The Ethics of Eating Animals - Research Paper Example

 The Ethics of Eating Animals There are varieties of foods available for consumers making it difficult for them to choose which one is best for them. Today many people are likely to eat anything edible without regard to whether it came from the lab, from animals or grown as plants. There is a big connection between the foods we eat and our emotional and physical well-being and people should be very careful of the choice of food they eat on their daily basis. People like eating meat due to its sweetness completely disregarding animal rights or the pain inflicted to them justifying this by claiming they are inferior beings; however, some people find it difficult to consume meat since they link it with the animal suffering, which makes them feel unease and unethical. According to Pollan (2006), manufactured foods may lead to adverse health conditions with lasting effects on the human life. He associates unhealthy eating habits with health complications such as obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure, conditions, which results to loss of several lives every year. Pollan blames the food industry for being obsessed with profits to at the expense of the health and lives of millions of consumers. He disputes the notion that animals are less intelligent as compared to humans and should thus be consumed as food just as any other vegetable is consumed. He posits that animals are self-aware and could even be more intelligent than human beings; notwithstanding, justifying their butchering based their perceived lack of intelligence or awareness is amoral. This is analogous to saying that less intelligent of those among use deserve to have their rights infringed; clearly this argument flies in the face of logic when applied to humans. To understand the justification for annihilation of animals based on their lack of intelligence and feeling, consider the treatment of two domestic animals a dog and a sheep. The latter is considered to be less intelligent than the former; therefore it can be slaughtered for food while the former becomes man’s best friend. In reality the two are not very different in terms of mental abilities, however for humans to justify killing sheep; they have to make them look stupid and therefore deserving of death as opposed to dogs which deserve to live based on their assumed intelligence. Furthermore, even if one was to assume for arguments sake that some animals are more intelligent than others, this is hardly reason enough to take away their right to live. There is a great incongruity created by the inconsistency between the love for animals and the enjoyment of meat, raising concerns for animal’s rights activists who have to contend with the fact that despite claiming to love animals, most people still enjoy meat. (Overal, 2012). Clearly, nobody thinks about where meat comes from, the process it takes before reaching the consumer and the fact that human also have bodies resembling meat. Wade (2000) argues that there are many inconsistencies between beliefs and behaviors concerning meat eating; hence, nobody is quite sure whether they are doing the right thing. To most civilized societies, eating the meat of a fellow human being is the epitome of savagery and primitiveness and it shows that those involved are evil and extremely immoral. How true this is arguable, however, the same can be said of humans who kill animals for the sake of satisfying their craving for meat. At the end of the day, in both cases, there will be predation and destruction of living animals for food. In the case of modern man, it is even worse since there exists numerous alternatives to meet and they can survive comfortably without eating meat as indeed many vegetarians do. For meat lovers to enjoy their fare, they mentally disengage their eating habits from the brutality and death that precedes their meal. One of the means by which this is achieved is by disassociating the meat from the animal, for example eating pork not pig, or mutton not sheep, thereby they try to completely alienate the idea of eating meat from the killing of animals. That is a covert admission that they recognize that killing animals for food is an uncivilized and shameful action otherwise they would not sugar coat it. Another fallacious approach to rationalize feeding on animals is the claim that they lack the mental capacity to feel pain as humans do; this is again an illogical attempt to diminish the moral valued of animals’ life and justify the immorality of their murder (Johnston, Szabo and Rodney, 2011). The idea that an animal feels pain when slaughtered threatens the comfort of meat lovers since it is easier for them to live in denial of the pain that their eating habits inflict on animas. Over the years, the process of industrialization has increased the magnitude of animal killings in an attempt to satisfy human craving for meat. The recognition that animals eaten possess minds similar to human beings is totally in contradiction to the use of animal food. People are afforded moral rights on the basis that they have minds and this is what makes them to undermine the existence and the well-being of animals, as they perceive them to have lesser minds than humans (Wade, 2000). As aforementioned, animals have developed minds and are just as capable of feeling pain, fear and stress as are human, nevertheless, and human societies have often chosen to ignore or contradict this truth. Accepting animals’ capacity for feeling would destabilizes many cultures which have meat eating as a key element of their beliefs practices and customs. Besides as long as a majority is in agreement that animals are inferior to humans, then the world can continue eating meat with a clear conscience never mind that the belief could be based on ignorance. The only way to compel meat lovers to take responsibility for the pain and harm their taste occasions on the animals would be to overtly illuminate the connection between meat and the animals that were killed for it to be available. Consequently, they will begin to associate the meat eating process with the injury inflicted on the animals, which some of them claim to love and they will be forced to address the dissonance between their food and personal tolerance for animal killing. At the end of the day, anyone who carefully listens to their conscious, especially those who claim to love animals will have no recourse but to turn stop eating meat altogether. This is because it is both morally and logically paradoxical to oppose, violence and killings among human while at the same time cordoning and facilitating these atrocities to animals. The immorality associated with eating animals is the strong motivator in moral choices to become a vegetarian, which is argued by health experts as good alternative to animal food (Joy 2005). This makes people who choose vegetarian meals as opposed to animals’ food for moral reasons more disgusted at the experience of animal eaters than those who choose vegetables for dietary reasons. Thus, disgust is recruited in the practice of moralizing cookery preferences into values, which in turn helps shape a person eating habits. Those who transgress against the perceived moral and traditional beliefs are associated with shame and guilt making them to reconsider their habits. Therefore, eating animals that hold ethically significant qualities in the society may trigger emotional states that may bring conflicts in a person societal perception. Denying the food animals their capacity of feeling pain, suffering and understanding is the key in initiating negative treatment to animals in the process of extracting food from them (Adams, 2005). In conclusion, animals are equally intelligent and should be considered if not given equal treatment as human beings in food consumption. Vegetarian diet is the best since industrial food is unnatural and unsustainable leading to lots of environmental and health problems in the end. Eating should be taken as an important and delicate part of human life so that they do not just eat anything on the menu without considering the consequences on themselves and the source of the food. References Pollan. M. (2006). The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, New York: Penguin Press. Print. Adams, C.J. (2005). Robert Morris and a Lost 18th-Century Vegetarian Book: An Introduction to Morris’s A Reasonable Plea for the Animal Creation. Organization & Environment, vol. 18, 4: pp. 458-466. Joy, M. (2005). Humanistic Psychology and Animal Rights: Reconsidering the Boundaries of the Humanistic Ethic. Journal of Humanistic Psychology; vol. 45, 1: pp. 106-130. Halteman, M.C. (2013). Knowing the Standard American Diet by Its Fruits: Is Unrestrained Omnivorism Spiritually Beneficial? Interpretation; vol. 67, 4: pp. 383-395. Wade, R. (2000). Towards a Christian Ethics of Animals. Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies; vol. 13, 2: pp. 202-212. Johnston, J.,Szabo, M and Rodney, A. (2011). Good food, good people: Understanding the cultural repertoire of ethical eating. Journal of Consumer Culture, ; vol. 11, 3: pp. 293-318. Overall, C. (2012). “Never eat anything with a face”: Ontology and ethics. Planning Theory; vol. 11, 4: pp. 336-342.,  Read More