My only rationale for why it's OK for me to eat pigs is that the pigs would definitely eat me if the opportunity arose, and in this respect they are different from say, cows, or indeed octopuses, which show no inclination to consume human meat.
If you (as sometimes happens to farmers) drop dead in a pig sty after not long the pigs will eat you because you're food and they're hungry.
This argument has appeared multiple times in this thread, and I'm genuinely curious: if pigs' behavior demonstrates to you that their status is low enough to warrant their treatment, why does adopting that behavior seem like a reasonable reaction? Or would you find a pig killing and eating a human to be a morally neutral incident that, while maybe not preferable, has no ultimate weight to consider?
Not low enough, high enough, the pigs, are much closer to me than to say a tree. Of course a pig killing and eating a human is morally neutral, I'd put it in the same bucket as a human falling off a step ladder, I have no reason to believe that the pig thinks humans are moral actors it should consider in a system of ethics.
If you (as sometimes happens to farmers) drop dead in a pig sty after not long the pigs will eat you because you're food and they're hungry.