alt Hacker News>what do we do to animals that are less intelligent than ourselves?
We do a lot of different things but we typically don't make an organized effort to eradicate them unless they are actively doing us harm.
There is also a massive difference between how we treat animals based on their similarity, sentimentality and utility to us; we are unconcerned with accidentally stepping on an ant but most people would be very upset and ashamed if they accidentally hit a dog with their car.
So, your statement is not as ironclad as you seem to think it is and you should put more thought into it and perhaps re-examine your reasoning.
Replies
> We do a lot of different things but we typically don't make an organized effort to eradicate them unless they are actively doing us harm.
Sure. But some of the species we breed at scale might prefer we did just eradicate them, like the chickens that grow so fast their entire giant breast muscle becomes chewy scar tissue.
(It's also not true for, say, whales; no harm, but we wanted their shit. If they have language, their stories probably heavily feature their own Holocaust. Nor passenger pigeons, who we just got rid of.)
> We typically don't make an organized effort to eradicate them unless they are actively doing us harm.
Animals are either useful and breeded controllably, or useless and considered a pest, an obstacle to {insert any goal here}.
Also animals don't tend to think critically and at the high level to be considered dangerous. So I don't think it's fair to put humans and other animals in the same risk category.
And we did the worst things to fellow humans. I hope we didn't already forget about all the colonization, slavery and mass-eradication of native tribes in 18th century all over the world.