For example in Peter Singer's book The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty, Singer says, "In the past 20 years alone, it [the human killing of animals for food] adds up to more death than were caused by all the civil and international wars and government repression of the entire twentieth century, the century of Hitler and Stalin." Singer then asks that if this number of deaths was caused to humans "how much would we give to prevent those horrors?" However, he then contrasts that thought by asking "yet how little are we doing to prevent today's even larger toll and all the misery that it involves?" Similarly, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham advocates for animal rights by comparing slavery to current animal conditions. He writes if the blackness of skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned to torment, then it may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. Like human rights, animal rights constitute various liberties that many people claim are violated in today's society
Factory farming is a form of intense agriculture to get as much food and profits for the smallest amount of resources. Often, this results in a large number of animals in a very small space. (CAFO= concentrated animal feeding operations). This is not only inhumane but not to mention unsanitary. These animals are bred to grow quickly and as big as possible. Some animals grow 3 times faster than if they were just left alone, and according to PetPedia, 50 billion animals are produced each year, with 99% of all animals being made at factory farms (https://petpedia.co/factory-farming-statistics/).
Factory farming not only puts animals but also the environment in unsustainable conditions. For example, chickens are often debeaked due to a lack of space in chicken coops. This is the process of clipping their beaks with a hot blade to a shorter length so that when they are in these coops they do not cause injury to other chickens, cause death to others, or resort to cannibalism. According to PetPedia, modern chickens have had a 220% increase in body fat compared to chickens from the 1950s. This occasionally happens to Broiler chickens -- chickens grown just for their meat. This added bodyweight is unnatural and some chickens cannot sustain their own bodyweight causing their legs to collapse. Therefore, they are often unable to reach food or water and often die early. To give you an idea of this abnormal production rate, there were about 7.61 billion chickens produced from January 2020 to October 2020 -- about the size of the human population in NINE months (the time it takes to make a human baby).
However, because the human population is rapidly growing, factory farms seemingly have no other options if they want to sustain the growing human population. According to a World Population Clock, the human population grows about 1.05% each year. While this number might seem insignificant in your statistics classes, when paired with the global population of about 8 billion, 1.05% becomes a number in the tens of millions. Also, as bad as they may be, factory farms provide millions of jobs and incomes to families that may be living differently without that source of income.
So what's an alternative for factory farming?
According to HuffPost, the best alternative is called “clean meat”. This is meat grown from animal cells and is produced in a lab without any need for factory farms. It isn't some science-produced meat-like substance, it IS meat (https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/clean-meat-sustainable_a_23642976).
- Buy alternative products and get locally sourced meats/dairy.
Despite all the shocking facts, being vegan is hard. Who would willingly give up meat and dairy -- especially cheese. As a Coptic Orthodox Christian, we religiously fast multiple times a year. While we fast, we must abstain from all meat and dairy -- becoming vegan. Is this where grit comes in? If something is hard but morally the right thing to do, should we continue? Peter Singer would say yes.
In Singer's book, Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement, he says, "Equality is a moral idea,'' and ''not an assertion of fact.'' In today's society, it's proper that everyone's interests receive equal consideration, despite ''what abilities they may possess.'' However, Michael Pollan agrees in his New York Times article saying, "Fair enough; many philosophers have gone this far. But fewer have taken the next logical step." He then quotes Singer's book in which he raised the question,'If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?'' Pollan writes a very interesting article, which Dr. Oliver recommended to me, where he finds himself reading Singer's Animal Liberation while "dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the idea." Here's the link to his informative article (https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/an-animal-s-place.html). Don't worry though it's not a bunch of boring information -- he lightens it with a comical-like tone here and there.
I want to end with one more quote from the aforementioned book by Singer. “If you are paying for something to drink when safe drinking water comes out of the tap, you have money to spend on things you don’t really need. Around the world, a billion people struggle to live each day on less than you paid for that drink.” This quote got me thinking. Something as simple as purified water could be the reason somebody sleeps without food?
Sources used:
Final Tally
Counted 26 classes, average about 2 bases per class (attendance and discussion question responses)
Nice draft, Andrew. Be sure to add a few links.
ReplyDeleteYou might also be interested in checking out Michael Pollan's account of his meeting with Singer, originally in a feature article in the Times and then in his book Omnivore's Dilemma.
"The first time I opened Peter Singer's ''Animal Liberation,'' I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the idea. Preposterous as it might seem, to supporters of animal rights, what I was doing was tantamount to reading ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' on a plantation in the Deep South in 1852.
Singer and the swelling ranks of his followers ask us to imagine a future in which people will look back on my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics of an equally backward age. Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals, killing animals for sport: all these practices, so resolutely normal to us, will be seen as the barbarities they are, and we will come to view ''speciesism'' -- a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes -- as a form of discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism.
Even in 1975, when ''Animal Liberation'' was first published, Singer, an Australian philosopher now teaching at Princeton, was confident that he had the wind of history at his back. The recent civil rights past was prologue, as one liberation movement followed on the heels of another. Slowly but surely, the white man's circle of moral consideration was expanded to admit first blacks, then women, then homosexuals. In each case, a group once thought to be so different from the prevailing ''we'' as to be undeserving of civil rights was, after a struggle, admitted to the club. Now it was animals' turn.
That animal liberation is the logical next step in the forward march of moral progress is no longer the fringe idea it was back in 1975. A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals..." https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/an-animal-s-place.html