> I think we need to draw a line somewhere. Are plants not "resources to be exploited?" How about the bacteria in our gut?

No resource should ever be "exploited". For a clear cut example, take asteroid mining. Assuming we had the technology, there do not seem to be any obvious ethical concerns with mining asteroids beyond necessity, to our hearts' wildest content. Right?

Wrong. The most straightforward counterargument relies on noting that humans tend to be bad at planning for the future AND also tend to be bad at imagining how necessity requirements might scale up in the future. In other words, the asteroid belt at the moment may hold far more than enough mineral resources for our civilization at present, but there may come a future (perhaps some generations down) when there may be so many humans, that the asteroid belt may be too small a pool to even maintain basic necessities for everyone.

But there are better, perhaps less obvious counterarguments. Usually, the people "exploiting" the resources don't tend to be the ones doing the labour needed to harvest/refine the resource to a point where it is usable: instead, there tends to be a sub-group of people who usually only get to see a fraction of the benefit gained from that resource. I am not going to get into this, because it's a topic that has been discussed to death. Let's look at it instead from a different angle: assuming that everyone is participating in the harvesting/refinement of the resource equally---is it really the best use of our time to be continuously harvesting/refining the resource? We may also want to give everyone the chance to explore art, exercise, socialize, explore the world for the sake of exploring (e.g. doing science/mathematics for fun!)---you know, living a balanced lifestyle?

More importantly, limitations inspire creativity and innovation, while mindless use of abundant surpluses lead to epidemics of complacency. Instead of waiting for the environment to place hard limitations on us, and then dealing with them, we could also put soft limitations on ourselves, merely to help us think outside the box in terms of how we tackle problems. Note that I use "mindless" in the beginning of this paragraph on purpose: there are strong connections between this philosophy, and the more general philosophy of mindfulness, but I won't get into that right now.

Summarizing: we should never think in terms of "exploiting", but instead we should think in terms of "what do we need right now", and "how can we manage the resources we harvest so that we can benefit from them sustainably" (hint: recycling/reuse should be an integral part of whatever we design).

With this attitude, we move our attention to living beings that can be resources. We should ask the questions: do we really need to harvest this living being? Are there better ways of getting what we need? Once this being is harvested, how can we make sure to reduce wastage? Paying attention to these question also allows us to make hard decisions with some level of inner peace (e.g. think of how indigeneous people harvested animals for resources). It also puts us in a positive mindset for dealing with a situation where it turns out that a living being we harvested had far more sentience than we gave it credit for: we have contingency plans, and we rest easy knowing that we minimized damage.

> What about rats? Rats and house mice carry harmful diseases, and arguably, extermination is merely depriving these animals of their right to self-determination (to getting food and shelter, in your adobe.) Of course, they aren't mindful they are spreading illness and disease to you, but you're the more aware being who is in a power differential with them, and thus need to realize your responsibility in the interactions.

Pests usually come into being because we're either displacing their natural environments, or they have grown used to feeding off our waste. Thus, better waste management allows for control of pest-borne diseases, and urban planning which includes natural spaces within the fabric of the city allows "pests" some of their old habitat.

Exterminating pests tends to also have a domino effect on the ecological network they are a part of, with unforeseen consequences.

It is up to us to be creative about how we manage pests. Here's some inspiration: http://www.crowdedcities.com/ (crows being trained to pick up cigarette butt litter in cities, which they can exchange for food at special collectors/dispensers)

> We can keep going down this rabbit hole. Someone already suggested not killing lobsters. Do they have significantly larger brains than mice or rats? It sounds like the answer is no[0]. In fact, their brains are the size of grasshoppers'...which means if we help respect the sentience of lobsters we probably have to respect the sentience of insects in general.

I am sure there are people who suggest that we shouldn't be killing lobsters at all, but recent concerns regarding lobsters and crabs stems from the absolutely terrible living conditions these animals are made to endure after they are harvested (their pincers may be removed, so that they can be "stored" better, in highly crowded storage units, while alive). Furthermore, some "culinary techniques" also seem to require unnecessary suffering on the part of the animal (e.g. boiling lobsters alive).

Also, I think current science is pretty clear about the massive difference in sentience between something like a grasshopper, and something like a rat. Here's a youtube video for fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HY_1-wC0Fg

> I consider myself a socialist, but some people are taking the "exploitation" talk of Marx too far and applying it to animals who are not sentient. I can understand drawing a line at Orcas, Dolphins, may be some primates or elephants, etc. But not all animals are the same and to treat them as sentient beings requires a large ignorance of reality of differences between the species.

I am not a capital S socialist, and I have serious reservations about Marx (in particular, he is prone to making over-general statements taken as fact, since he believes he is taking a "scientific approach"). I think, I am simply a community-ist. I believe in the power of communities: human ones, animal ones, and human-animal-plant hybrid ones. All life is to be valued, and in particular, network interactions are to be respected for their power.