Yeah. It is wildly inconsistent. But compartmentalization is key to living with a clean conscience. When I eat a steak I do not sit and think about cows grazing on the range, or cows crammed in pens awaiting slaughter, or the actual slaughtering of cows. I enjoy the food. To do anything but is like eating while you take a crap, or thinking about paying bills while you have sex. All are part of life, all are incompatible and should be mentally separated. Honesty is not the issue. Everything gets its time. And if things like that become too bethersome, there is always vegetarianism or Veganism for those who lack the intellectual flexibility and wherewithal to deal with life and death.
Using animals for entertainment can be good or bad. Most mammals like being around humans as long as we treat them well. They lead much better lives kept by us than they would in the wild. By better I mean comfortable and stimulating. Think of your dog sleeping in the bitter cold and snow, not having eaten in a week, and getting his ass kicked by a bigger stronger dog, after having lost a fight for food to a bear. Then picture him sleeping in his spot in the house, a few steps from his food, which he probably doesn't want because he's full of the table scraps he got after dinner, just before the Milk Bone and head massage. Yeah. I think they like it.
And not only that... mammals enjoy interacting with humans, to varying degrees of course. Not all animals are as predictable as dogs, like cats. Most animal performances are simply an example of humans triggering the instincts of the animal in a controlled way. This is especially true of cats. The problem with cats is that they are not social animals (except lions) and depend much less on approval as a reward. I feel terrible for Roy. He obviously loves tigers more than they love him. But even his partner readily acknowledges that the tiger cannot be blamed. Roy lost controll and the tiger was triggered into a behavior which hurt him. He always knew this was a risk.
The only time using animals for entertainment is bad is when the animals are abused. We use different standards for what constitutes good treatment of an animal and it varies with different animals. There is no point in detailing them here. Abusing animals is unconscionable and barbarous. When humans take the responsibilty and burden for another animal I believe we are obliged to treat that animal as well as we would treat ourselves, qualitatively and relatively. If we don't want to do this we should leave them where we found them. Beasts of burden, animals born in captivity, and other types of working animals are no exception to this, nor are food animals.
