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Damaris Alvarado

Professor Batty

English 101

10 December 2019

The Ethics Of Eating Timed In Class Essay Revision

When eating meat do you stop to think what has the animal possibly been through?

Although there is a very fast-growing population’s demand for food, on the other hand as

humans we should not be jeopardizing the life of animals by making them go through torture,

slaughtering them just to fill up our bellies; because for animals confined in factory farms food

has to be grown for them that the animals burn up that food’s energy which adds to the amount

of food available to us. When consuming an animal the consumer is also going to digest what it

was that the animal ate. Which is sometimes litter to ammonia droppings, and the way that

factory farms handle animals is horrifically unethical as farmers drag animals through pain and

suffering.

Raising animals for global meat consumption can most of the time lack of quality food

consumption for the animal to digest. As Singer mentions in The Ethics Of Eating “...Disease

was caused by feeding the cattle the brains and nerve tissue of sheep. People who naively

believed that cows ate grass discovered that beef cattle in feedlots may be anything from corn to

fishmeal, chicken litter (complete chicken droppings) and slaughterhouse waste”(1). The

majority of the time meat consumers have absolutely no idea what has been fed to the meat they

are eating. Even for the farmers that do grow food for animals, animals need and burn up
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the energy from that food and human consumers end up with a very small fraction of the food

value that is fed to them, usually no more than one-third.

Meat is also known to be carcinogenic to humans. Full of parasites and leads to high risks

of diseases. Ray T. Pierrehumbert talks about in Meat Consumption, Health, and the

Environment “based mainly on evidence of links of colorectal cancer. LARC estimates that

34,000 deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat, and if the

reported associations with red meat were proven to be casual, then diets high in red meat could

be responsible for 50,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide”(1). When consuming meat the

consumer is also eating away all the pain and suffering it has gone through. In the long run,

eating meat does not have any real benefits.

The unethical handling from factory farmers to animals is undeniably astonishing.

Newborn babies are separated from their mothers, made anemic and are kept in narrow stalls

they cannot even turn around in. Animals are not granted a minimally decent life, or even go

outdoors to see the day of light. Factory farms also are detrimental to the health of these animals

as the levels of harsh chemicals in the air such as ammonia stings and hurt the lungs of animals.

In The Ethics Of Eating Singer explains the suffering of animals by saying “Slaughtered at only

45 days old, their immature bones can hardly bear the weight of their bodies. Some collapse and

are unable to reach food or water, soon die… aggressive birds are likely to pick to death the

weaker hens in the cage. To prevent this, producers sear off all birds’ beaks with a hot blade. A

hen’s beak is full of nerve tissue… but no analgesic or anesthetic is used to relieve
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pain”(1). No animal should go through that amount of unbearable pain just for the sake of filling

up our tummy.

Although it is true that there is a fast-growing demand for food and one cannot deny that

from a young age most humans have been taught that meat is necessary for our health, I argue

that consequently, the result will not only be animal suffering on an even greater scale, but

environmental damage and rise in diseases such as cancers and heart diseases will grow for in

humans.
 Works Cited

Godfray, H. Charles J., et al. “Meat Consumption, Health, and the Environment.” ​Science,​

American Association for the Advancement of Science, 20 July 2018,

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6399/eaam5325.full​.

Singer, Peter, et al. “The Ethics of Eating by Peter Singer.” ​ProjectSyndicate,​ 14 June 2006

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-ethics-of-eating?barrier=accesspaylog