Most people don’t use critical reasoning to make their decisions, hence why most people live their lives in a state of constant contradictions.

My old philosophy professor once told us that the most effective way to expose somebody’s lack of critical reasoning about an issue is to just respond with, “who says?”

Basically the Socratic method, ask them to justify the statements they make, and see how they respond. The vast majority of the time, you’ll quickly find out that they don’t have any good reasons to support their statements. They haven’t given them much thought at all, nor much thought to differing views/positions. They live their lives in ways that feel generally “correct” or pleasurable to them, and that’s it.

Why do they think it’s alright to eat factory farmed meat? Because they like the taste, the thought of billions of animals living short, miserable lives, then being slaughtered and processed for us to consume doesn’t horrify or disgust them, so they keep doing it.

Most people when challenged on it will put up some vague attempt to support their actions, “Other animals do it to each other, so why not us?” “Animals don’t have sophisticated minds, so it doesn’t actually cause them real suffering.” “Humans need animal protein to be healthy.” etc. All terribly weak arguments that are easily refuted. But most people don’t care, because most societies normalize meat consumption and factory farming. They grew up eating meat with other people eating meat all around them, and they never gave it any thought.

Hence why most pet owners who eat meat would be absolutely horrified and disgusted if their dog or cat had a litter and somebody bought all of the puppies/kittens, only to torture, slaughter, and eat them. A completely inconsistent reaction given the fact that the pet owner happily eats other animals that are treated in the same way. But again, they didn’t reason themselves into their viewpoint, so they don’t worry about being consistent.

This is further confirmed by anecdotes from vegetarians/vegans, who will tell you about all the awkward, unprompted reactions from meat-eaters when they find out they don’t eat meat. Many people get very defensive, often making snide or accusatory remarks about vegetarianism/veganism. They don’t like the idea that eating factory meat is morally wrong, because they like the taste and don’t want to make to effort to change their lifestyle to confirm with that moral principle. So they mock, tease, or try to “expose” inconsistencies in the vegetarian/vegan’s own worldview as a defense mechanism.

If they can make the vegetarian/vegan look foolish, then that feels like a win psychologically to them, which provides mental and emotional comfort and allows them to slip back into their lifestyle without needing to confront their own moral failings.

Because they benefit from eating animals (they enjoy eating them) whereas they don’t benefit from having sex with animals (they don’t enjoy having sex with animals).

If you need for survival to hunt and eat an animal you are just part of the ecosystem, a predator.
Do you need to have sex with another species? In the wild it happens and even rape is natural, but the question could be “would you like to live in a human society like that?”.

That said, animal farming is unethical and completely unnecessary nowadays. Most people would agree that killing an animal just for pleasure would be ethically wrong, but then we as a society rape to breed, grow in terrible conditions and kill in nightmarish ways farm animals just because “meat is good”.

This is exactly why many indigenous cultures put an emphasis on thanking the animal for their meat.

There is no logical consistency except what allows the continued survival and flourishing of life and the human race.

Having sex with animals could get you sick and cause all sorts of problems. Eating animals on the other hand can extend your life beyond a few days and perhaps even into years after you can no longer drink your mother’s milk and has very few downsides, especially with the invention of cooking. Sure, we don’t need the source of sustenance that is meat today when we have several times more food than is necessary to feed the whole globe and then throw a lot of it away, but this wasn’t true for the vast majority of our history. People only a few hundred years ago had to scrape for every protein they could find.

There’s no special moral reason because we didn’t decide. It’s just an instinct, though one that we can examine and ignore if we want.

A number of US states agree with op here, some it’s legal to have sex with animals within limits, anything over 20 pounds rings a bell for one, alabama maybe. They might have changed those laws because they were getting made fun of idk.

Everybody’s gotta eat, but not everyone’s gotta fuck a dog

While klling an animal for food is sure destructive for the animal, it is constructive for the humanity. It allows us to get all those proteins “for free” instead of producing them ourselves from plants like herbivores do and invest the saved energy in our intelligence to create beautiful and complex things. Whereas copulating with an animal is pure destruction. It harms the living being and leads to no babies and no emotional bond strengthening (contrary to human sex).

Eating animal is still a contradiction, because destruction is there. So I think this problem does need to be somehow overcome. But at least it’s outweighed by its positive effects, unlike zoophilia.

It’s simple, actually.

The number of people who like to eat animals is larger than the number people who like to, that.

The animal isn’t aware of being dead.

People raping and killing for their own enjoyment is sick. Someone else doing the dirty work for our enjoyment (i.e. eating meat), well that’s different. If somehow zoophilia were proven to enhance meat flavor, we’d probably be OK with it

In a perfect utopian society I would hope we wouldn’t be doing either.

False premise. Zoophilia isn’t condemned because animal rights etc. It’s condemned because ‘ew WTF we don’t want people doing that, to the extent that we will make laws against it.’

It’s the same reason that we have laws against incest. Had laws against homosexuality.

I’m not saying it should be allowed because we (some of us) grew up and realised that laws against homosexuality were stupid. Just that, that is the reason. Collective societal disgust. It’s only justified by using animal rights (and rightly so, because EW) the same way we justified antihomo laws because it goes against some obscure biblical / Koranic rule.

But zoophilia is not about consent at all!

Scientists use dummy ostriches to collect sperm. Ostriches approach and… use the dummies, by their own volition.

If there was a human in there, it wouldn’t be very different from the perspective of the real ostrich. So it’d be technically possible to consensually bottom an ostrich.

But why the fuck would you do it?

This is what people actually despise about bestiality. It’s a gut feeling, before any rationalisation

Edit: you could very much argue that the ostrich dummy method is still non-consensual as it involves some form of trickery. But, regardless, I think it’s telling that people would treat it differently depending on whether there was a human in it or not, even though from the animal’s perspective there is no difference.

HIV exists because someone had intercourse with a chimpanzee so that might be a part of it.