Animal Person

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Chris from Beijing wasn't able to comment (Animal Person is blocked in China) but he did write me to say he looks forward to Jonathan Safran Foer's sequel to Eating Animals. Not Eating Animals. And when you have people who slaughter animals for a living on your side, in my mind your pro-animal message loses credibility.

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Animal Person

MARCH 9, 2010

A handful Animal Person readers since May of 2006, when I started this then-daily blog, have asked me if I've read Joan Dunayer. And now that I've read Animal Equality and begun Speciesism , I think I know why. Dunayer devotes a chapter each to the language used in hunting, zoos, "marine parks," vivisection and "animal agriculture."

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Animal Person

MAY 30, 2009

Bea directed me to an interview with Dr. Elizabeth Parker , the "chair man " (my emphasis) of the Animal Agriculture Alliance at CattleNetwork, which apparently is "The Source for Cattle News." If any "drastic measures" are employed, they are to remove animals from suffering, not to impose our dietary choices on others.

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Animal Person

OCTOBER 26, 2009

I immensely enjoyed "EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED" (even on the big screen) and eagerly anticipated "EATING ANIMALS" by Jonathan Safran Foer. Finally, if you know someone who gravitates toward the philosophical issues around our use of animals, this is a good book. Ever, in fact. Not great, but good. But why does he say "vegetarian?"

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Animal Person

DECEMBER 5, 2009

People whose careers involve creating, fattening, transporting and slaughtering sentient nonhumans whose parts and secretions will then be used as food are having some financial difficulties. First let's deconstruct: The recession has caused a decrease in demand for animal products. Along with the rest of the country.

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Animal Person

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

Then there are the myriad entry points to thinking about how we use animals and the impact that has on the animals, the planet, our bodies and our consciences. We all know junk-food vegans and vegans who eat "faux meat" products every day. You are choosing domination and enslavement and forced breeding and unnecessary slaughter.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 10, 2010

Buying dairy products supports them. That doesn't mean that 99% of dairy products are from family farms , as the average number of cows on each family farm is just over 100. Families, so the commercials go, don't engage in untoward aspects of animal husbandry that might hurt the cows. The cows' tails swing in the breeze.

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Animal Person

MAY 24, 2009

But though the pigs weren't originally destined for a mass grave, weren't they destined for slaughter nonetheless? CIWF wants to "halt the brutal killing of these animals, and to ensure that they can be assured of a humane future." Here's my question: What is "a humane future?"

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Animal Person

AUGUST 19, 2009

For me, the focus on culture and tradition is basically an excuse for "anything goes" when it comes to animals. I wonder how much they learn about the animals other cultures eat. (In The site says food production factories are included , but I doubt that means those involving the slaughter of animals.).

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Animal Person

SEPTEMBER 29, 2009

"Desperate to drive up prices by stemming the gusher of unwanted milk, a dairy industry group, the National Milk Producers Federation, has been paying farmers to send herds to slaughter. Their minds don't whirl and scream with the injustice of sentient beings enslaved and treated as units of production. They're our "best friends."

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

The film Partitions (running time: 14 min) by Audrey Kali gives an intimate glimpse of the ethical struggles that five small-scale meat farmers face when their animals are slaughtered. In this film, we see farmers interacting with the animals they will eventually transform into food (chickens, pigs and cattle).

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Animal Person

MAY 11, 2009

Yesterday's " Do Small Victories Affect Big Picture in Animal Rights Debate? Here's the set-up: The European Parliament endorsed a ban on seal products. restaurants by animal rights activists." Notwithstanding their local tactical victories, are animal rights protesters really as effective as they appear?

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 16, 2009

Animals raised for food suffer miserably. The overwhelming passage in November of Proposition 2 in California, which banned tight confinement of many of the animals raised for food, is a fine example of the power of publicity to educate people about the atrocities we commit to those animals who have no voice of their own.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 3, 2009

Bea directed me to the Animal Welfare Special Report at TheHill.com , in which Rep. David Scott (D-Ga), who is the chairman of the Livestock, Dairy and Poultry Subcommittee of the House Committee on Agriculture draws a line in the sand regarding the animals we use and how we use them. Translation? Let the games begin.

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Animal Person

APRIL 14, 2009

There is a profound difference between what Sea Shepherd does and what the Animal Liberation Front does, but there are also similarities, and those similarities increase in number if a direct action by the ALF (or anyone else) is an open rescue and therefore a direct defense of sentient nonhumans being attacked by humans. Funding.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 6, 2007

A column entitled "Ag Industry Threatened by Animal Rights" appeared in today's High Plains/Midwest Ag Journal [ HPMAJ ]. The column, which you can read here , is a call to arms to factory farmers to fight back against those individuals and organizations working to protect farm animals from the abuses inherent in factory farms.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 23, 2009

There are two approaches a vegetarian might take in arguing that rearing and killing animals for food is morally offensive. He might argue that eating animals is morally bad because of the pain inflicted on animals in rearing and killing them to be eaten. Nor could he object to the painless killing of wild animals.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Interests arise, Singer contends, from the capacity to feel pain, which he labels a 'prerequisite' for having interests at all; and animals can and do suffer, can and do feel pain.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

I suspect that many regular readers of Animal Ethics are already vegetarians. That's because those who read Animal Ethics with regularity know that there are many compelling reasons to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. One cannot produce eggs or dairy products on a large scale without the wholesale exploitation of animals.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 16, 2009

The Argument from Glass-Walled Slaughter Houses Mel Morse, former president of the Humane Society of the United States, once remarked: “If every one of our slaughter houses were constructed of glass this would be a nation of vegetarians.” For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post.

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Animal Person

JULY 6, 2009

You can't pull the god card to claim superiority over the rest of us so you demonize the consumption of animal products. You purposefully choose to ignore facts like that though when citing the "cruelty and injustice" involved in the rearing and slaughter of animals. It simply cannot be justified.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 27, 2008

To the Editor: Re “ PETA’s Latest Tactic: $1 Million for Fake Meat ” (news article, April 21): The commercial development of meat from animal tissue won’t result in “fake meat” any more than cloning sheep results in fake sheep. There is no happy ending for even the most humanely raised animal. coli bacteria or food additives.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 3, 2009

Meat, however, purchased at the supermarket, externally packaged and internally laced with petrochemicals, fattened in feed lots, slaughtered impersonally, and, in general, mechanically processed from artificial insemination to microwave roaster, is an affront not only to physical metabolism and bodily health but to conscience as well.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 2, 2008

Kristof, who takes note of the trend represented by the animal welfare proposition on the ballot in California this fall. It’s time that our tax dollars no longer finance the inhumane conditions—for workers and animals and the climate—of factory farms. To the Editor: Re “ A Farm Boy Reflects ” (column, July 31): Hats off to Nicholas D.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 17, 2008

What the utilitarian who defends human carnivorousness must say, then, is something like this: that the amount of pleasure which humans derive per pound of animal flesh exceeds the amount of discomfort and pain per pound which are inflicted on the animals in the process, all things taken into account. Is this plausible?

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 16, 2008

But there is a net loss in all meat production, not just of farmed fish or feeding fish to land animals being raised for food. Feeding grain to chickens, pigs and cows is even more inefficient, with 70 percent of grain grown in the United States going to animals raised for food. Danielle Kichler Washington, Nov. 11, 2008

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 2, 2007

March 27, 2007 To the Editor: Livestock producers raise their animals under humane standards and under the care of a veterinarian. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, management and husbandry are more important than the type of production system for ensuring the health and well-being of pigs. That is never humane.

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 12, 2008

Wild animals and native plants have a particular place in nature, according to the land ethic, which domestic animals (because they are products of human art and represent an extended presence of human beings in the natural world) do not have. On the top, from left to right, distinguish between (nonhuman) animals and plants.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 30, 2009

The Argument from Human Grain Shortage All of the clearly moral arguments for vegetarianism given so far have been in terms of animal rights and suffering. The eating of non-grain-eating animals, e.g., fish and wild game, is morally permissible on this view. Nobody wants existing animals to be slaughtered.

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Niman gives us is to pay attention to the source of meat products and what our mothers always told us: clean your plate. Niman for pasturing the animals to provide all the beef, turkey, chicken and pork eaten in this country? Thus, it’s not enough to say that Americans should “cut back on consumption of animal-based foods.”

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

To the Editor: Re “ Animal, Vegetable, Miserable ,” by Gary Steiner (Op-Ed, Nov. In fact, a whole lot of semi-vegans can do much more for animals than the tiny number of people who are willing to give up all animal products and scrupulously read labels. Go vegan, go vegetarian, go humane or just eat less meat.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 25, 2008

And it is not just at the slaughterhouses but at the factory farms where these animals are tortured from the very beginning of their lives to the horrible end. What we do to animals shows how we feel about other species. 21, 2008 To the Editor: You rightly capture the magnitude of the problem of ensuring safe food products.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 20, 2008

Ethical vegetarianism is the thesis that killing and eating animals is morally wrong whenever equally nutritious plant-based alternatives are available. Virtually everyone agrees that: (1) It is wrong to cause a conscious sentient animal to suffer for no good reason. Animal abuse is a crime in all fifty states, and rightly so.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 23, 2006

Jonathan Hubbell, a philosophy major at the University of Texas at Arlington, is the newest member of the Animal Ethics blog, and once again, I would like to welcome him aboard. It truly is horrific and despicable to treat animals so badly. All that follows from that assumption is that it is morally permissible to eat some meat.

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