Why do some think violence is more accepted than sex in western media?

[CSTowle]

It's not anthropomorphizing, it's not putting humanity on a pedestal when it comes to programmed or instinctual behavior. We are animals. Our natural selective advantages are just in the areas of intelligence, language, and ability to use both to develop more advantages for greater adaptability to new environments or problems.

Science continues to discover that animals have more intelligence and complexity than we wanted to give them credit for, so honestly little surprises me in that department. The only reasons I can see for denying this would be religious teachings that say the Earth and everything on it are gifts from a supernatural being to be used at our whims or for those hostile to vegan/vegetarianism who don't want to have to empathize with their equivalent of a walking Big Mac. Then wanting to think animals are just pretty background waiting to be harvested for useful items makes sense, nobody wants to think of themselves as being "bad" so if they don't think or feel pain (or anything at all) then easy-peasy.

[Totoro Man]

crows, for example, can recognize specific human beings. at work we've got a half-dozen of them that ignore the staff out of familiarity; they do tend to attack strangers on the property. crows have been proven to be able to count up to the number six in lab studies, use tools, and solve problems that even chimpanzees couldn't figure out. [like bending a paperclip to use as a hook to retrieve a piece of food from inside of a bottle]

consider the dog named "Chaser", who apparently learned roughly 1,000 words and what they meant. even other animals with less obviously measurable forms of intelligence still comprehend when humans are speaking to them. cats, for example, can generally understand that people are trying to talk to them... even if they don't understand what is being said. they can respond to body language, tone of voice, and pointing.

jazz legend Charles Mingus even had a training program to teach cats how to use the toilet. I s#%t you not.
https://www.charlesmingus.com/mingus...raning-program

this isn't about anthropomorphisms... it's about observing actual behavior across different species.

it doesn't even mean that people view human life as being less important. it also doesn't mean that we're automatically elevating the value of animal life relative to human beings.

I spent the better part of a decade researching birds, watching them, and thinking they were pretty awesome. I used to read about them and draw sketches of them every day. that doesn't stop me from eating chicken, though.

my primary hostility towards vegans and vegetarians are the ones who act like it makes them better people. [one of my co-workers joked "you'll never have to ask a vegetarian if they are one... because they'll tell you up front and never let you forget!" it simply doesn't make them better people. humans, like all animals, have to consume things in order to survive. the act of consumption itself is a form of destruction. some people refuse to consume sentient beings and other people don't have a problem with it. it doesn't make one better than the other.

if people have religious reasons for think of animals as lesser beings than humans, I don't have a problem with that. but most cultures understand that animals are an important resource, and that people can't live well without them... even if they DO eat them. I'm not going to judge a man from Kenya who kills a rabbit to feed his children. my ancestors regulary went fishing for salmon. not gonna condemn them for that either.

I don't consider animal life to be equivalent to human life. most people don't. that's never going to change.

I'm going to disagree with Starter Set (again).

it's BECAUSE people are "enlightened beings" that we're capable of such awful things to begin with.
Fyodor Dostoevsky:

"People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it."

[wait, did Starter Set get banned?]