Professor Andrews
English 28
20 January, 2014
The Animals We Eat Are our eating habits causing the suffering of many animals? Many people in today’s society love to eat bacon, steak, and even chicken. Some people can’t even go a day without eating meat. Animals who are raised in farm factories suffer with being abused physically and mentally. Farm factories are a bleak place where animals are raised in a prison like compound which restrict their movements. Most of these animals happen to be chickens, pigs and cattle’s. These animals are also pumped with unhealthy hormones, and even eat their own species. These animals are just raised for humans to eat when the animal is according to factory farm standards ready to distribute. Although, we as Americans have adapted to a carnivorous eating lifestyle, it is immoral to eat meat. To begin, it is immoral to eat meat due to the fact that animals are physically abused. Chickens are kept in small cages where they cannot even move or spread their wings out. Chick beaks are lazored off or debeaked so they won’t pick each other to death due to stress. Chickens end up becoming fragile and suffer broken bones as they are removed from cages. Even baby male chicks that are of no economic value are incinerated in a machine and killed instantly. According to a video I watched, pigs are often hit with metal rods. Baby piglets that are not healthy enough are slammed to the ground, a practice farmers do to instantly kill baby piglets. Their tails, testicles and ovaries are also cut off without any anesthesia. As for cattle, workers usually kick, ram with blades of a forklift, apply painful electric shocks, and even torture them with a hose. Water attempts to force sick or injured animals to walk (humanesociety.org). According to Michael Pollan, in the book “An Animals Place”, he mentions, “The measure of their suffering is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts” (209). These animals are kept locked up away from doing what they want to do. Some of these farm animals never get a chance to see the day of light. Chickens may want to run around, stretch, and even groom themselves. Pigs usually like to sleep, and roll around in the mud all day. Cows like to have space to move around, eat grass or hay all day long. Pollan mentions, “Singer replies that “animals feel a need to exercise, stretch their limbs or wings, groom themselves and turn around whether or not they have ever lived in conditions that permits this” (209). These animals suffer daily right underneath our noses. I myself have decided to quit eating red meat but still struggle with eggs and chicken. It is hard to let go of eggs and chicken because I use them in everything I cook with. After watching some footage of animals being abused I became extremely heartbroken. I could not believe the cruelty that is allowed in factory farms. Animals feel pain just as much as humans do. People have to really take a decision whether the animals we are eating have really gone through a lifetime amount of suffering; therefore, it is wrong to eat meat. It is immoral to eat meat for a fact that, animals are pumped with unhealthy hormones. Pollan says, “Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers 10 days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormone- and antibiotic- fortified feed” (213). Piglets don’t even have a chance to be naturally fed by their mothers from birth. Piglets are stuck in a cramped crate feeding off a hormone that makes them grow bigger and fatter than a normal pig. Cows produce milk for the same reason humans do and that is to care for their young. Calves after one day old are taken away from their mothers and fed with milk replacers. The milk replacers happen to have cattle blood so that their mother’s milk may be sold to humans. Antibiotics and hormones are used to cause each cow to produce