So you empathise with your pets whom you have a kind-of relationship with. But you eat e.g. pigs because you don’t.
Counterpoint: in the UK, rabbits are fairly common pets and uncommon-but-not-taboo food. Chickens are sometimes kept as pets too, though I’m not sure whether that tends to be mostly for the eggs. Horses are accepted as both pets and food, though rare in both cases. I’d be surprised if dog-eating cultures don’t also have pet dogs. I believe there are other cultures that commonly keep cows, goats and pigs as pets, and I’d be surprised if those cultures don’t eat those animals.
(This isn’t the same as someone eating their own pet, but no-eating-your-own-pet wouldn’t explain cultural taboos against any forms of meat.)
I think you read my point too strongly. My point is not that a relationship to pets is the distinctive aspect. Nor that the cultural norm around this is relevant. What I mean is that empathy is the key and the subject of empathy is malleable. I don’t know how empathy find its target but I assume that it is a process that involves pattern matching, preferrences and a lot of learning. This means that complex distinctions seem quite plausible to me. If you can learn to distinguish between dogs and pigs and between my pet and other persons pets you probably also can learn to distinguish between pet-rabbits and those in the supermarket.
Counterpoint: in the UK, rabbits are fairly common pets and uncommon-but-not-taboo food. Chickens are sometimes kept as pets too, though I’m not sure whether that tends to be mostly for the eggs. Horses are accepted as both pets and food, though rare in both cases. I’d be surprised if dog-eating cultures don’t also have pet dogs. I believe there are other cultures that commonly keep cows, goats and pigs as pets, and I’d be surprised if those cultures don’t eat those animals.
(This isn’t the same as someone eating their own pet, but no-eating-your-own-pet wouldn’t explain cultural taboos against any forms of meat.)
I think you read my point too strongly. My point is not that a relationship to pets is the distinctive aspect. Nor that the cultural norm around this is relevant. What I mean is that empathy is the key and the subject of empathy is malleable. I don’t know how empathy find its target but I assume that it is a process that involves pattern matching, preferrences and a lot of learning. This means that complex distinctions seem quite plausible to me. If you can learn to distinguish between dogs and pigs and between my pet and other persons pets you probably also can learn to distinguish between pet-rabbits and those in the supermarket.
(It wasn’t intended as a rebuttal, more as “this theory also needs to consider...”)