Strawberry

guess how tofu is made

Yall have big digits

If you've taken in a cat you have committed yourself to its care. It's not a matter of the moral agent being a killer as the combination of being a moral agent and not an obligate carnivore. You can choose not to consume animals because you don't need to. If you choose for your cat to not consume animals, you are killing the cat. But this is not a huge factor in the real world when it comes to the meat industry. Cat food is not nearly its main driver.

As for your alien hypothetical: Whether they should be "allowed" is kind of an unclear question. Who is allowing or disallowing this action? I think humans would be justified in fighting back to prevent our own demise. I think it would be ethical on the part of the aliens to strive towards a solution for their diet that doesn't involve killing or harming sentient beings

lol

People use words in varied ways to make rhetorical points and get people to consider things they might not have otherwise. Oh no! I'm sorry that cognitive dissonance is stressful

We are the ones with the social system allowing for moral frameworks to guide our decisionmaking. Cheetahs aren't moral agents ... Plus, they are obligate carnivores anyway (which is why your cat should not be deprived of meat)

please act in good faith or let me know that you're not interested in doing so

There are no creatures with souls. But no, I wouldn't say keeping a cat in general is immoral. There are definitely ethical concerns around things like kitten breeding mills and letting cats roam around outdoors, though

Using linguistic prescriptivism to shut down an argument and calling it "the truth" and "reality" to avoid thinking about what somebody means when they say a word is... certainly something

You said they were morally equivalent when you called it murder

I didn't, actually

and you said it again just now

I didn't, actually

Why does killing an animal for food carry any moral weight?

Because humans aren't special unique beings with souls that make us the only ones with moral worth. Many animals are capable of suffering and emotion.

Cheetahs don't get any flak for hunting caribou.

We are the ones with the social system allowing for moral frameworks to guide our decisionmaking. Cheetahs aren't moral agents. And if they are, they follow cheetah morality. Plus, they are obligate carnivores anyway (which is why your cat should not be deprived of meat)

whether or not we can live without meat (we can), we certainly can't live without plants. Even if you eat only meat, you depend on plants (and roughly 10x as much) in a lower trophic level. There is currently no way to avoid starving to death or dying of malnutrition without harming plants

pedantry is an incredible argumentative strategy. Truly unstoppable. Why think critically when you can read a dictionary instead?

frogs