they're just too damn smart (and cuddly).

but you know, horses are smarter than cows, and the french are eating horses by the stableful, every day. thank goodness "big brown" didn't end up as an entree in some parisian restaurant, eh?

and you know, pigs are smarter than horses - but people still won't give up their bacon and ribs and ham n' swiss sandwiches

and you know, dogs are smarter than pigs - but people in korea (the good korea, south korea, where they're not even starving) - they eat dogs all the time. And china too.

somebody ought to protest this at the olympics. instead of raising your fist in a black power salute, just start barking during the chinese national anthem.

I'm curious about the hierarchy of intelligence you're employing in your post, baltimore aureole. I mean, I appreciate what you're doing rhetorically, but by what measure do you consider dogs to be more intelligent than pigs, for example?

here are a variety of thought experiments

• what would a pig do if a burglar tried to break into my house?
• arnold the pig on "green acres" apparently wasn't able to parlay his brief fame into an extended career, like lassie
• does my dog eat garbage? (oops, that one's a tie, i guess)

The problem with this medium is that tone and mood often get lost. You *are* posting tongue in cheek with all three of these, right?

I've seen chickens and cows in action and I'll be damned if I'm going to feel bad about eating them.

Okay, I feel a little bad about eating factory-farmed, cruelty-added chickens and cows. Especially when I know that the people processing them in awful conditions are paid squat and work in dangerous (and gross!) conditions.

I don't eat goat not because they have satan eyes, but because they taste just like you would expect a goat to taste. Goaty. Bleah.

I love to eat sheep. Mutton and lamb are awesome. And I can't feel too bad about it because I've seen the depths of their stupidity. They need us, and this is the bargain they have struck. So long, lambkin.

People in Africa eat chimpanzees, and gorillas, too. [They call it 'bush meat'.]

Does that bother you at all?

Would it bother you more if you realized that this is probably going to lead to the extinction of the gorilla and perhaps the chimpanzee, at least in the wild?

Would the level of concern rise if you were informed that chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, and that what we are doing could even be considered a form of genocide?

Oh, and people in Japan and Norway eat whale meat.

I don't suppose that bothers you, either.