How smart is too smart to be meat?

[RobinFinderson]

How smart would a creature that isn't human have to be before you would not consider it to be meat? If we discover alien life, and it looks dumb, should we try eating it? How smart would a creature have to be before we stop thinking about how it would taste smothered in BBQ sauce?

[creekster]

That would depend on how hungry I am and how slow the meat is.

How smart would a creature that isn't human have to be before you would not consider it to be meat? If we discover alien life, and it looks dumb, should we try eating it? How smart would a creature have to be before we stop thinking about how it would taste smothered in BBQ sauce?

[Pheidippides]

How smart would a creature that isn't human have to be before you would not consider it to be meat? If we discover alien life, and it looks dumb, should we try eating it? How smart would a creature have to be before we stop thinking about how it would taste smothered in BBQ sauce?

Have you ever raised pigs? I have, and I still eat bacon.

[RobinFinderson]

Have you ever raised pigs? I have, and I still eat bacon.

Not personally, but I have spent months of my youth on a farm where we would feed the pigs and chickens and cows. I understand that pigs are very intelligent creatures. Too bad they are so damn tasty.

[TripletDaddy]

when nervous people chew/eat their own cuticle skin (often accompanied by the biting of fingernails), they are engaging in a form of cannibalism. I am guessing that there are some fairly intelligent folks who have self-cannibalized.

[WashingtonCoug]

About as smart as a dolphin.

[Pheidippides]

Not personally, but I have spent months of my youth on a farm where we would feed the pigs and chickens and cows. I understand that pigs are very intelligent creatures. Too bad they are so damn tasty.

Exceptionally intelligent. Easily the most intelligent animal I have worked with. To use one example, every set of hogs we ever had would segregate a certain area of their pen to use as a lavatory. This area was only frequented when it was time to use it; otherwise they stayed in the other "clean" areas of the pen (clean being somewhat relative, more or less, as they always had a wallow to keep cool).

Sheep are on the other end of the intelligence spectrum, at least as far as mammals go, with cows scarcely above them. I don't think twice about eating cows, not even when I call them by name at the dinner table.

But as you say, if we're not supposed to eat meat, why does it taste so damn good?

[ewth8tr]

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[Katy Lied]

I thought about your question a lot when I was reading Orson Card's Speaker for the Dead. Those piggies were quite the sympathetic and intelligent lot. Of course, the tragedy is that no human realized how intelligent they were, based upon their piggie actions.

[wuapinmon]

In Will Self's The Book of Dave, in a post-apocalyptic & post-deluge England, the people have bred some creatures for labor, food, and oil called "motos." The glossary at the back of the book defines them as, "large, viviparous, omnivorous, mammalian crature native to Ham and found nowhere else. Used by the Hamsters as a source of meat and oil alone. The moto has the functional intelligence of a 2 1/2 human child" (491). They have conversations with them and tell them about a happy place they're going right before they cut their throats.

when nervous people chew/eat their own cuticle skin (often accompanied by the biting of fingernails), they are engaging in a form of cannibalism. I am guessing that there are some fairly intelligent folks who have self-cannibalized.

When I wore a younger man's clothes (and was a robber in Boston Place) I used to say that if a limb were ever severed and had to be amputated, that I would perhaps roast it to see what I tasted like. That wish has since left me, but there was a time when I might've been that weird.

[Tim]

Will Self's The Book of Dave

Amazing book.