animals are friends, not food?

7/31/2019 Animals Are Friends, Not Food?

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Kristen Lopez

David Alfieri

Composition II

14 November 14, 2011

Animals Are Friends, Not Food?

When you are brought up in a society that tells you to treat everyone with fairness and

equality, where do you draw the line? Love your fellow man and "all men are equal are

common idioms we all throw around, but they are not necessarily ones that we live by. Are we

really respecting everyone and everything on this earth? We are supposed to treat one another how

we want to be treated, but when that level of respect and love is not extended to others, such as

animals or the environment, we are not treating everyone with fairness. Today, vegetarianism and

environmentalism are very big causes that have many supporters with good reason: everything

deserves to be treated with value. It is not right for us to take others for granted

Everyone has a different reason to become a vegetarian, whether they have a strong love

for animals, despise the cruelty the animals face or just simply do not enjoy eating meat. Most

vegetarians share a common cause; they do not want to see animals being mistreated. However, an

additional benefit to being a vegetarian that is unbeknownst to many is the positive effect it has on

the environment. Not all animals killed for food are actually consumed. When these dead animals

are buried and begin to decompose, the natural process called anaerobic decomposition forms

fossil fuels. These fuels consist of elements like carbon, coal, petroleum, and natural gas, and can

exist for up to 650 million years. They are not considered to be renewable resources due to the


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large amount of time they take to form, as they take millions of years to come to fruition. We go

through these resources faster than we can produce new ones, causing the production and

consumption of fossil fuels to become grounds for concern for the environment. The burning of

fossil fuels also creates carbon dioxide emissions, the primary cause of the greenhouse effect.

According to a webpage entitled Ten Reasons To Be A Vegetarian, the amount of fossil fuels

needed to produce a meat-centered diet rather than a meat-free diet is three times more. In the

United States alone, in an effort to produce more meat ready for consumption we have cleared 260

million acres of forest. We destroyed the natural habitats of animals, ruined tropical rainforests and

increased the possibility of certain species facing extinction. In what way is this showing love to

the animals or the environment? This is an incredibly selfish move on our part, for we use more

land than we can possibly ever need to in this country.

The greenhouse effect is another concern raised by vegetarians and scientists alike. When it

comes to the production of greenhouse gases, "The way you have to look at these things is over

time. So we're up over 20% over where we were in 1990, in our effort to cut greenhouse gases. So

we're not doing very well," says Jim Butler. While we need for the greenhouse effect to take place

in order to heat the Earths temperature to one that is habitable, the increase in greenhouse gases

emitted into the atmosphere continuously makes the earths climate warmer and warmer. Ever

since the Industrial Revolution took place in 1700 AD and factories began to pop up across the

land, the concentration of the major greenhouse gases in the air has increased. This was a total

disregard for the environment and began the true destruction and exploitation of our natural world.

Apart from the environmental benefits of vegetarianism, have you ever stopped to think

that like humans, animals feel pain too? In his article Against Meat, Jonathan Safran Foer, an on-

again-off-again vegetarian, delivers insight into his choice on not eating meat and offers an


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anecdote from his childhood. Upon thinking about the words of his babysitter and his father

flushing his dead fish down the toilet, he concluded that We dont hurt family members. We dont

hurt friends or strangers. We dont even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to

include farmed animals in that list didnt make them the exceptions to it. Dont you consider your

pet a part of your family? I know when I first read this article I made note that I had never thought

of it that way. You dont hurt your family members, you dont hurt your friends, or even strangers;

you are not supposed to hurt anyone. Of course we dont hurt or eat our pets, but what makes farm

animals any different? They still have a heart, they still have a brain, and they can still feel pain.

When you squeeze a dogs paw they bark incessantly, or when you step on a cats tail it meows

bloody murder. They obviously are able to feel pain. Why do we think it is okay to cause this

unnecessary pain to other poor animals then?

A very interesting observation is the fact that often times people are more sympathetic and

concerned with the well-being of an animal than with that of a human being. Admit it, when you

are sitting in the movie theater and you watched as people are killed left and right you are almost

numb to their deaths, but the minute there is potential harm to the dog running around the film you

casually freak out. For some reason, perhaps it is the innocence of the animals or the lack of self-

defense they have, we are more concerned with the animals. However when it comes time to eating

them, do we still have that same level of concern? How about when you think about the fact that

not all animals are even dead by the time they are cooked? Some are still alive when they go into

the pot or the oven. Conveniently, A detail so obvious that most recipes dont even bother to

mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle. This is part of

lobsters modern appeal: Its the freshest food there is. (Wallace) Just imagine being trapped in a

hot shower that just gets hotter and hotter and your only escape from the pain and torture is death.


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That is what these innocent lobsters go through. I guess because some people figure lobsters arent

fuzzy, warm, and huggable pets they dont care as much about them. This prompts the author to

bring forward another question: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory

pleasure? Is it really alright for us to harm animals just for our selfish reasons?

Large numbers of people do not even consider the pain and torment an animal went

through in order for it to be on their dinner plates. Many times people are quick to just waste food

and throw it away with the mindset that there are plenty of more chickens, pigs, or cows out there

in the world. While it is true that there are an abundance of animals on this earth, why do we feel

that we have the right to make them our food? Pretty much everyone has the basic knowledge that

animals are treated poorly in order for us to eat them. However, if everyone actually saw the

horrible conditions poor pigs are put through in order to become the bacon in your breakfast

burrito or the ham in your lunch sandwich, perhaps the number of people willing to still consume

meat would diminish greatly. It is far easier to empathize with a cause when you can see the facts

rather than just hearing.

We live in a world today where we tell young children that we must respect one another if

we expect to be treated well ourselves but we do not actually practice this golden rule. The respect

should extend farther than from human to human; we should respect everything. If we want to use

the earths minerals and resources, how can we destroy the land with no intentions of trying to

rebuild it? We will run out of viable land faster than we can blink an eye.

animals are friends, not food?

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