, everything is something else's food. To quote Willy Shakes, "We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots." In that context, insect suffering is meaningless, or at least not morally significant.
But if you're worried about the moral implications of insect suffering vis-à-vis taking action to kill a moth infestation, then you are in fact going against that nature you claim to value or prioritise. You are imposing human values on the natural world. If moths should not be killed because their suffering is morally significant, gulls and crows shouldn't eat insects either, because that is also "meat is murder".
So if we are going to impose human values on such categories, then there is no reason "humans are entitled to eat meat animals" is inferior to "I am a moth genocider" as values systems. Certainly, humans should not be deliberately cruel to animals, but that's not the moral question here.
'You are objectively evil for meat eating' is as artificial and arbitrary as any other imposition of our morals on those who don't share those values. Objective by what metric? Certainly not that of nature. Objective by human systems? Ah, there we come back again to "socially constructed" and "there is no objective moral system of right and wrong" and the likes.
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