The dilemma of killing animals

We are getting to the point of a real dilemma. On the one hand, we have 8 billion people on the planet to feed and every single day, 240,000 new mouths to feed.

On the other hand, we are gaining compassion about the other species and we understand more every day about their unique intelligent and sentience. We protect and care for some species like this whale and slaughter others.

We now have classed octopus and squids as sentient creatures. Do sentient creatures have rights? Perhaps the most basic of them; the right to live?

As we continue to research the animals, we will understand that we are not on the top of the evolutionary pyramid. Such a concept will be absurd. What it will look like is not a pyramid but a mountain range. With the various species all occupying their own unique mountain of consciousness, sentience, and intelligence. One mountain being no more privileged than another. Why is our bigger brains more privileged than the ability to migrate thousands of kilometres every year, or the ability to regrow an appendage?

For example, birds. Birds do not come from an evolutionary path of fear like mammals. At the end of the dinosaur period, mammals were small fearful animals like today's merkats. Always fearful, always vigilant, and we have kept this fear in our evolutionary path as an important factor in our survival. Birds did not start this way. Birds evolved from dinosaurs and upon having the ability to fly away from danger, became less reliant on fear as a positive evolutionary factor. Of course, they need to recognise danger but their ability to fly away from danger means that fear is much less a part of their genetic makeup as humans who have little natural defences. In this respect, birds have the ability to evolve much faster then humans when the evolutionary requirement for fear is less. Their mountain may become higher than the human's.

So we have a dilemma, and this dilemma will grow in importance as we gain more understanding of sentience, and also gain compassion as we transform to a less tribal species.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/17/entangled-humpback-whales-sad-fate-has-researchers-calling-for-action-on-fishing-nets