Humane....or not?

"Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience." (Wallace, p. 251)

After our class discussion about the types of humane ways to "prepare" lobsters, their general reactions to being boiled alive and the way we feel we should go about killing the rest of our food, I felt that the question became more of a, "Should we kill?" No matter how many different ways we look at it, killing a lobster is simply that - killing. There is no way to get around this fact, which brings up the question, "Is it humane to kill?"

As a rule of thumb, killing is not accepted in our society. If we kill one another, we earn ourselves a life sentence in prison. So the question comes down to whether animals are also treated as we treat ourselves. If we go by the definition of humane, we find this - "merciful, kind, kindhearted, tender, compassionate, gentle, sympathetic." While I believe having these virtues is an essential component of a human nature, I find that having only those qualities might pose a little difficult to sustain in life. We may try and treat animals in this fashion, but do they show us the same when they have the opportunity or the drive to hunt us? I wonder, did a mountain lion ever ponder whether he would show compassion and kindness to the jogger it stalked for six weeks? I think our higher cognitive levels and intellect give us an advantage over these creatures; however, I do not think we are obligated to override our natural design to kill when we need to eat. We were not created to purely eat grains and vegetables. Would we have been designed with such intellect and capacity if we were merely suppose to be berry-collectors and grazers? I am going to make a outrageous claim and propose that we train and place our morals on fellow carnivores (such as the dog) because they are intelligent and they can outwit us. They are capable of hunting us if they so choose (though we have greatly domesticated them and eliminated/moved most of their wild cousins through our development of the land). If we truly treated animals in a "humane" way, would we be so inclined to domesticate them? Would we still consider ourselves intelligent if we stopped killing (that is, stopped "preparing" what in my mind is meant to be killed) and allowed for ourselves to become lower on the food chain? How would that affect the rest of the animal populations and our anatomical systems?