If you assume that people arguing against you are doing so out of cultural bias then I can see how it would look like I was arguing with you out of cultural bias.
There are people in the world who find it normal to eat horses and dogs, I don’t think they are any more cruel for doing so than people who eat cows or sheep.
But “Why the hell did you keep a sick dog in your car all day for the purpose of feeding it to a turtle in front of a a bunch of kids?” doesn’t get answered by, “You know, in other parts of the world people don’t have the same attachment to dogs as we do in this country.”
If it was purely utilitarian then why wait for until the students were there? If the point was that the turtle needed to eat then how do you explain that he first tried to feed it to a python and then fed it to the turtle when the python wasn’t hungry? The point of the act was to make sure that highschool kids bore witness to a puppy being eaten.
If you decide to slaughter a cow in front of a Hindu crowd you aren’t just harvesting meat in a utilitarian way, you are going on the offensive against their cultural values. I don’t say that because I believe in Hindu cultural superiority. Shock for the purpose of shock is childish bullshit.
And when you sacrifice an animal for the purpose of shock or to make a point, you may be transforming an act of feeding into one of cruelty.
I actually take @benfranks’s point that this may have been different in a small farm town than in the big city I’m used to. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions about what was in the teacher’s head or how it was read by the students. There are cultural differences not just western vs. eastern, they are all over the place.
But the idea that we can try to judge people’s actions without reference to the culture they exist within is attempting to substitute oversimplified categories for reality. It matters that Americans care more about dogs than about mice when understanding what happened.
(I’ll admit that bringing up how many pounds the fact that Americans value dogs might weight was facetious.)
This all makes me think a bit about a scientist who was known to manually sexually stimulate a dolphin she was training when it was aroused. The dolphin just couldn’t focus when it was horny. I honestly, truly believe she was just doing what made sense in a totally utilitarian way. But if she started sliding it into every conversation she could in the lunch room, I’d start to re-evaluate my idea of her motivations.
