Rights of animals

I agree with Michael Pollans article that states many different facts arguing giving animal the moral rights and equality that humans have upheld. Pollan states, “What’s wrong with the animal agriculture, with eating animals, is the practice, not the principle.” (Pollan). To understand, we need to look at the human species from the start and go beyond everything else. If you were to remove the meat industry, factories, statistics, and the moral rights and values and just focus on the nature of humans and evolution, it is easy to see that we are only doing what animals would be doing to each other in the wild. After all, we are animals too and it is our nature. On the other hand if you were to include all of those things mentioned above, you would find that the practice can be and is quite often more than not, a very brutal process. That being said, Pollan is absolutely correct in stating that the animal rights activists should not be focused on giving animals rights but by giving them animal welfare.

This would keep things as natural as possible, without going back to our hunter/gatherer status. If the animals were given a place to grow and live free, and then killed painlessly and quickly, what would the animal rightists have to fight anymore. The act of killing for animals for food or resources dates back to long before animal rights were around, the only difference is how we do it. The idea of the open air farm slaughter where people can see, would help us to better understand why and how, but would also eliminate the pain and suffering dealt with in the meat industry today.


On the subject of the rightists fighting to give animals the rights and moral values a human has, it just simply cannot be done. Wild and domestic animals simply lack the brain power and reasoning power that humans have achieved through evolution, and thus could not possibly be compared to us on the same level. An example is stated comparing the mentally ill and a chimp. If the mentally ill is included in our moral consideration why isn’t the chimp. It just can’t happen.” the differences between blacks and whites are trivial compared with the differences between my son and a chimp.” (Pollan). We are two different species, not different colors. Blacks and whites can have the same thought process and mental compacity as one another. But a child and a chimp will differ greatly, the child will grow and build upon itself and become like an adult and evolve into having a greater mental compacity and thought process that a chimp will never achieve.

In the end, Pollan knows that animals could never possibly achieve the rights and moral consideration that humans have, due to the fact that you just cannot compare the two species. We have gone through different evolutionary changes to make this sort of idea not realistic. As for slaughtering the animals , I agree with Pollan in that we should allow the practice of klling animals to go back more to the roots and become more natural. It will give people a better understanding of how life works and who we all really are, and give them a better respect for the animal kingdom and to think before allowing the unecassary pain and suffering of one that big steels walls would have normally blinded us from seeing. I think animal rightists have really forgot who we really are, which is animals, who have the same needs and desires as other things in nature. We have only been singled out because we are a superior race with reasoning, so they are only contradicting themselves.