"So, then, how much suffering and death of nonhuman life would we be willing to countenance to save Shakespeare, our sciences and so forth?"

"Unless we believe there is such a profound moral gap between the status of human and nonhuman animals, whatever reasonable answer we come up with will be well surpassed by the harm and suffering we inflict upon animals. There is just too much torment wreaked upon too many animals and too certain a prospect that this is going to continue and probably increase; it would overwhelm anything we might place on the other side of the ledger.... One might ask here whether, given this view, it would also be a good thing for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering. Although I do not have a final answer to this question, we should recognize that the case of future humans is very different from the case of currently existing humans. To demand of currently existing humans that they should end their lives would introduce significant suffering among those who have much to lose by dying...."

Writes philosophy professor Todd May in "Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?/Our species possesses inherent value, but we are devastating the earth and causing unimaginable animal suffering" in a NYT op-ed.

I know he's just playing with ideas and going to one of those "Modest Proposal" extremes, so I just want to call him out on one thing: Animals are cruel to each other. I'm willing to concede that humans are the worst and that our kind of cruelty is different because we can understand what we are doing and because we use our powers to amplify and extend cruelty. But without us, what would the other animals do to each other? There would be no humans around to perceive and bemoan it as cruelty, but it's already the case that the animals don't know we're feeling compassion for them.