This is a kind of utilitarianism I cannot get behind:
https://www.abolitionist.com/reprogramming/index.html
I see this is wrong on many levels, but it's only an extreme version of ideas many people have.
1. Firstly, it's all about the subjective experience (and apparently of herbivorous species only--he hates cats and believe they should be abolished if they can't be reprogrammed).
I have a long overdue essay in the queue which keeps not being finished about how the focus on subjective experience leads us into social destruction, genocide, etc. (e.g., the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which focuses on the subjective experiences of Zionist Jews, and similarly the philosophy which enabled Nazism is highly subjective...and it focused on eliminating Marxist materialism because that makes nationalists and capitalists feel bad).
2. Secondly, it's imagining ourselves to be gods, with our best intuitions being ultimate wisdom. The road to hell is paved with our best intentions. The road to wisdom begins with realizing we are really very small, and the world that existed before us was grand. We should never (have) tried to change it very much.
3. It's a cornucopian view which ignores physical limits like Limits to Growth.
Whatever their immediate prey might feel, animal predators serve an essential function in ecology. The essential function of keeping things from getting out of balance. It's a form of negative feedback.
The important thing is not how people or animals feel. The important thing is continuation vs extinction.
The problem with people is not that they sometimes make animals feel bad. The problem with people is that their collective activities are driving a global mass extinction. This is hard to see if you have a small field of vision. A human society of vegetarians might be slightly better than otherwise (note: Hitler was a vegetarian), but it could still be driving mass extinction through habitat loss, pollution, and climate modification. Even if those things were slowed down considerably they would still continue. The solution involves some combination of limiting the human population size and the destructiveness of human technology.
Cats are not driving a global mass extinction, and I doubt they ever have. Ordinary predation has limits. It is human technology, including especially agriculture and mining, which lacks those kinds of limits.
