First, my own background. I'm a cat lover. I work at an animal rescue. I've been taking care of cats for 20 years now and I can't imagine my life without them. I wouldn't want anything bad to happen to them, and if anyone were to ever hurt them, I would want that individual to be harshly punished.
I'm not ethically opposed to raising farm animals for the purpose of eating meat, so long as they are treated humanely while they are alive.
Most animals are not treated humanely while they are alive. See here for some specifics:
http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/
After all, the cats I care for are obligate carnivores, so I'd be a hypocrite if I were against raising other animals for meat.
Well no you wouldn't because humans are not obligate carnivores. You could be against raising animals for the purpose of human consumption and not be a hypocrite.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find stores that still sell free range meat. I'm currently looking into CSA because I've heard it's better for the environment, so I'll have to see how that pans out.
"Free range" animal products are often far from humane.
Yet the reason I'm asking this question is because, for the life of me, I find myself unable to articulate an objective moral or philosophical argument as to why I as an individual, or why we as a society, should care about animal cruelty as an issue.
You can never really conclusively proof that any moral claim is correct, whether it relates to animals or humans. You can, however, appeal to things that (many) others are likely to agree on. Such as "it's wrong to cause unnecessary suffering to another conscious being for the sake of personal gain and/or laziness".
I used to argue that there are studies that have been done showing a link between cruelty towards animals and cruelty towards humans. This is how several notorious serial killers, like Jeffrey Dahmer, got their start. However, only a correlation has been proven, and correlation is not the same as causation. There are animal abusers who do not grow up to be serial killers, and there are serial killers who never abused animals growing up. Perhaps the same psychological cause is behind both behaviors in households where abuse takes place, but I haven't been able to find sufficient evidence on this.
This argument seems to presume that things are only bad if they harm humans.
I could argue that animals are living, breathing, thinking beings, who provide us with companionship and warmth. They have the same feelings we do. They feel pain like we do. They give us so much and ask for so little in return. However, this is an emotional appeal, not an objective argument, and not everyone is going to feel the same way.
And arguing that bad things done to humans are wrong is often going to be an emotional appeal too...
I'm going to play devil's advocate here. Why should anyone care about animal cruelty?
The same reason we should care about human cruelty. Compassion, justice, morality...
What does it matter if a livestock animal is trapped in a tiny cell, wading in its own filth its entire life? It's just going to die anyway.
The same argument could be applied to humans. It matters because it matters to the animal and it may be going to die eventually, as all of us are, but that doesn't mean the suffering he/she undergoes while alive doesn't matter.
And what does it matter if a cat or dog is beaten, neglected, or starved? It's just a stupid pet. It's not the same as treating a human the same way,
Not
exactly the same, but it's wrong for pretty much the same reasons.
