Animal cruelty

right or wrong in what sense?

and why?

Well I am doing an assignment for philosophy and I an doing the question is animal cruelty right or wrong and in what cases can it be right and wrong

Cruelty, to anyone or anything, under any circumstances, is never justifiable. Right or wrong are ambiguous terms with meanings that differ from one society to the next. That can be a problem when it comes to finding good answers.
You will probably also need to define 'cruelty'. Where does disciplining a pet become cruelty towards that pet? Perhaps when it comes to the point where the animal does not understand why it is being punished? I don't have many answers, just questions...
Is mass slaughtering cattle for meat production cruelty towards cattle?
We tend to say that it isn't, on the basis that the animals don't understand what will happen to them. But anyone who's been within a mile of a slaughterhouse can smell the blood and death, and only a blind fool will think that the animals can't.

Well I can say it is cruel

Nature involves the killing for food or territory as a normal and necessary phenomenon. Cruelty is the creation of unnecessary pain in the production of food.

I do not advocate cruelty, and i deplore it. However, i see no one here providing a plausible rationale against cruelty, never mind a reasonable definition. By the way, there are predators in nature who will "play with" a prey animal which is not yet dead. Watch a cat with a mouse or a bird sometime.

That is true. Sometimes they will begin eating an animal before it is dead. Tigers and lions and other large cats let their young play with their prey as a method of teaching them to hunt.

That is what WE consider cruelty. I wonder if endorphins enable zebras or birds to die with relatively little pain. I hope so

I'd think the shock would block out the pain. Usually when you are in shock you really do not feel anything. I've heard people talk about shark attacks and how they don't feel pain.

Although you might not feel pain - I'd imagine it would still be terrifying having something gnawing at your body.

I certainly would be terrified, pain or no pain. But I don't think zebras would be so inclined. I don't know, of course.
But thanks for your suggestion abut shock.

I think adrenaline handles the pain. You don't feel paiun when the adrenaline runs through you and you are focused on getting through the moment.

That is also very true.

Are we talking about humans being cruel to animals? Or are we talking about the way animals behave in the wild? Obviously we have no control over the way animals behave in the wild, but it does bring up some interesting questions. I don’t think we should be looking to wild animals to see how to behave. We certainly shouldn’t think if they behave in a certain way then it’s ok for us to behave that way. Clearly they function in a very different way to us and there is a reason they behave the way they do. The way they catch and kill their prey is how they are designed.
We are designed to function in a completely different way.
I don’t agree with animal cruelty at all under any circumstances. I can’t understand why anyone would want to hurt a poor defenceless animal. Only a coward would do this. I understand completely that animals need to be killed for food and many people rely on this as a business, their livelihood. Even in these circumstances there must be a humane way of killing animals. When we become a society that accepts cruelty to animals, things have gone very wrong.

See now, this might be nothing more than human arrogance. There is absolutely nothing humans do that is unique to our species. The differences are of degrees, not in "how we are designed to function". We have a rather advanced ability to think systematically, but there are animals with the same skill. It's only less evolved.
Anyone who has ever had a pet knows that animals have emotions. Anyone who is inclined to disagree are either ignorant or arrogant.

The worst cruelty against animals comes from those people who see animals as something less than living. Those who think that they are not really sentient, so it doesn't matter if you pull the skin off and leave the animal to die slowly.
So it is cruelty out of ignorance. What scares me is the will to guard this ignorance, so that we can keep up the profit... Shameful, if you ask me.

It does seem that we guard such ignorance in order to preserve it. I know I do. I am mostly vegetarian (when it comes to red meat), but I consume fish and chicken like a monster. My excuse is that they are already dead (and killed by someone else) when I bought them.

I'm one of the English ex-vegetarians! My main reason for becoming vegetarian was my love of animals, and the gut feeling that I was doing something wrong by eating the flesh of an animal. For health reasons, I started eating meat again for about a year, but recent videos of animals in abattoirs has once again made me turn to eating only fish and some chicken.

I won't tell ya about chickens, then. We kept chickens and geese when i was a kid, but got rid of the geese, because they're too noisy. We also ate a lot of fish, but it wasn't ocean fish. It was fish we went out and caught ourselves.

I buy only organic chicken, free range or deep litter, in the hope that the poor creatures are treated as well as possible - but I still feel bad about eating their flesh. I even worry about fish - they say they are cold-blooded, but .... ?

Well, it's the standard of what constitutes "free range" that's the problem. But i won't make it any more difficult for you. Fish are among the stupidest animals on the face of earth which are big enough to eat. The only possible exception are doves. If you hunt doves (dove hunters are right down there with fish and doves), and you see 12 of them sitting on a fence, you can shoot about nine or ten of them before any of them notice that something might be wrong.