Friday, March 11, 2011
Unethical Treatment of Animals
Animals are living, breathing creatures, completely able to feel pain. The meat industry treats cows, pigs, chickens and other meat with no respect for their lives or well-being. I tried to watch a video clip of how animals were treated on farms and slaughter houses, but it was the worst video I have ever watched and I could not make it through the entire thing. I know the food need is an ever-growing demand with the increasing population, but something has to change. It should be illegal to keep animals in cramped places causing physical and mental illnesses. It should be illegal to make animals, who have as much feeling as the pets in your home, suffer through cruel punishment such as being beaten, chained down, abandoned without food or water for long periods of time. Skinning, burning and killing while fully conscious and terribly scared out of their minds should be outlawed as well. Something has to change and it needs to change fast. Animals have a right to live in open fresh air and walk around and enjoy their life without all of the torment.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree with your point, but be careful not to overstate your claim and thus lose credibility with your audience. Do ALL animals feel pain the same way? What about tiny little things with hardly a brain cell (insects, say)? One idea that comes up in philosophical accounts of moral standing is that beings have higher or lower degrees of moral standing in virtue of their higher and lower degrees of consciousness. This is an intuitively plausible idea to many people, but it does have some implications that need to be chased down. For example, if consciousness is the measure of moral worth, does a human in a vegetative state matter less, morally speaking, than a chimp?
ReplyDeleteI hope you will look for the book by the autistic woman who is internationally famous for designing human slaughterhouses. Fascinating stuff, not least because she claims the key to morally appropriate treatment of cows is thinking like a cow, which she further claims is a lot like thinking like an autistic person.