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Nathan Patel Zack Bean English 1304 1 April 2010 Humans Ethical Duty to Kill Animals While attending high school, I was given the enlightening opportunity to watch a documentary highlighting the evils of poultry farming. The movie I was made to watch showed a variety of gruesome images including chickens running after being beheaded and massive rooms of cages filled with chickens too close to each other to move. I, like most others in the class that watched the movie with me, was deeply disturbed. Many of my classmates could not eat a McDonalds chicken nugget or Hot n Spicy for weeks. I, however deeply moved by the film, still did not want to give up these foods. Acting as as the voice of reason to my peers, I had to remind them them that McDonalds foods contained very little actual meat anyways. There are tens, maybe hundreds, of similar videos that are played in high schools all around the country, and the sheer number of these videos illustrates just how wide-spread these poultry-farming practices are. It is not uncommon for these videos, which if not seen at compulsory high school can be found amply on the internet, to influence people to abstain from using animal products. While some dont follow through in the long run, there are many people who last years or even the rest of their life abstaining from animal products. However cruel the raising, killing, and consuming of animals may seem to some people, there are many pitfalls to the logic of abstaining from animal products. On top of the fact that people who use animal products clearly love animals

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more than people who abstain from them (How does someone who intentionally separates themselves from animals love them more than someone who admires animals so much that they want meat in their stomach and leather on their back?), there are many regards in which it is extremely more ethical to raise animals and kill them rather than let them be free. The most commonly unnoticed fact about animal raising is that when animals is being raised for a product, these animals, despite their sometimes harsh living conditions, must be kept somewhat healthy in order to be useful later. A cow with no muscle couldnt make a decent burger or steak. Should its skin be damaged, its hide wouldnt make a great jacket. The same principles apply to any animal from which someone intends to make products including chickens, ostriches, alligators, goats, sheeps, etc. Theres no telling how many of these animals would lead unhealthy lives if it were not for the fact that they were raised on a farm with the intention of being killed. On top of looking over their health, people raising these animals also provide a place for them to live, and for some certain animals, protect them from their natural predators. Consider the idea that cows were not raised for their hide and meat. Whether they are grass-fed cows grazing fields or corn-fed cows cooped up in tight quarters, the space they occupy would become wasted space, and probably used for other purposes. This would require displacing the cows, and there would not be enough grass for them to live on anymore. Without the farms, there would be no one to serve their interests, and the cows would starve to death. This is why when considering the process of raising animals, we should put more emphasis on the fact that we are giving them food and a place to live rather than the fact that they will eventually be killed.

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It is also important to consider the implications of science as it relates to farming animals. If our current understanding of evolution and adaptation hold true, we do animals no service by letting them run free in the rather non-wild atmosphere of North America when we could be imposing adversity on them to coerce their species to adapt into a greater one. Animals including humans, are believed to have evolved and adapted based on the adversities they faced. As has already been stated about cows, chickens would have little other space to live if there were no farms dedicated to raising them. It only makes sense that since these farms are necessary, the only ethical way to treat the chickens there is to impose adversity on them so that future generations of chickens would be more fit to live their farm life comfortably. Something often forgotten about our relationship with animals is our ethical duty to control their populations. Unlike humans, who are at the top of the food chain and have advanced economic methods of allocating resources to accommodate growing populations, other animals have no such luxury. Chickens, for example, are larger in population than any other bird on the planet it. They were also domesticated long before any were mass-farmed for their meat and eggs and are not very self-sufficient as a result of this. It suffices to say that if the current population of chickens were freed and some werent killed after just several weeks of life for their meat, the population of chickens would initially grow even larger, and they obviously would have to compete heavily for food in the absence of being fed by farmers. Many chickens would kill each other (even non-hungry chickens are often violent towards each other), and some might starve to death. Humans, therefore, control their populations positively by raising them and negatively by killing them. By systematically raising and killing these animals we are fulfilling our ethical duty

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as more intelligent animals to both keep them alive but keep their populations under control at the same time. Just as with the things we hear from politicians running for office, activists, and other fringe groups, it is important to take was we see in these videos about animal farming with a grain of salt. This is because the so-named animal welfare and animal rights groups that produce these videos about the evils of meat farming and poultry farming are clearly attempting to get a visceral response rather than a logical one. These groups want people to abandon their reasoning skills for no other reason than to increase their numbers, which they probably want for spending power or for effective government lobbying. However easy it is to fall for these videos, its important to always remember our ethical duty to those animals. After all, that which is right and that which is easy are hardly ever the same.