Want to reduce animal cruelty? Eat more meat!

[Lagmonster]

That's completely incredible. Our great ape cousins are in many ways very intelligent in regards to tool use, ability to solve problems in better ways than trial and error, etc. But that non-human animals have such linguistic ability is unsupported, unless we're going to take children under two years of age.

Except that they then proceed to teach said ASL to other apes in their group. Either way, I said human child, by which I meant toddler (which is about the same vocabulary depth of an above-average chimp), so that is perfectly fine.

Kuroneko is poking in the right direction, at least. It's not my area of expertise at all, but my understanding is that an important structure that we are not finding outside of humanity is cumulative culture. One or two other species have the basics in place for it, but they are almost severely behind us in that regard. And that's important, because that's the difference between solving problems and thinking about designing better problem-solvers. It's the difference between cooperating with your peers to get to the ends, and cooperating with your peers to study the means.

[Akhlut]

The choice you call for is the choice to commit atrocity at whim via a process that's not only morally horrific but is also unhealthy

Sorry to keep harping on it, but it does get my goat, proverbially, when you keep harping on this. Meat is not, prima facie, unhealthy as a food source. Large numbers of humans have eaten large proportions of meat in their diets throughout history without it being harmful (many Plains Indians ate a diet very heavy in bison and pronghorn meat; Inuits/Eskimos ate/eat diets heavy in sea mammals that, prior to the large-scale release of VOCs and other pollutants, did not seem to result in particularly awful long-term health consequences; many hunter-gatherers eat very large amounts of meat and do not seem to suffer health problems from meat aside from parasite loads, though there is evidence to suggest that a minor parasite load is useful for humans to prevent such things as allergies and autoimmune disorders; etc.), while modern vegan diets can be just as unhealthy as an all-meat diet (potato chips deep fried in soy oil; soybeans seem to have some adverse health effects because of the number of phytoestrogen-mimics in them; eaten diets high in corn that have not undergone nixtamalization can result in pellagra; etc.).

Humans are pretty clearly omnivores by nature, as our ancestors have been dining on meat for at least some 7 million years, so meat on its own isn't a problem as far as health goes. Now, being sedentary and eating a shitload of fat, yes, that's a problem, but one can be a fatass by eating guacamole-covered tortilla chips and deep-fried batter-covered pecans while having one's skin fuse with the fabric one's Laz-Y-Boy too.