If anyone's given a choice between ending (or, inversely, saving) a random human's or dog's life and their first thought is "well, the person might be a child rapist Hitler" then they're pretty much broken as a person.
No one ever said that the automatic assumption was that the human was a child rapist Hitler, rather that without knowing the specifics, the human could be more worthy of being shot than the dog.
I didn't say the assumption was automatic either. I said that even stopping to consider that sort of thing when put in that situation is pretty messed up.
Wouldn't you say being forced to kill anything is pretty messed up? You seem to be thinking this is a free-voluntary decision, when it's not. Being forced to kill something, I'm gonna consider what it is I
have to kill. If, in the end, you killed a dog who saved a child from a burning building, and let a mass-murderer live, wouldn't you feel some guilt? I certainly would.
I also like the implication that dogs are inherently "nicer" than humans.
No one ever said that. I said some dogs are nicer than some humans; that is not nearly the same as saying all dogs are inherently nicer.
No wonders if the dog mauled a kid's face off or if he fucks with the house cat just because he's an asshole like that.
From my experience, most dogs are only assholes if their owner is an asshole, and makes em an asshole. Pit bulls are some of the friendliest, most loving dogs I've ever met, and they're supposed to be horrible face mauling assholes.
Funny how dogs get the benefit of the doubt of just being mean because of their upbringing, but it doesn't seem to come up when judging humanity.
Whomever said humans don't get the benefit of the doubt? I certainly didn't. I simply said that most of the time, asshole dogs have asshole owners. But considering YOU were the one to start denigrating dogs, and how they're not as empathetic, or kind, as you want them to be, I figured I would defend them. Not the same thing.
Really, I've got nothing against dogs or most other animals (my first post in the thread is pretty clear on where I stand on the issue). It's the constant undercurrent of "oh, humanity is so terrible we're all so fucked up (except me)" whenever discussion about undefined people comes up that pisses me off and made me take an extreme-ish stance. That and the idea that keeps coming up about how what humanity does to itself is so horrible compared to what happens with other animals. Some of nature's methods of murder and survival are far more horrifying than what we manage.
I think that's the point though, to show how humans and animals are not that different. Ya, there are life forms out there that are pretty fucked up, and do some pretty fucked up thing (for example, the wasp that turns cockroaches into zombies, to lay it's young in, so that they have a living animal to eat). But c'mon, humanity does
just as fucked of things, and it's not saying that humans are worse, it's saying that we're just as animal as all the animals we denigrate.