Animal rights, properly understood, is an ideology that believes the capacity to feel pain is the basis for possessing rights.
Hence, several years ago, PETA claimed that eating meat was the evil equivalent of Auschwitz.
Now, with some studies showing that fish may feel pain, over at the Huffington Post, we are told to stop eating fish by a professor (of course!) of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. From, “Science Shows Fish Feel Pain, so Let’s Get Over It and Do Something About It,” by Marc Bekoff:
We need to do something about this now because billions of fish are killed globally for food as if they don’t care about what happens to them.
As Robert Jones of the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Chico, notes in his essay called Fish sentience and the precautionary principle…” If fish are sentient (and there is good evidence that they are), then the number of sentient beings in the form of fish that are slaughtered for food annually equals at least twelve times that of the current human population (Mood & Brooke 2010).
If the idea of such a moral atrocity weren’t enough, current world fishing trends point to a global eradication of all taxa currently fished, causing a total collapse of the fishing industry by the year 2048 (Worm et al. 2006). Surely, by any moral calculus, applying the precautionary principle regarding fish welfare is reasonable and prudential, if not obligatory.”
In other words, don’t eat that salmon and leave the halibut alone!
So, let’s recap. We can’t eat meat. We can’t eat fish. We may not be able to eat insects, because they are sentient beings. Indeed, PETA has accused honey farmers of using “rape racks” when queens are inseminated.
That leaves some plants. Why only “some?” Well, another professor has told us that “peas are persons too,” and so we can’t eat annuals such as tomatoes.
This is what happens when human exceptionalism is rejected: We go out of our ever lovin’ minds!