Killing
From Wikinfo
The act of killing an animal or plant life form can be said to have occurred when an outside force, usually another life form, has done something to cause it to die.
Religions often require special ways of killing animals for meat - kosher and halal are two such systems.
When a human being is killed by the action or fault of another human being, this event is called a homicide. In law this may be called murder (action) or criminal neglect (fault). This rarely happens in a war or other situations (like police guarding property) where the society values the system being protected more than the individual killed. This is very common in human societies which assign a very wide range of value of life to different humans at different times. To kill humans is not considered bad or wrong in all societies at all times: many that claim this is so using the Ten Commandments or other moral codes as their guide, also have engaged in war and apply a "death penalty" which is killing by the state. Sometimes they also oppose abortion, which they say is "killing an innocent" unborn human. This of course assumes they must know who is "guilty".
Killing of other intelligent animals that communicate with each other is considered as bad or almost as bad as killing humans by many people. Some people think it is worse to kill a Great Ape (like humans a hominid), since it has the same feelings and type of family life, and over 98% of the same DNA, and is not in any way a threat or rival to a human, so the normal excuses for killing other humans never apply. But European logging companies allow hunters to kill gorillas and bonobos for "bushmeat" to feed loggers. And George W. Bush thinks capturing such endangered species to sell as pets is fine, which often involves killing the mother to take the baby. So not everyone sees this as being so morally wrong.
For similar reasons, Great Whales were and are also very strongly protected from killing by many groups in the ecology movement, especially Greenpeace. But some nations, like Japan, keep finding excuses to continue killing whales, so this belief is also not universal.
It is quite hard to find a consensus on killing. Most ethicists say killing in self-defense is fine, but some religions like Buddhism say it is not. Almost every educated person says cannibalism (killing a human to eat it) or genocide (killing whole groups just because they are of that group and not one's own) are terrible, but when the United Nations talks about these things it usually debates stem cell and human clone research before it bothers to talk about 98%-human hominids being genocided and cannibalized in the African rainforest by European logging companies. So it is not clear that there is any real connection between what people say about killing and what they do about it. Perhaps they are afraid to do what they feel is right, in case they too are killed.
This would be the most common personal experience of killing - being afraid it will happen to you if you stand up too strongly against those who are doing it.
References
- Adapted from the Simple English Wikipedia article, "Killing" http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
