One thing that I find very interesting is, how we generally display different amounts of sympathy for different animals -for instance, the different treatments that are given to beetles and cockroaches, or between owls and vultures.

For example, I find myself having a considerable heart-tug towards a dog in pain, but I view pain in a mosquito much more as simply a biological survival device. Furthermore, I find it harder to have sympathy or respect towards animals that I perceive as having lesser self-preservation instincts, like moths, turkeys, cows, pandas, and flying insects that won't move when you swat them. I also have more respect for canine or feline infants than human ones, since babies are so goddamn dependant and disgusting. But maybe that's just me.

What about you folks? I'd particularly like to hear Stewart's take on this issue.

And FWIW, the whole animals/children subject is one of the things that originally turned me off in moral realism.

I do treat animals with different levels of sympathy, although I'd like to think that I do it based more on material differences between the animals than on how I personally feel about them.

I save snails and worms from the sidewalk after it rains. I don't always save slugs, though. Part of that is because I can't grab a slug as easily as I can grab a snail or even a worm. Probably another part, though, is that I don't find slugs as aesthetically appealing.

Last night I found dozens of baby spiders in my bathroom. I let them be, but this morning when I took a shower I had to let one of them go down the drain. He was on my shampoo bottle, and I gave up on him after a very brief attempt to get him off safely. I'm glad that I'm not the sort of person who would indiscriminately drown a bunch of harmless spiders, but I'm also aware that it doesn't take a whole lot of incentive for me to put one under the faucet.

As far as comparing a dog and a mosquito, I think there are good, physical reasons why that isn't arbitrary. After all, we know with near-certainty when a dog is feeling pain, whereas I'm not even certain that mosquitos feel anything like pain, or even 'feel' anything at all. I like to err on the side of caution, but there's significantly more utility in helping dogs than mosquitos.

Cows and turkeys, though? I think you'd be surprised just how much preservation instinct they still have, despite the best breeding efforts of thousands of years of human intervention. And I wouldn't recommend trying to threaten a panda bear...

My interests are not in what the animals do, or how smart they are, or how much I like their appearance. Most of my interest lies in whether something I'm doing is causing them pain, or whether something I could be doing might help prevent or alleviate it.