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.