The demand for renunciation of killing animals. An ethical challange

The demand for renunciation of killing animals has already been discussed b y mankind since ancient times. Many arguments for and against this demand h ave accumulated in the meantime. The reproaches of the vegetarians repeated ly forced the ones who eat meat to justify their diet. Today most of these historical justifications however have to be rejected because of lacking pl ausibility. Many of the vegetarian arguments on the other hand must be reje cted for similar reasons as well. Remaining as morally convincing is the de mand for doing the killing absolutely painless and without frightening the animals, which was already formulated for example by Kant and Schopenhauer. Argumentations which consider this way of killing as still immoral belong in a broad sense to the "anthropocentric" animal ethics. They do not belong to what is called in Germany "pathocentric" animal ethics, because an anim al that is killed without being frightened or tortured, has not suffered, f or it hasn't consciously realized anything like danger or harm. We do even argue that these animals are not harmed at all, because it seems senseless to talk about harm without negative conscious phenomena. To push ahead a ba n on animal slaughter for moral reasons could be itself morally wrong becau se it would disturb indirectly many people's conscious well-being without b eing justified by protecting an animal's conscious well-being. It is howeve r possible to derive from a general duty not to make animals suffer (pathoc entric animal ethics) a duty to boycott food of animal origin if these anim als had to suffer during their lifes.