Ethical Treatment of Animals
Ethical Treatment of Animals As with most subjects which involve ethics, there is more than one point of view. With ethical treatment of animals it is not different. In fact it is a subject which has caused near war type situations. In example there are people who believe that any time animals is killed even if that animal did not suffer it is wrong. On the other hand there are people who glory in eating meat and killing animals. But the bottom line is most people are somewhere in the middle on how they feel about what happens to animals in the world of humans.
I am going to go over the some of these ideas and talk about the good and bad of both sides. The issue of animal rights is a very complex issue. There are both the positive and negative sides, which seem to have major contradictions. Animal rights people propose that the basic interest of animals such as suffering avoidance should be accorded similar attention as give to human beings. One such organization is Peta. Peta or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Peta may have some of the right ideas in that animals should have rights. Animals should not be made to suffer needlessly.
However Peta takes things past merely protecting animals and they have caused harm to humans and even to the animals that they try to help. Peta is an extremist group, and most people have at the very least have heard of them. Most people have an idea of what they are about. Many people are interested in treating animals with respect and responsibility, but a lot of these same people feel that Peta goes too far. Peta has been named by varying government ran organizations such as the USDA, have named Peta as being terrorists. If you have ever seen some of the demonstrations that Peta has done you might see why.
On their own website it states very clearly, “Almost all of us grew up eating meat, wearing leather, and going to circuses and zoos. We never considered the impact of these actions on the animals involved. For whatever reason, you are now asking the question: Why should animals have rights? •Animals Are Not Ours to Eat •Animals Are Not Ours to Wear •Animals Are Not Ours to Experiment On •Animals Are Not Ours to Use for Entertainment •Animals Are Not Ours to Abuse in Any Way”(Peta,2011) I interviewed my dad a bit to get some of his ideas and opinions on animal rights.
The reason is that he is a hunter. I asked him to explain from his point of view as a hunter, and someone who enjoys and respects nature. “Many organizations have been created to deal with the issues of hunting and gun control. A few of the better known ones are PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, The Humane Society, and on the other side, the NRA. There are many others, but I am most familiar with these three. First, a little history about me. I started hunting with my brother and father when I was about eight. Just small game at first, squirrels, rabbit, and pheasant until I was 16.
Then came deer hunting. I have never hunted larger game than white tail deer. I have owned many guns over the years, from handguns, rifles and shotguns. I have never owned a gun that could not be classified as a hunting weapon. I have never hunted for the “trophy. ” I do not believe that cruelty to animals is acceptable. That being said, let’s get back to these well known organizations. All of these organizations talk about animal rights and guns owner rights in one manner or the other. I will discuss PETA and the Humane Society first because they are similar in their philosophy.
On the surface, both of these organizations stand for treating animals with the respect that they should be treated with. But if you check out the history of these two well known organizations, they are both guilty of going overboard with the concept of the “ethical” treatment of animals, and they rave on about protecting wild animals rights. Nature has checks and balances to keep wild animal populations under control, and these checks and balances get totally ignored when organizations like these two and others like them get involved.
An obvious example of what happens when the population is not controlled is what has happened to the deer herd in several of the southern states. They have starved to the point that the general size of deer in the southern states is much smaller than the size of deer in the northern states, where the deer herd is smaller. (In numbers, not size). Another example of what happens when the population is not kept under control is happening in Wisconsin; the Chronic Wasting Disease is killing a lot of deer. This is a slow cruel death. One of the ways that nature balances the population of a species is to increase the numbers of predators.
I have to ask; which would be a more cruel death, being shot, or being eaten? Coyotes and Wolves hunt in packs and rip their prey apart to kill them, and sometimes starting to feed on their kill before their kill is dead. Sounds real humane??? Another way that animal populations are maintained is the weather. Freezing cold weather and lots of snow cause much death with wild animals. If they can’t find enough places to get out of the wind, to stay warm, they freeze to death; and if the snow covers up the ground too deep, they can’t get to the grass and other food they need to keep from starving to death in the winter.
One other aspect that these animal rights organizations don’t cover is what would happen financially to the states if hunting were to be banned. The amount of money that is taken in by states include the hunting licenses, additional permits for specific species, sales tax from the sales of hunting supplies, motel rooms, food at restaurants, gasoline, etc. This amounts to millions of dollars per year. That’s a lot of money to throw away. Now for the NRA. I have, in the past been a member of the NRA. The NRA is mostly a gun owner rights organization, but they do get involved with hunters rights also.
The reason that I don’t maintain my membership with the NRA is that they get to radical about gun owners rights. Much like the previously mentioned organizations get to radical about animals rights, I guess the NRA has to do the same. Common sense would dictate to most people that no regular person has any reason to own a machine gun, but the NRA says that everyone should be allowed to have one if that person would want it! There is good reason why the NRA has to get so radical about these stands though, but you would have to have a better understanding about the laws to really understand these reasons.
Laws have to be just specific enough to work without being too specific to leave loopholes that people can get around. It’s difficult to outlaw a machine gun without outlawing a semi-automatic shotgun or rifle used for hunting, that could easily be modified to full automatic, thus making it a “machine gun“. The one way that I think that the NRA does support common sense is their support of hunting. They offer hunter education courses, and they support reasonable hunting regulations and fees.
Researching recent history will prove that without realistic hunting regulations, hunters will wipe out the entire population of animals that they want to hunt. Lastly, I have to say that anyone that thinks that wildlife hunting will never be stopped is just fooling themselves. Humanity is growing and expanding to the point of crowding out wildlife. When I started hunting forty years ago, you didn’t have to look too far to find a place to hunt. Now farmers are leasing there land so, unless you pay to hunt on their land, you can’t hunt there. Also, states are selling off a lot of the “public” lands to private owners.
Another point is back to the money issue. When I started hunting with my dad and brother, we would load up in my dad’s pickup, and travel anywhere from twenty to one hundred miles to hunt, but gas cost under 50 cents a gallon. Now driving a hundred miles one way to hunt gets very expensive. Hunting has always been an activity that I have enjoyed, even when we didn’t bring home the meat, and not just because I like the taste of wild game over domestic meat. It’s like riding a motorcycle, you either like it, and it gets in your blood, or you don’t like it, and you don’t do it. ”
A lot of money and effort is instead put towards people who legally hunt. Hunters for the most part are conscious of wildlife. They very often want to preserve it as much as anyone. Though their desire and drive to preserve it is also so that they can hunt. They for the most part avoid hunting animals that truly endangered. Only poachers who are illegal hunters hunt without discrecrestions. “Here’s a short list of some great things hunters have done and continue to do for our economy and wildlife: •Hunters are pro human first. •Hunters love and respect America’s wildlife more than the people who fight against us. Nobody in America donates more money or more time to our wildlife than hunters. Through hunting licenses, special taxes on hunting equipment and simply by donating money to hunting groups, clubs and foundations that help protect and preserve our land and wildlife. •Hunters donate thousands of pounds of venison every year to the needy and hungry. •Hunters continually raise and donate money to local charities. •Hunters spend around $24. 7 billion every year in retail businesses. •Hunters spend around $955. 4 million a year on sales and fuel tax. •Jobs related to the hunting industry account for $16. billion dollars in income every year. •Teddy Roosevelt (also known as the conservation president) loved hunting and came up with the idea of preserving large portions of forests and land. Since then hunters have purchased and preserved millions of acres of land saving it from construction and development. •Hunters have and continue to reintroduce and repopulate multiple big game and small game species into dozens of areas where the wildlife was killed off due to settlers. ” (Hunters against Peta, 2011) Peta commonly likes to target anyone who would eat meat, or wear furs.
Somewhere in there it is like they have forgotten that humans are naturally meant to eat both meat and vegetation. Humans have also been wearing animals since the dawning of human consciousness. If not for wearing furs humans might not have left Africa. What Peta fails to notice is that for the most part hunters who are usually everyday people, most often try their best to hunt in humane ways. My own father is a hunter, and always does his best to be sure that when he kills a deer or other animal that the animal does not feel anything. It is what is called a clean kill and most hunters do this.
Most people do not what to see an animal suffer. But humans are partly meat eaters. “Fox News Channel aired two Center for Consumer Freedom commercials skewering People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for its association with terrorism and other violence. We have received hundreds of email responses from the general public — almost all of them positive — and we wanted to share a few with you. Some were personal, from people with direct experience dealing with animal rights terrorism. Others were from animal lovers and vegetarians who detest PETA for casting them in a bad light.
But most were from ordinary Americans whom PETA has managed to anger and alienate over the years. ” (Center for Consumer Freedom, 2003) In my mind I think hunters are better than the mass slaughter houses. I do not like the knowledge of the meat that comes from the store often did not have a good life. I do think that these establishments should change and be made to give the animals a good life. I do enjoy eating meat. But I do not enjoy the thought of the animal that gave its life for me to eat it, did not have a good healthy life, up to the time when they killed it. How do I know of the conditions that pigs live and die in?
I worked for a short time at a meat packing plant, called IBP. I could not work there very long; I started to have nightmares about what the pigs went through. To this day I can’t eat pork. I feel that if we could make it so that animals are treated as if they are feeling beings like they obviously are. I think this is what should happen. Animals should live a happy life, and not live every day in a cage, they should be allowed to do what they would do naturally. They should also be treated with great respect and care, even at the time that they would give their lives.
I feel that the mass slaughter of animals such as happens now is wrong. Animals break their legs, fall on each other. They live in fear and stress. Animals die on the way to market, and the animals around them trample and stumble over them. Pigs are taken in trucks and crammed into a box trailer, to the point that they can’t move. They ride to market, in a trailer which is freezing in the winter; some of them freeze to death. And hot in the summer, some of them die from heat exastition. I think these are things which need to be changed. Scientists as bad guys?
Yes that is what Peta would have you believe. These are people who work hard to find cures for things such as diabetes and cancer and Peta wants them stopped. “Scientists frequently disagree on the interpretation of data. Such disagreements follow an informal set of rules, where one assumes that the contestants are honestly engaged even though biases may cloud their minds. A new group of individuals with medical training operates under a different set of rules, however: any statement or argument may be used to support the animal rightists’ contention that using animals to advance human medicine is wrong.
These “medical scientists” pervert the scientific discourse in which most of us engage. Their fabrications are egregious. They take legitimate scientists’ statements out of context, construct statements out of larger passages to twist arguments in their favor, and cite works that actually are contrary to their arguments for effect. ”( Morrison, 2002) So where does the line get drawn? Should animals have rights? Should animals be thought of as property and not as living creatures? Peta has the right ideas; however their ways of doing things is over the top. Peta is not without benefits though.
If it was not for Peta there would not be someone to say “hey, these animals are becoming endangered, give them a break”. The way that Peta goes about things is highly questionable, but I do think that they are trying to do things to help. I do also think that regular hunters, those people who go out once a year to feel the earth around them. They for the most part are not the evil devils that Peta would make them out to be. Poachers are different from hunters. They are not the everyday hunters, and their goals are not for sport or for the pleasure of the hunt, it is for prophet, they are only seeking money and at any price.
So there is not a real right and wrong here, there is grey in both areas. This is not a case of relativism; this is something that cannot be dismissed or easily resolved. There is a solution, though not easily found. I think it has a lot to do with communication. Just like most things in this world if communication is not good, then things can and often do slowly fall apart. Both sides have their view of the world. But no one is talking about it to each other. There is just a lot of here say, and people skimming over to find the parts that they can find is wrong with the other groups philosophy.
But then there are also the groups in the matter of animal’s rights that will not discuss with anyone, because their views are the right ones, and they will not see any others. Perhaps it would be a good option to hire Deontologists to help and find a common equal ground. Deontological off an ethical theory and they try and contrasted with consequentialist or teleological ethical theories, to find common rightness of an action to be determined by its consequences. With ethical treatment of animals it is not different. In fact it is a subject which has caused near war type situations.
In example there are people who believe that any time animals is killed even if that animal did not suffer it is wrong. On the other hand there are people who glory in eating meat and killing animals. But the bottom line is most people are somewhere in the middle on how they feel about what happens to animals in the world of humans. I am not sure that there will be a solution that everyone can be happy with and live with. There is usually a solution to a situation, but for one that has to do with life I think that the only way to come to a solution is not to change the situation at hand.
But perhaps to change ourselves and the way that we think about the world around us. The planet and the creatures on it are alive, and they feel. Perhaps when we remember that life is connected and to disrespect life is to disrespect ourselves and our children. Maybe then we can find a solution to this and many other ethical issues. References Morrison, Adrian R. (2002). Perverting medical history in the service of “animal rights”. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45(4), 606-619. Retrieved February 22, 2011, from Project MUSE database.
People for the Ethical Treatment or Animals (2011) retrieved from Peta, http://www. peta. org/ Center for Consumer Freedom (2003) Anti-PETA Ads Win Popular Acclaim, http://consumerfreedom. com/news_detail. cfm/h/2264-anti-peta-ads-win-popular-acclaim Davis, P. PETA: When Animal Rights Becomes Terrorism and Crime People Who Aren’t Treating Animals Ethically (2007) Retrieved from Associated Content, http://www. associatedcontent. com/article/282260/peta_when_animal_rights_becomes_terrorism. html? cat=9 Hunters against Peta (2011) retrieved from website Hunters against Peta, http://www. huntersagainstpeta. com/
