Would you kill the puppy?

I spent last weekend at a friend’s place. There was beer, pizza, bacon… that's the complete list of items you need for a good time. Everything was just sOOper (except that one of the dogs took a shine to me and kept jumping into my lap. This was all well and good until he decided, while still sitting on me, that he was going to ‘service’ himself. Needless to say I felt quite violated. I’d wrongly assumed I meant more to him than that).

Now, the friends I was with, we’re the kind of people who like to argue. Even if we don’t care about the subject, we’ll dig our heels in and argue anyway purely for the sake of pissing off the other person. But when we ran out of real life issues to discuss, we moved on to the hypothetical, the standout amongst which being: ‘If boiling a puppy alive and drinking the broth would cure cancer, would you kill the puppy?’

First up, a few things had to be straightened out:
1. How many people can you save per puppy? (one)
2. How old is the puppy? (8 weeks)
3. What kind of quality of life did the puppy have? (bred in poor conditions purely for this purpose)
4. What happens to the puppy if you don’t kill it? (sent to a third world country to be used for food)
5. Finally, and most importantly, is it a cute puppy? (no)

The worrying part is that I answered a little too quickly, ‘Of course I’d kill the puppy.’ It concerns me that my automatic response was ‘Kill them. KILL THEM AAAALL!!!’ No. I’m not pro-puppy murder. But I was forced to admit that I value the life of a human being more than that of an animal. If it was someone I cared about or a helpless puppy, I’d kill the freakin puppy.

I’m not a bad person. I’m pretty much a vegetarian except for when it comes to the delicious animals. Cows are ruining the environment with their gassy-ness, so it only makes sense that we should turn them into hamburger patties. And as for chickens and pigs? Well, if we weren’t supposed to eat them, they wouldn’t be so tasty. Every other animal has my permission to live. Except ducks. They’re pretty tasty, too. And turkeys. Birds in general, I guess. Kill all the birds.