Kind of a weird question IMO. I don't even think animal lives are worth the same as animal lives. Is a single deer's life the same as a single ant's life?
I consider myself to be kind and thoughtful towards people and animals -- I'll save snails or worms that I find while gardening, but I also will kill mosquitos that are inside my house, and move spiders outside where they will potentially die.
This isn't even getting into "special" animals like pets
Yeah, I'd like to see the results from the question : I have a gun pointed at your long time childhood friend and one pointed at this cow, now is this cow's life worth the same as your friends life?
I have a gun pointed at your dog and another pointed at a guy that's going around eating people's pets...
You are mixing the rational component of the question in general with the emotional attachments of particular situations. This kind of "I know it in my heart" drive is the same that drives things like racism and xenophobia.
A better comparison would be if the human in question was a random dude you pulled off the streets. If this was a cow that I grew up with and shared a bond with, then yeah, I'd obviously pick the cow over some dude I don't know. If it's a childhood friend versus a random cow I don't know? Same thing but in reverse.
True. But I would never answer a survey based on my presumed understanding of the surveyors intentions. I would always answer exactly on the wording in the question.
If you answer on what you think the question means, and not as it is written, you throw a lot of noise into the statistics.
Interesting (or, perhaps, expected) that the more progressive/left leaning demographics correlate with a higher proportion valuing human and animal life equally. Sort of makes sense and I'm glad to see it.
delusion at it's finest, humans are supposedly the smartest beings on this planet and yet this proportion of them are wasting their heads worrying about their former burgers' life, if the animals were meant to be worth as much as us, they would have developed metalworking by now