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DEBATE & PERSUASIVE ARGUMENTS
Debate Kit: Is It Ethical to Eat Animals?
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A hot topic in classrooms and on the minds of many people today is whether or not it’s ethical to eat animals. Here at PETA, our core belief is that animals are not ours to use. We know that many schools assign debates on topical issues to help their students learn to speak and write persuasively, develop research skills, and recognize multiple sides of a controversial or multifaceted issue—and the ethical question of using animals for food is certainly one such topic. This student debate kit lists a variety of resources that can be shared with students to support the argument that eating animals is ethically unjustifiable and that eating vegan is the only solution.
Resolved: Eating animals is cruel, unsustainable, and unethical, and people should make the switch to vegan eating.
Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals
AFFIRMATIVE ARGUMENT
The food industry is one of the biggest exploiters of animals and is responsible for mass suffering and death. Every year, tens of billions of animals are killed for food, and most endure lives of constant fear and torment. Nearly all the animals raised for food in America today are separated from their families and crammed by the thousands into filthy warehouses, where they spend their entire lives in abysmally filthy conditions. They’re mutilated without the use of painkillers and deprived of everything that is natural and important to them. On the killing floor, many animals are conscious and struggling to escape while their throats are cut—and some are still conscious while their bodies are hacked apart or when they’re dunked into tanks of scalding-hot water.
It is an indisputable fact that animals have sentience and complex nervous systems. Animals are intelligent and complex—much more so than many people even realize—and scientists are finding more and more evidence of this all the time. But emotional complexities and intellectual capabilities aside, animals can feel pain just like humans can—and just like us, they value their lives and don’t want to suffer.
© Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals
That said, there is no such thing as “humane meat.” Giving animals a few more inches of living space is simply not enough—and even if their quality of life is high, we still don’t have the right to take that life for something as trivial as a particular meal. Animals on organic and “free-range” farms often endure the same cruel mutilations—such as debeaking, dehorning, and castration without painkillers—as animals on conventional factory farms do. And at the end of their miserable lives, they are typically shipped on trucks through all weather extremes (usually without food, water, or rest) to the same slaughterhouses used by factory farms.
In addition to animal suffering, animal agriculture also contributes to environmental destruction. Raising animals for food requires massive amounts of land, food, energy, and water and results in polluted land, water, and air. The United Nations (U.N.) has acknowledged that raising animals for food is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” And the resources going toward feeding the billions of animals used for food could be used more wisely to combat world hunger.
© iStockphoto/Claudiad | © iStockphoto.com/crispphotography
People may ask, “But animals eat meat, so why shouldn’t we?” Some animals do kill other animals for food, but unlike most humans, those particular animals could not survive if they didn’t. It’s unfortunate that some suffering is a part of nature. But humans are capable of making choices based on ethics—such as how to feed, clothe, and entertain ourselves—so we have the responsibility of making the most ethical choices possible and of doing our best to reduce suffering of any kind.
Of course, there are also similarities between humans and other animals. Like us, other animals experience fear, pain, and distress. But we are uniquely capable of choosing between cruelty and kindness, so we should never willfully inflict pain on any being—human or nonhuman.
Humans have the ability to reason and make compassionate choices, so we must end the use of animals for food in favor of a humane, vegan way of eating. There is no humane or ethical way to eat animals—so if people are serious about protecting animals, the environment, and fellow humans, the most important thing that they can do is to stop eating meat, eggs, and dairy “products.”
