Didn't watch the whole thing, but I think there are better arguments for not cooking and eating a pet than "just morally wrong." People form emotional and social bonds not only with other humans, but also with pets, and when those bonds are broken it can be extremely painful and lead to permanent psychological scarring. Pretending that Muffin goes to doggy heaven is a relatively healthy means of healing from that loss, allowing the emotional memory to remain intact. Eating the corpse, on the other hand, is the psychological equivalent of cutting off a limb to escape the pain of a papercut, no matter what economic or environmentalist arguments are made to justify it. If you eat one creature that was like family to you when it was alive, why not cannibalize any random human on the street with whom you have no psychological links to at all? People gradually become the equivalent of livestock, and even family members with deep emotional connections may end up being butchered and eaten by a sociopath numbed to the horror by being made to eat the bodies of pets they once played with.
Eating meat is different from eating pets. Livestock don't have any emotional connections to people, pets do. Not just dogs and cats, but even traditional livestock animals like pigs and goats, if someone cares enough about them to give them a name.
Posted by: Tatterdemalian on July 11, 2012 10:12 AM