The bad science and worse policy noted in Mystified Obscurity resulting from constructivist insights which ignore reality is pervasive and seemingly growing worse. Looked at another way it isn't getting worse so much as failing to get better though old myths (creationism, etc. etc.) are refuted. Other myths take their places.

One of the more worrisome myths is that animals are in some way like humans and so should be treated like humans. This isn't possible in even a trivial sense but that doesn't prevent trivial policies from being pursued in the name of this myth.

Where animals were seen as "agricultural products", now they are seen as creatures with feelings. This has been accepted by the European Union, which has put a definition of sentience in its animal welfare legislation: "A sentient animal is one for whom feelings matter." In deciding that they are sentient and have feelings, science has blurred the line between "them" and "us" even more.

Why all the fuss? What's wrong with the way we interact with animals at the moment? Nothing, if you don't accept that animals have their own feelings and emotions, or accept it but still don't care. But if you do care, then you will realise that the moral relationship we have with animals is deeply troubled. It becomes impossible to maintain moral blindness to the way we treat them.

This isn't just another example of Euro-disease, it is a profound failure of intellect, ethics and aesthetics. The idea of basing the perquisites of life on anthropomorphic tenets is a coarsening of our more insightful and less morally blind past. Some life forms are more like humans but it makes no intellectual or moral sense to privilege them above other life. If we try to rank life forms to determine their treatment, then both science and common sense would rank bacteria far above humans. They are not only the dominant life forms on the planet they are the most essential. Continuing that ranking to include all life forms would place humans very, very low. It is a complete inversion to privilege anthropomorphic traits.

This isn't new, and there are arguments for accepting this MacLeodian "True Knowledge" approach that essentially dispenses with all the morality rubbish, but those who advocate anthropomorphic ranks don't even seem to realize that this is what they do.

There is some evidence that some societies are becoming more compassionate. This was only too apparent at an unusually high-profile Compassion in World Farming two-day conference held in London earlier this year, an event that could never have happened even a decade ago. In some of the richer countries, the demand for organic meat is increasing, as are the number of organic farms and the number of vegetarians and vegans. Through the work of welfare scientists such as Temple Grandin, the slaughterhouses of big corporations such as McDonald's now employ higher welfare standards (see "Practical passions”).

There is even a name for the scientific study of human-animal interactions: anthrozoology. The discipline has its own international society and journal called Anthrozoös. Its next conference is to be held in July.

Breakthroughs in the study of behaviour have helped recognise animal talents and skills as never before. Grandin has even described animal skills in terms of those of autistic savants.

Attributing human characteristics to animals is no longer automatic career death (see "Close encounters”) and some believe that by not attributing human characteristics to animals, we may miss something fundamental about both ourselves and them (see Frans de Waal on “Suspicious minds”).

There is nothing compassionate about vegetarianism. It's a type of moral blindness abetted by scientific ignorance that fails to grasp the consequences of agriculture for life on this planet. It seems that for them it's OK to steal the homes of myriad life forms and drive them to extinction so long as you don't eat them. Kill them, yes, but don't face them when you do it or admit what you have done. Out of sight, out of mind.

Until we learn to make our food from inorganic matter and contain our populations and planetary impacts we live by the death of others. That's life as it always has been. It is possible that it need not always be so, we could live in space habitats and synthesize our food from space rocks, or perhaps just upload ourselves into inorganic machines and cease to be human or even alive in any traditional sense. There are interesting implications and unknowns for the consequences of all these post-human possibilities. But pretending to be post-human, to be above the fray, is a continuation of the superstitious and unreasoning faith of the past. Worse, it's a degraded faith that suffers from lack of connection with natural reality. Being so completely ungrounded enables even greater disassociation from reality.

There is more hope for a higher intellectual, ethical and aesthetic relationship with our food in the views of traditional human societies that fully recognized and embraced the interdependence of all life forms. Everything and everyone is food. We are all in this together; you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game. Deal with it. What we can do is be sane and truly compassionate about the way we live, starting with simple gratitude for the gifts of other life forms in full knowledge that this is a debt that we will all repay one day.

There are implications for how we grow and prepare our food. The work of Temple Grandin, mentioned above, is an example of a more mindful relationship with food that reflects older wisdom. She has managed to communicate some of the old understandings to those who have ungrounded views due to their lives which are so completely disconnected from natural systems. She isn't unique. There is a large and growing backlash against industrial agricultural methods that reached their peak in the 20th century. It has nothing to do with organic fetishes, veganism or any other ungrounded belief system though. It is science based and informed by a more mature sense of ethics and aesthetics. Those of a more spiritual inclination sometimes grok that this was the basis of many indigenous belief systems of an animist sort. A scientist might understand them as being more ecologically aware and integrated. Their lives made it fairly easy to see relationships since they were immersed in reality rather than isolated.

We can do so as well by educating ourselves and reasoning clearly. The muddled nonsense of the sort discussed in the article is not helpful. It is worth seeking clarity on these issues precisely because we will one day choose to synthesize our food. The reasons will be economic; it will be cheaper in every sense to grow food in vats or assemble it directly from inorganic materials. Clarity about our actions will help keep us grounded and perhaps avoid some of the darker futures made possible by becoming less human. When there are fewer reality checks on our behavior it is useful to be more self regulating.