Non Human Animals example essay topic

Their sentence to death begins the moment they are born. Malnourished and weak, a mother catches only a glimpse of her newborn before he is taken away. It is her eleventh child, and like the rest, she will never see him again. The infant is left in a small room with only a machine to feed from. His diet is force fed hormones and chemicals. In a few weeks, his cage becomes too small to even turn around.

He spends the days in boring agony, his only physical stimulation being the sounds of loud machinery, and the stench of his own excrement. He is small and emaciated, with no exposure to the sun, lacking the bone and muscle strength to do anything but sit. He could not run even if the bars would open. What is his fate? To be raped and eventually murdered like the sisters before him, or to live everyday like his fallen brothers, tortured for years before their slaughter? No, he is a fortunate child, for his death will not be long waited.

Just one month after his birth, the veil calf is shipped by truck to a giant factory. Alone and restrained, his feet are fettered by chain. It gnaws at his ankles, but it is nothing compared to what is to come. A large man approaches him with mallet in hand. The calf screams the only way he knows how as his skull is crushed and throat is slit.

His last sight is the ground five feet below, as the blood from his wound slowly bleeds his life away. This is a true story; a story that plays out thousands of times a day. It takes place not just in far off third world countries or in uncivilized cultures, but also in the rural areas of backyard America, where non-human animals are tortured and put to death everyday. They have no legal protection, and they pass away with little sympathy from the people they feed, or the corporations they die for.

These are abominable practices that deserve serious re-evaluation. The case for animal rights is a case for understanding, not only for the unbearable conditions of the animal industry, but also the notion of speci sm and animal equality. The animal industry is made up of live animals being exploited and killed for the use of food, clothing, and other material products. Nearly all animals bred for slaughter and exploitation are raised in factory farms, where thousands of animals are housed in unsuitable living conditions, and treated more as property than living beings.

Understanding the conditions of this industry is a matter of education. The story above is one account of one calf's tragedy, but there is not enough ink on the planet to write the horror of every animal who is born to die. In factory farm conditions, chickens are given less than half a square foot of space per bird, and all have the ends of their beaks cut off. Today's meat chickens have been genetically altered to grow twice as fast, and twice as large as their ancestors (Coats 43). Many suffer health problems as a result of their treatment, and die before the age of 6 weeks.

Once inside the slaughterhouse, fully conscious birds are hung by their feet from metal shackles on a moving rail. The first station on most poultry slaughterhouse assembly lines is the stunning tank, where the birds' heads are submerged in an electrified bath of water. After passing through the stunning tank, a mechanical blade slashes the birds' throats, and blood begins rushing out of their bodies. Inevitably, the blade misses some birds who then proceed to the next station on the assembly line, the scalding tank. Here they are submerged in boiling hot water.

Birds missed by the killing blade are boiled alive. Prior to being hung up by their back legs and bled to death, cattle are supposed to be rendered unconscious. This "stunning" is usually done by a mechanical blow to the head. The procedure is terribly imprecise, and inadequate stunning is inevitable. The result of poor stunning is conscious animals hanging upside down, kicking and struggling, while a slaughterhouse worker makes another attempt to render them unconscious. Eventually, like chickens, the animals will be "stuck" in the throat with a knife, and blood will gush from their bodies whether or not they are unconscious.

Fish seem to be the forgotten animal of the industry. It is strangely believed that fish have no feeling, a culturally programmed idea probably developed to justify the practice of fishing. As sentient beings, fish do in fact feel pain. After being born and raised in over crowded and diseased tanks, aquaculture fish are loaded into oxygenated tanker trucks bound for the kill plant. Upon arriving at the processing plant, the tanker trucks pour their cargo, water and fish, into large metal mesh cages. As the water pours through, fish who have survived the ordeal of "harvest" and transportation die of suffocation.

In some restaurants, fish are actually eaten alive. They are eviscerated and filleted, and delivered to the serving table. The eye is covered so that the fish will not see and react to diners reaching for parts of his / her body. Modern breeding pig sows are treated like piglet making machines. Living a continuous cycle of impregnation and birth, the sows each have more than 20 piglets per year. At two to three weeks of age, piglets are taken away from their mothers, by which time, approximately 15% will have died (Coats 103).

The piglets' tails are cut off to minimize tail biting, an abnormal behavior that occurs when these highly intelligent animals are kept in deprived factory farm environments. In addition, notches are taken out of the piglets' ears for identification. The air in hog factories is laden with dust, dander, and noxious gases that are produced by the animals' urine and feces. Studies of workers in swine confinement buildings have found 60 percent to have breathing problems, despite their spending only a few hours a day inside confinement buildings (Coats 104).

Like most animals, pigs too are hung upside down, ineffectively "stunned" and "stuck" in the throat to bleed to death. Hopefully they are dead before their skin is boiled. The conditions listed above summarize only a few accounts of animal cruelty as perpetrated by humans. The conditions of the dairy industry and practice of vivisection have not even been touched upon. Still, even knowing the harsh conditions of the animal industry, one may not be convinced that there is need for change. The basis of animal rights is not only rooted in a never-ending list of horror stories, for even in the most "humane" killing conditions, it would not be justified to kill animals at all.

The next step to understanding animal rights is overcoming a deeply rooted falsehood of the human relationship with the world: Just as it has been accepted that all humans are equal regardless of race, it should also be understood that all animals are equal, regardless of species. Speciesism is term coined by Peter Singer in his book Animal Liberation and is defined as "Human intolerance or discrimination on the basis of species, especially as manifested by cruelty to or exploitation of animals" (Singer 19). Just as it is racist to act as if whites are superior to non-whites, and as it is sexist to act as if men are superior to woman, it is speciesist to live as though humans are superior to non-humans In order to understand speciesism, one must consider how far the individual extends his / her grounds for equality and why. It would be assumed that many people judge others, be they men or women, black or white, as equal because society has come to recognize their greater similarities. It is understood that, perhaps different in race or gender, all people can excel in every task considered relevant if given equal opportunity. Now, does this mean animals should not be treated as equals because, for example, they cannot vote?

Of course not, as voting has no significance to a dog or a cow or a pig because they cannot do it. Similarly, does this mean men should not be treated as equals because they cannot have an abortion? Of course not, as having an abortion has any significance to a man, because they cannot carry children. The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.

The case for animal rights does not call for similar rights based on comparatively trivial differences, but equal rights based on inherent overriding equalities. It is not important whether or not they can speak or reason or vote. It is important that they can feel pain and terror and heartbreak, just as humans, and it is therefore unjust to condemn them to such a life, born to die. "All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: In suffering, the animals are our equals" (Singer 76). Perhaps it is time to rethink human values.

Why is 6 million human deaths called genocide, while billions of non-human deaths that occur yearly is called "industry?" What worth is the human commitment to harmony, justice, peace, and love as long as we continue to support the suffering and shame of the slaughterhouse? Just because humans cannot relate with the lives of non-humans does not mean it is right to breed, confine, and slaughter them. Just because their capacity for learning may not equal humans does not mean it is right to test harmful products on them. Just as it is understood that it is not right to kill a black man because he is not white or a women because she is not male, it is not right to kill a cow because he is not human. Therefore, just as gender and race equality adaptations have been made, it is now become evident that our bases for equality must also be extended to other non-human species. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

"We are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for?" -- George Bernard Shaw. Maybe the future will hold a new day for human and non-human animals alike. A day where the stockyards and factory farms are silent.

A day when all animals are treated with respect to their lives, and let to live for their own. A day when a mother's calf is left to live. Like slavery, some day people may look back on the horrible practices of the animal industry in disgust, and live more peaceful knowing that such conditions have been abolished. Such a day could only be reached when people realize the inhumane conditions of the animal industrial world, and that the value of non-human life is equal to our own. Works Cities Coats, David, and Michael Fox.

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1998.9 April 2003 Report, Bonnie. "Factory Farming in Missouri". S.T.A.R.T. Newsletter 4 May 2002. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. Boston: Penguin Book Publishing, 1979.