Breakthrough Writer

Lesson #4 for the Vegetarian Debate: Reviewing Both Sides of the Argument: Second Revision

 

 

Part One. Sadism and Brutality: Faulty Comparison?

 

Thesis That Defends Vegetarianism by Refuting the Comparison Meat-Eaters Make Between Humans and Animals

Some argue that we must kill animals for food because killing animals is part of nature. Animals kill animals. And that’s what we do. Tim, a reader from my blog, argues that vegans base their ideals on a false utopia. He writes:

 

I agree that man should be humane in all things, including the manner in which he kills his food. But let me add one little remark that the anti meat-eaters seldom appreciate.

Have you ever gone camping? What do the woods sound like at - say - 2 or 3 AM? To exaggerate a little, they sound like a slaughterhouse. Animals kill and eat other animals. They don't fuss over HOW the killing is done or how MUCH killing is done; they just do it. And it can be pretty horrible. Nature is savage; period.

So, don't forget, vegans, that nature itself is not a serene pacifistic green little utopia, whereas man is an abominable meat-lusting monster. Nature is often brutal and ugly.

In agreement with Tim, is another reader, Angelo. He writes:

I had a crayfish a few years ago---and he would eat "feeder" goldfish thrown in the tank. The "feeders" are sold for a dime each. The crayfish would ambush the goldfish, grab the fish and puncture its gill. Then, with the goldfish struggling, the crayfish would scrape the goldfish's scales off, before beginning to eat. The fish was still alive as the crayfish would chomp down on the tail, body parts, etc. Admittedly on a smaller scale--- that's still worse than electrocuting a cow.

 

But another reader, Shorty, believes comparing nature’s brutality with the brutality animals are subjected to in the slaughterhouses is a false one. He writes:

Nature is indeed savage, but animals seldom kill but for hunger. The animals that get eaten in the wild don't know what it's like to be confined in a pen, wallowing in their own waste - only to die fat and tender. Livestock warehousing, and mass killing will never be vindicated. It will always be a symbol of greed, arrogance, and a barometer of the human condition. Eating meat is OK if you hunt for it in an ethical manner. Otherwise, vegetarianism is the holy grail for me.

 

Animals are obligate carnivores; humans are not entirely; animals eat out of necessity; too many humans eat out of gluttony; animals eat to survive; people kill animals for profit; animals don’t slaughter animals on the mass scale that humans do. Therefore, the comparison between nature’s brutality and man’s brutality is a faulty one and as such it constitutes a logical fallacy.

 

Another Faulty Comparison: Animals Don’t Cause Waste and Pollution the Way Humans Do

1.   Pig waste ruins lakes and rivers.

2.    Cattle feedlots contaminate water over 1,900 times the state’s maximum standard for E. coli in surface waters (Masson).

3.    Raising pigs and cattle (animals don’t raise animals to eat) creates 80 million metric tons of waste nitrogen annually (Masson).

4.    Animal waste is 130 times greater than human waste annually in America (Masson).

5.    Animal waste results in E. coli, Salmonella, and other diarrheal diseases (Masson).

6.    Rain forests are being destroyed to grow soy, but the majority of the soy is used to feed livestock (Masson).

7.    According to the Smithsonian Institution, every  minute land the size of seven football fields is currently being bulldozed to create room for farmed animals and the crops need to feed them (Masson).

8.    Livestock accounts for 18% of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions in carbon dioxide, more than the entire transportation sector of the whole world, including cars, ships, airplanes, and trains (Masson).

 

Another Faulty Comparison: Humans Subject Animals to Horrors on a Mass Scale That Can’t be Compared to Predator and Prey

1.   Humans separate calves from their mothers at birth so mother can give milk for human consumption

2.    Cows are transported in boxcars where they panic.

3.   Chickens like to sunbathe but are doomed to a life of cramped darkness.

4.   Ducks crave water but are doomed to a life of arid dryness.

5.   Hens have their beaks cut off with a hot blade and live their lives in pain from the nerve damage.

6.   Birds raised in pens and kicked so they scatter and are shot at close-range (like Dick Cheney did when he shot someone) requires no skill and suggests a certain amount of sadism. There’s even a business where you can use computer graphics to kill your prey.

7.   Cows are forced to feed on corn, which is cheaper than grass but can’t be digested properly so the cows suffer indigestion and a bacteria count that leads to food-born disease.

8.   One million calves are used for veal every year. They are removed from their mothers and holed up in a small crate, about two-feet wide, with no straw or bedding. They cannot stretch. Mortality rate is 20%. That is their life before being slaughtered.

9.   Pigs tails are cut off with no anesthesia so they don’t bite each other’s tails off during confinement.

10.               Confined, often the pigs go crazy, biting the bars or their own tails, or shaking their heads constantly.

11.               Confined, pigs have elevated levels of cortisol (stress hormone).

12.               Too often, pigs, cows, chickens, and other livestock are still alive on the conveyer belt as pieces of their body are taken apart. They die slowly, piece by piece, and in essence are tortured. The slaughterhouses won’t let you see what is happening.

 

Part Two. The Abuse of Language

1.   Organic is associated with elitist, rich, out-of-touch. Organic may be that in part, but that’s an over simplification.

2.   Veal is French for calf but we don’t want to admit to eating calf.

3.   Pork is French for pig but we say we eat “pork,” not “pig.”

4.   Words like “meat,” “bacon,” and “burger” hide the association with the animal origin.

5.   Downer, an animal that collapses from ill health or is crippled. By law, this animal is not supposed to be slaughtered, but these downers are slaughtered all the time.

6.   Factory farm is euphemism for slaughterhouse

7.   Fresh food: According to USDA “fresh” chicken can be frozen and for any length of time. What?

8.   Processing: euphemism for slaughter and butchery

9.   Radical, anyone who doesn’t agree with you or challenges your beliefs or challenges your capacity for denial.

10.               Sportsman, a euphemism for someone who sadistically hunts and tortures animals.

 

 

Part Three. Example of a Thesis That Refutes Factory Farming by a Meat-Eating Omnivore

Let's be clear. I am a failed vegetarian, a man for whom the vegetarian diet left me weak and so hungry that I overate carbs until I gained lots of weight to the point that I was saddled by corpulence. So let's put this on the table: I eat animal protein. Having confessed my carnivorous ways, let me say here that I am morally revolted by factory farming and that I am prepared to refute with all my heart and soul the major arguments that factory farm apologists use to defend the abominations that ensue in 99% of the slaughterhouses. 

The central weakness of the farm factory apologists is their specious claim that we are entitled to brutalize animals since brutality is the norm in nature. Comparing farm factory slaughter with animal-on-animal slaughter is an egregious comparison wrought with many fallacies. First, animals kill for hunger while farm factories kill for profit. Second, the scale of brutality in the farm factory far surpasses that which occurs in nature. Third, the amount of waste farm factories impose on the environment cannot be compared to the almost nonexistent waste that occurs in the animal world. Fourth, farm factory butcheries spread disease like E.coli on a mass scale whereas in Nature such spread of contagion does not occur. Revealing this faulty comparison for the outlandish fraud that it is, what are meat eaters like me to do? Surely, the answer lies in trying to eat meat that comes from non-farm factory sources, such as meat labeled "organic" and "sustainable." 

 

 

Part Four. Refuting the Vegetarian Diet

While I concede that there is way too much mindless cruelty in the factory farming of animals, we must not obfuscate the truth, namely, that the vegetarian diet does not provide optimum nutrition. The omnivore diet, which includes meat eating, is defensible from an evolutionary, biological, and nutritional point of view.

Essay’s First Page

Summarize the book’s major arguments that support a vegetarian or vegan diet for animal rights. 

Essay’s Second Page

If after reading the book, you are not convinced that you should “convert” to vegetarianism or veganism, you may want to defend an omnivore diet. To write a defense of the omnivore diet (which includes meat eating), one would have to concede that the current system of factory farming needs reform and that the system is changed. Also one would concede that people eat too much meat but that the solution is not the elimination of meat eating but the reduction of it. One will cut down from the national average of meat consumption (200 pounds) to approximately one-third of that (70 pounds). One would concede that that 70 pounds of meat would be as organic and sustainable as much as possible even at the higher costs. This section would take about a page.

Essay’s Final Four Pages In Which You Support Your Thesis Mapping Statements

 

You would have to argue that the vegan diet is not optimum nutrition and may even be dangerous, especially for pregnant woman and newborns. You might look to Nina Planck in her New York Times article or her book Real Food. Or you might look to Lierre Keith’s book The Vegetarian Myth or her book excerpt from her website.

 

Part Two. Other Sources That Challenge the Vegan/Vegetarian Diet

Weston A. Price Foundation

Nina Planck Interview

Death by Veganism Updates

Meat Eating Was Essential to Human Evolution

Evolving to Eat Mush

Paleo Diet

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Evolution by Fire

Home Economics and Evolution

How Our Vegan Diet Made Us Ill

In Defense of Meat

In Defense of Meat Eaters, Parts 1 and 2

In Defense of Meat and Fire

An Animal's Place

Nutritional Arguments:

1. Replacing animal protein with soy can be dangerous and soy doesn't digest in terms of elevated estrogen as well as animal protein. 

2. You can't get B12 without animal protein. Supplements are inferior to real food.

3. You get inferior amino acids from plant protein even when you mix them to create "complete proteins" like combining rice and beans or peanut butter and wheat.

4. You get more concentrated nutrition with cooked meat than raw plants. 

 

Lierre Keith Lecturing on Her Vegetarian Myth: 5 Parts

A Blog Against Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth

 

 

Here's a blog against Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth. 

And here's a blog that claims there are fallacies that support vegetarianism. 

And Say What, Michael Pollan?

Common logical fallacies to avoid. 

Vegetarian Debate Lesson #1: Third Revision

Part One: Your Essay Assignment

One. Based on The Face on Your Plate

 

In a 5-page research paper, develop a thesis that defends or refutes Masson’s vegan ideology.

Paragraph 1: Introduction

Paragraph 2: Thesis with 4 or 5 mapping components

Paragraphs 3-9: Elaborate your mapping components

Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a dramatic restatement of your thesis

Last Page: Works Cited page with no fewer than 5 sources

 

A word about intellectual rigor: Don't approach the essay with a preconceived thesis based on your biases and eating habits.

Rather, begin your essay with a tabula rasa, a blank slate, having no preconceived notions, and let your research and intellectual struggle determine your argumentative position.  

 

 

 

Part Two. Reasons We Eat Meat

1.   Family traditions. We learn what to eat from our family first and culture second.

2.   Faith. Some eat meat because it’s encouraged from their holy book.

3.   Some people crave meat. The vegetarian Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, admits he still salivates upon smelling barbecued meat. Some research indicates that animal protein is superior to plant protein and as such animal protein satisfies the appetite in ways plant protein cannot. 

4.   We’re able to compartmentalize. This means while we love eating meat, we don’t want to know about how the animals are killed. We go into a state of mind called “willed denial.” Another way of putting it: Our left hand doesn't know what our right hand is doing.

Vegan rock star Paul McCartney said “If there were glass walls on the slaughterhouses,  everyone would be a vegetarian.”

5.   We become convinced that the science backs up the idea of an omnivore diet, including meat eating, for optimal nutrition. Nina Planck, author of Real Food, and Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth, are leading proponents of meat-eating. The human brain needs animal amino acids and fats. However, it should be pointed out these women do not eat factory-killed animals. My doctor supports their view as well.

6.   Some people eat meat because when they tried to be vegetarian, they got super hungry and gained a lot of weight. It seems animal protein fills us up for longer periods of time. When we don’t eat meat, we “carb out.”

7. We live in a state of learned denial according to Masson, the author of The Face on Your Plate. 

Part Two. Arguments for Being a Vegetarian or a Vegan: Humanitarian, Environmental, Nutritional (most controversial)

One. Argument of sentience. Animals feel pain. We should afford them the same humanitarian concern, to be spared from pain, that we afford ourselves. Part of the sentience argument rests on empathy. Should we empathize with animals’ pain?

Two. Danger of compartmentalizing morality. Can you be kind to humans but cruel to animals? Or is there a link? And if there is no link, are we dealing with disassociative personality disorder? How does that speak to integrity?

Three. The argument of Carnism or speciesism, which says we can abuse animals as we please or as we see fit for our perceived benefit. Carnism or speciesism is, according to many vegans, a moral flaw.

Four. The sadistic argument. A lot of “research” has predictable results and suggest an unconscious cruelty at the very least.

Five. Indoctrination argument. See Chapter 2, page 70 in Singer. See Eating Animals and the use of language.

Six. Farm factory argument. See Jonathan Safran Foer. 99% of meat comes from factories with all their horrors and abuses.

Seven. The Glass Wall or Willed Ignorance Argument. Also called Willed Denial. See Eating Animals and the use of language. The misuse of language.

Eight. The Efficiency Argument, which is in the realm of the environment. A meat-eating diet is more harmful to the environment than a vegetarian one.

Nine. The Nutritional Argument, the most controversial because of conflicting data.

Ten. The Story Argument. How we eat determines the story we tell to ourselves and our children. Our stories define who we are.

Part Three. Impediments to Being a Vegetarian or a Vegan.

One. Your family, on your side and your spouse’s side, are not vegetarians and to reject their meaty meals is in a way to reject your family, its traditions, its intimacies. You may even be scorned, shunned, and looked at as a “weirdo,” a misfit, and a malcontent.

Two. Your spouse eats meat so your not eating it carries implicit condemnation of his or her eating habits. Eating is part of your intimate bond with your spouse. You don’t want there to be a wedge between you two in this regard.

Three. Not eating meat and its place eating rice and beans and such, you find yourself eating more calories a day because a vegetarian diet doesn’t fill you up as much as a much as a meat-eating one. While some lose weight when they convert to vegetarianism, you blow up and become rather pudgy.

Four. There is the whole soy issue with some warning of its dangers, which are analyzed in detail; however, you also know that these findings are disputed. Nevertheless, not knowing who to believe, you are concerned about the dangers of soy.

Five. There are those who write that from an evolutionary standpoint, you need to eat some meat, including Nina Planck, Lierre Keith, and the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Six. You suffer from meat lust. Your most indelible food memories are the salivations that occurred during childhood barbecues. To this day, the smell of barbecued meats intoxicates you to levels of euphoria that you cannot deny.

Seven. You realize that milk and eggs result in animal cruelty so that vegetarianism, a relatively easy “lifestyle choice,” doesn’t fully absolve you of your guilt. You must be a vegan, and this entails an effort and a circumspection that you find too rigorous.

Eight. You and your spouse want children and read literature about the need for some animal protein to maximize fertility.

Nine. You hate to acknowledge this, but like Lierre Keith, you feel better when you eat some animal protein.

Ten. In the end, you find you’re agnostic on the meat issue, but eat meat only twice a month or so because you want to minimize your support of an industry that is cruel to animals. This flexitarian stance makes you feel better and minimizes the guilt that might compel you to become a full vegetarian. One thing you're not agnostic about: Factory farming is unacceptable. If you don’t believe me, watch the documentary Food, Inc.

 

Part Four. Jeffrey Masson's and Peter Singer’s Arguments Against Eating Meat and Experimenting on Animals

 

1.  What is the initial challenge in advocating equal rights for animals? Being looked upon as a joke, a radical, and a freak. Other movements started this way but are now held as mainstream ideas. He uses the example of women’s rights.

2.  Since animals and humans are not the same, what is the basis for equal treatment of animals? They are sentient beings, meaning they suffer, they feel pain, anxiety, trauma. Our empathy revolts at allowing cruelty to be inflicted upon feeling beings. As Alice Walker has said: “I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It’s like…you’re just eating misery. You’re eating a bitter life.”

3.  What does it mean when we say that animals, like humans, have interests? Rights are given to those who have interests, which includes the capacity for suffering and the capacity for joy. We don’t fret the fate of a rock that we kick because the rock has no interests. In contrast, an animal is not “unconscious automata.” All the signs of pain in humans are evident in animals: writhing, screaming, facial contortions, increased pulse rate, elevated levels of stress hormones, etc.

4.  What is a speciesist? The overwhelming majority of humans are speciesists, that is they respect and acknowledge the interests of humans over other animals. Most humans are ready to cause pain to animals for their own benefit. We talk about the sanctity of human life but not animal life, for example. This benefit might include eating animals as food, hunting them for sport, experimenting on them for medical research, fighting them for entertainment, killing them for furniture, car seats, clothing, etc.

5.  If speciesism is morally abhorrent, then can one be good in other areas? Or does the speciesism contaminate the entire being? 

 

Part Five. Three Resources That Refute and Defend Vegetarianism

How to Make a Case Against Vegetarianism

How to Make a Case For Vegetarianism

Common Arguments Against Vegetarianism And How to Answer Them

 

Part 6: Sample Refutation Thesis Statements

 

An example that refutes Masson:

While Jeffrey Masson is a sincere soul with deeply humanitarian concerns about the abuses animals face in factory farms, his plea for us to follow a vegan diet fails to be persuasive because it is too rigid and extreme to be realistic, it is nutritionally unsound, perhaps even dangerous, it assumes, erroneously, that the average person has the resources to eat a varied, healthy vegan diet, which is exceedingly costly, and fails to grasp the important lessons of human evolution, which are built on the killing and cooking of animals. 

A more explicit refutation

Masson's argument fails on many counts, not the least of which are his dogmatic rigid ideology, his moral inconsistencies, his ignorance of the needs of everyday people, and his ignorance of the relationship between animal protein and human evolution. 

A refutation that supports Masson

While we have, as the above thesis claims, evolved to eat meat and while Masson's vegan diet is too rigid and expensive for many, we must do all we can to embrace his humanitarian plea because the vegan diet is essential for our next stage of evolution, which is to eat in a way that saves us from the horrors of factory farming. These horrors include the disease that is spread throughout factory farms, the abject cruelty that animals suffer, the manner in which our abuse toward animals harms us morally and spiritually. Finally, let me conclude my thesis by saying that there are enough nutritional breakthroughs to make a vegan diet affordable and healthy for all. 

A more explicit refutation of Masson's critics.

Those who dismiss Masson's arguments do so at their own peril. They do so at the risk of denouncing their moral integrity; their moral call to treat animals with respect; their susceptibility to animal-born disease, and their foregoing the advantages of a vegan diet. 

 

Lesson #4 for the Vegetarian Debate: Reviewing Both Sides of the Argument

 

 

Part One. Sadism and Brutality: Faulty Comparison?

 

Thesis That Defends Vegetarianism by Refuting the Comparison Meat-Eaters Make Between Humans and Animals

Some argue that we must kill animals for food because killing animals is part of nature. Animals kill animals. And that’s what we do. Tim, a reader from my blog, argues that vegans base their ideals on a false utopia. He writes:

 

I agree that man should be humane in all things, including the manner in which he kills his food. But let me add one little remark that the anti meat-eaters seldom appreciate.

Have you ever gone camping? What do the woods sound like at - say - 2 or 3 AM? To exaggerate a little, they sound like a slaughterhouse. Animals kill and eat other animals. They don't fuss over HOW the killing is done or how MUCH killing is done; they just do it. And it can be pretty horrible. Nature is savage; period.

So, don't forget, vegans, that nature itself is not a serene pacifistic green little utopia, whereas man is an abominable meat-lusting monster. Nature is often brutal and ugly.

In agreement with Tim, is another reader, Angelo. He writes:

I had a crayfish a few years ago---and he would eat "feeder" goldfish thrown in the tank. The "feeders" are sold for a dime each. The crayfish would ambush the goldfish, grab the fish and puncture its gill. Then, with the goldfish struggling, the crayfish would scrape the goldfish's scales off, before beginning to eat. The fish was still alive as the crayfish would chomp down on the tail, body parts, etc. Admittedly on a smaller scale--- that's still worse than electrocuting a cow.

 

But another reader, Shorty, believes comparing nature’s brutality with the brutality animals are subjected to in the slaughterhouses is a false one. He writes:

Nature is indeed savage, but animals seldom kill but for hunger. The animals that get eaten in the wild don't know what it's like to be confined in a pen, wallowing in their own waste - only to die fat and tender. Livestock warehousing, and mass killing will never be vindicated. It will always be a symbol of greed, arrogance, and a barometer of the human condition. Eating meat is OK if you hunt for it in an ethical manner. Otherwise, vegetarianism is the holy grail for me.

 

Animals are obligate carnivores; humans are not entirely; animals eat out of necessity; too many humans eat out of gluttony; animals eat to survive; people kill animals for profit; animals don’t slaughter animals on the mass scale that humans do. Therefore, the comparison between nature’s brutality and man’s brutality is a faulty one and as such it constitutes a logical fallacy.

 

Another Faulty Comparison: Animals Don’t Cause Waste and Pollution the Way Humans Do

1.   Pig waste ruins lakes and rivers.

2.    Cattle feedlots contaminate water over 1,900 times the state’s maximum standard for E. coli in surface waters (Masson).

3.    Raising pigs and cattle (animals don’t raise animals to eat) creates 80 million metric tons of waste nitrogen annually (Masson).

4.    Animal waste is 130 times greater than human waste annually in America (Masson).

5.    Animal waste results in E. coli, Salmonella, and other diarrheal diseases (Masson).

6.    Rain forests are being destroyed to grow soy, but the majority of the soy is used to feed livestock (Masson).

7.    According to the Smithsonian Institution, every  minute land the size of seven football fields is currently being bulldozed to create room for farmed animals and the crops need to feed them (Masson).

8.    Livestock accounts for 18% of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions in carbon dioxide, more than the entire transportation sector of the whole world, including cars, ships, airplanes, and trains (Masson).

 

Another Faulty Comparison: Humans Subject Animals to Horrors on a Mass Scale That Can’t be Compared to Predator and Prey

1.   Humans separate calves from their mothers at birth so mother can give milk for human consumption

2.    Cows are transported in boxcars where they panic.

3.   Chickens like to sunbathe but are doomed to a life of cramped darkness.

4.   Ducks crave water but are doomed to a life of arid dryness.

5.   Hens have their beaks cut off with a hot blade and live their lives in pain from the nerve damage.

6.   Birds raised in pens and kicked so they scatter and are shot at close-range (like Dick Cheney did when he shot someone) requires no skill and suggests a certain amount of sadism. There’s even a business where you can use computer graphics to kill your prey.

7.   Cows are forced to feed on corn, which is cheaper than grass but can’t be digested properly so the cows suffer indigestion and a bacteria count that leads to food-born disease.

8.   One million calves are used for veal every year. They are removed from their mothers and holed up in a small crate, about two-feet wide, with no straw or bedding. They cannot stretch. Mortality rate is 20%. That is their life before being slaughtered.

9.   Pigs tails are cut off with no anesthesia so they don’t bite each other’s tails off during confinement.

10.               Confined, often the pigs go crazy, biting the bars or their own tails, or shaking their heads constantly.

11.               Confined, pigs have elevated levels of cortisol (stress hormone).

12.               Too often, pigs, cows, chickens, and other livestock are still alive on the conveyer belt as pieces of their body are taken apart. They die slowly, piece by piece, and in essence are tortured. The slaughterhouses won’t let you see what is happening.

 

Part Two. The Abuse of Language

1.   Organic is associated with elitist, rich, out-of-touch. Organic may be that in part, but that’s an over simplification.

2.   Veal is French for calf but we don’t want to admit to eating calf.

3.   Pork is French for pig but we say we eat “pork,” not “pig.”

4.   Words like “meat,” “bacon,” and “burger” hide the association with the animal origin.

5.   Downer, an animal that collapses from ill health or is crippled. By law, this animal is not supposed to be slaughtered, but these downers are slaughtered all the time.

6.   Factory farm is euphemism for slaughterhouse

7.   Fresh food: According to USDA “fresh” chicken can be frozen and for any length of time. What?

8.   Processing: euphemism for slaughter and butchery

9.   Radical, anyone who doesn’t agree with you or challenges your beliefs or challenges your capacity for denial.

10.               Sportsman, a euphemism for someone who sadistically hunts and tortures animals.

 

 

Part Three. Example of a Thesis That Refutes Factory Farming by a Meat-Eating Omnivore

Let's be clear. I am a failed vegetarian, a man for whom the vegetarian diet left me weak and so hungry that I overate carbs until I gained lots of weight to the point that I was saddled by corpulence. So let's put this on the table: I eat animal protein. Having confessed my carnivorous ways, let me say here that I am morally revolted by factory farming and that I am prepared to refute with all my heart and soul the major arguments that factory farm apologists use to defend the abominations that ensue in 99% of the slaughterhouses. 

The central weakness of the farm factory apologists is their specious claim that we are entitled to brutalize animals since brutality is the norm in nature. Comparing farm factory slaughter with animal-on-animal slaughter is an egregious comparison wrought with many fallacies. First, animals kill for hunger while farm factories kill for profit. Second, the scale of brutality in the farm factory far surpasses that which occurs in nature. Third, the amount of waste farm factories impose on the environment cannot be compared to the almost nonexistent waste that occurs in the animal world. Fourth, farm factory butcheries spread disease like E.coli on a mass scale whereas in Nature such spread of contagion does not occur. Revealing this faulty comparison for the outlandish fraud that it is, what are meat eaters like me to do? Surely, the answer lies in trying to eat meat that comes from non-farm factory sources, such as meat labeled "organic" and "sustainable." 

 

 

Part Four. Refuting the Vegetarian Diet

While I concede that there is way too much mindless cruelty in the factory farming of animals, we must not obfuscate the truth, namely, that the vegetarian diet does not provide optimum nutrition. The omnivore diet, which includes meat eating, is defensible from an evolutionary, biological, and nutritional point of view.

Essay’s First Page

Summarize the book’s major arguments that support a vegetarian or vegan diet for animal rights. 

Essay’s Second Page

If after reading the book, you are not convinced that you should “convert” to vegetarianism or veganism, you may want to defend an omnivore diet. To write a defense of the omnivore diet (which includes meat eating), one would have to concede that the current system of factory farming needs reform and that the system is changed. Also one would concede that people eat too much meat but that the solution is not the elimination of meat eating but the reduction of it. One will cut down from the national average of meat consumption (200 pounds) to approximately one-third of that (70 pounds). One would concede that that 70 pounds of meat would be as organic and sustainable as much as possible even at the higher costs. This section would take about a page.

Essay’s Final Four Pages In Which You Support Your Thesis Mapping Statements

 

You would have to argue that the vegan diet is not optimum nutrition and may even be dangerous, especially for pregnant woman and newborns. You might look to Nina Planck in her New York Times article or her book Real Food. Or you might look to Lierre Keith’s book The Vegetarian Myth or her book excerpt from her website.

 

Part Two. Other Sources That Challenge the Vegan/Vegetarian Diet

Weston A. Price Foundation

Nina Planck Interview

Death by Veganism Updates

Meat Eating Was Essential to Human Evolution

Evolving to Eat Mush

Paleo Diet

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Evolution by Fire

Home Economics and Evolution

How Our Vegan Diet Made Us Ill

In Defense of Meat

In Defense of Meat Eaters, Parts 1 and 2

In Defense of Meat and Fire

An Animal's Place

Nutritional Arguments:

1. Replacing animal protein with soy can be dangerous and soy doesn't digest in terms of elevated estrogen as well as animal protein. 

2. You can't get B12 without animal protein. Supplements are inferior to real food.

3. You get inferior amino acids from plant protein even when you mix them to create "complete proteins" like combining rice and beans or peanut butter and wheat.

4. You get more concentrated nutrition with cooked meat than raw plants. 

 

Lesson #3 for the Vegetarian Debate: Moral Relativism and Denial (third revision)

 

 

 Grammar and Spell Check: Find the Errors in the Following Paragraph

Jeffrey Masson would have us embrace his vegan ideology, however, such an ideology; which entails eliminating all animal products, requires a commitment that few of us our willing to muster. Although, I applaud Masson's compassion for animals; I must repute his strict vegan ideals, indeed, a strict diet is actually harmful for our health. Especially children and the elderly, moreover, the sickly are at a particular risk when implementing a vegan diet. Because the vegan diet lacks essential amino acids for maintaining the human immune system. We must not; however, dismiss everything that Masson writes, after all, he is correct about the environmental pollution rendered from factory farming, therefore we should not mock Masson instead we should look carefully at the legitimate aspects of his reasoning.

 

 

 

Refutation Thesis Example That Refutes the Meat-Eating Diet

 

McMahon’s thesis

While I concede that the vegetarian diet can be refuted on biological, evolutionary, and nutritional grounds, I cannot accept the reckless barbarism and cruelty that many meat eating arguments try to ignore or sweep under the carpet. That we may need to eat meat doesn’t excuse our torture and brutality against animals. We must fight to reform the meat industry. That the vegetarian, and especially the vegan diet, may be lacking in vital nutrients does not excuse our woeful treatment of animals. That we are dependent on animal products in so many ways does not excuse the cruelty we inflict upon them. Any legitimate arguments against the vegetarian or vegan lifestyle in terms of nutrition do nothing to dissuade me from believing that our current slaughterhouse system is a moral abomination in four ways: The current slaughterhouse factories for chickens, cows, pigs, and other livestock are built on moral relativism, mindless denial (willed ignorance), dishonest language, and outright sadism. 

  

Example of a Thesis That Refutes Vegetarian Diet with mapping components (the reasons you use to support your argument)

 

 

While we must struggle to minimize animal abuse, we must not be persuaded to become vegetarians, or even worse vegans, for diets excluding animal proteins violates our evolution and optimum nutrition. 

First Research Point: Most vegan diets are embraced by adolescents who suffer eating disorders.

Second Research Point: Entire families who "go vegan" become ill. 

Third Research Point: A vegetarian diet is contrary to human evolution. 

Fourth Research Point: Cooking meat gave humans an evolutionary advantage according to Catching Fire. 

 

Research Point 5: Some sects of vegetarianism, especially veganism, are like shrill religious cults in which even vegetarians who don't embrace the vegan orthodoxy are demonized. 

  Part Two. Pro-Vegetarian Argument: Moral Relativism as a Logical and Moral Fallacy in the Way We Treat Animals

 

 

1.   Moral relativism means we change the rules whenever we deem a rule change suits our purposes. For example, we’re kind to our dog, we feel sympathy when our dog or other pet suffers, we would not cook our pet, but then we brutalize and cook other animals. There’s no consistency here. We choose to have empathy for one animal and not another. Pigs are smarter than dogs, but we subject pigs to a life crammed in a pen where they gnaw the cage, cry, weep, and then cry like babies as they’re slaughtered, skinned, dunked in boiling water while they’re still alive, etc.

2.   Moral relativism leads to abuse of power. If a man demands fidelity from his wife but changes the rules for himself so than he commit infidelities, then he is abusing his power. Likewise, if we say decency demands laws against abusing and neglecting pets, to abuse livestock for our eating is an abuse of power. Failure to be consistent compromises our integrity as human beings.

3.   Moral absolutism establishes a clear difference between fair, rightful power vs. abusive power. Treating animals like unfeeling commodities to make the “bottom-line” or maximize profits is a clear abuse of power. To make more money, chickens and turkeys are fattened with drugs so they can’t walk or reproduce and kept inside dark cages where they cannot move for their brief lives.

4.   Our moral code for many of us teaches moderation over excess. But the way we treat animals, so terrified of their torture than most of us DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO THEM BEFORE THEY SHOW UP ON OUR PLATE, that we can only eat animals through willed ignorance. A clean, quick kill might be acceptable, but the well-chronicled abuses in the slaughterhouses are excessive and therefore contradict any absolute moral code.

 

Part Three. Mindless Denial as Logical and Moral Fallacy That Supports the Mindless Killing of Animals

1.   If we have to live in darkness to continue with our life as it is, something is wrong. Say a man knows in his heart that his wife is cheating on him but he forces himself to “not know” so he can stay married and not confront her, for he’s afraid that a confrontation would cause her leave him. Or parents may know their son is taking drugs but they will ignorance because to know the truth is too painful for them. To live in darkness is fueled by moral cowardice. The hunter who quickly kills his animal and prepares his own meat does not live in darkness. He knows what his meat eating entails. But the average consumer buys packaged meat and does not want to know what happens in the slaughterhouse. This is willed ignorance and it is the result of moral cowardice and laziness.

2.   Children can’t will ignorance like adults can, according to Jeffrey Masson, author of The Face on Your Plate. When a family eats chicken, and someone says “Pass me a leg,” or “Pass me a thigh,” children recognize they’re eating an animal and often become disgusted.

3.   Bill Buford says people don’t want to think of “meat” as an animal, a beast that was terrified before death, struggled during its butchering, was skinned, bled out, and chopped up. They want to see “meat” as an abstraction.

4.   Tamara Murphy, a famous chef, delivered eleven freshly killed piglets to her restaurant. She adopted the piglets at birth and made sure not name them so she wouldn’t get too attached before she took the piglets to the slaughterhouse. The piglets trusted her and greeted her with joy when she visited them so that when she took them to the slaughterhouse, she felt she had betrayed them. Her denial won out, however, for she wrote an article for her blog titled “Celebration of the Life of a Pig.” What do we learn from this? Never underestimate the power of denial.

5.   Many of us have deep love, care, and sympathy for companion animals and wild life, but we cut off that sympathy for farm animals. How? Some, like Jeffrey Masson, argue this cutting off of sympathy requires denial.

6.   In the documentary Food, Inc.we see a crippled cow, called a “downer,” being bull-dozed by a tractor into a slaughterhouse and it moans and cries. Some of us could not eat that cow’s slaughtered flesh. Some of us could go into denial and enjoy its meat.

7.   Familiarity, being used to something all of our lives, seems “normal” so we can deny its brutality. Think of someone who grew up with dog fighting or cock fighting. These brutal, barbarian “sports” would seem “normal.”

8.    Denial is often used because we’re too lazy and apathetic to disturb the status quo, which means “the way things are.” We say to ourselves, “Why should I inconvenience myself? I want my life to roll along just the way it is.”

9.   Many meat eaters become hostile and defensive when asked to discuss slaughterhouses. Defensiveness is a sign of guilt from a person who is in denial and who lacks a “clean conscience.”

10.               Denial is a form of disassociation. Many children cannot associate or link their McNuggets with the “cute” little chick they see on TV.

11.               The denial of animal suffering rests upon keeping the slaughterhouses remote, distant, and hidden. No meat company allows filming of what goes on. It has to be kept secret. Any video footage we get is done undercover. This is strong evidence that there is something bad that has to be hidden.

 

Sample Thesis That Counter-argues common arguments in favor of vegetarianism.

 

While the vegetarian argument is built on noble aspirations and makes a convincing case for reforming the cruelties and abominations that take place on factory farms, the vegetarian diet does not provide optimum nutrition. First, we must consider we have evolved into omnivores and as such we have a biological/evolutionary need for some animal protein; second, we must consider that there is an abundance of evidence that points to malnutrition and even death that infants suffer who are forced by their parents to eat a vegan diet; third, we must consider there is a strong link between the vegetarian diet and obesity and related metabolic syndrome as a result of relying too much on agricultural, carbohydrate-laden foods.

 

Sample Thesis That Counter-argues an Anti-Vegetarian Position

While I concede that there are many advantages to a meat-eating diet, these advantages are off-set by several factors, which include the inevitable cruelty that animals suffer as we try to feed a world of billions of people; the environmental devastation that occurs when we reserve the Earth’s land for grazing livestock animals; the environmental damage that occurs from the animal waste that cannot be adequately refined at factory farms; and the myriad of diseases that are spread from farm factory animals. 

A Third Example

The brilliant lecturer Jeff McMahon has apprised us of the intractable conflict between the dangers of the vegetarian diet and indiscriminate meat eating as he successfully shows that the only solution to this conflict is to eat organic, sustainable animal protein. Such an eating program is the only viable way to eat because _____________, _________________, _______________, and ___________________. 

Thesis 4

Is McMahon "brilliant"? Balderdash. His argument for killing animals in an "organic setting" rests on so many illusions that he has been stripped of any intellectual credibility. His illusions are too numerous to cover in their entirety, but we can begin by focusing on McMahon's most egregious critical thinking lapses, which include the fact that it is impossible to feed the world with the organic process; _________________, ______________, _________________, and _____________________.

Class Exercise: Write two thesis statements: one that refutes Masson and one that refutes Masson's critics

 

Class Activity:

Write a thesis that refutes the vegetarian diet or one that includes eating meat. Then write a list of 4 or 5 reasons for supporting your thesis.

 

 

 

 

 

Lesson #2 for the Vegetarian Debate: Is Killing Animals for Our Pleasure Good for Our Soul? (Third Revision)

 

 

 

Part  One. Writing Your Essay based on Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation

 

For your essay to be successful, you will have to use a refutation argumentative style. In doing so, I suggest you begin my summarizing, in about one page, Masson’s major arguments. Be sure to include what you think are the strengths, weaknesses, and fallacies, if any, in his claims and arguments.

 

Then begin your thesis paragraph that will either defend or refute Singer using a REFUTATION ARGUMENT MODEL. You will find 5 arguments that your opponents rely on to contradict your position and you show how your opponents’ arguments, point by point, can be refuted. What if during your thinking about the topic and your research you find yourself agreeing with your opponents? THEN CHANGE YOUR POSITION.

 

In your thesis paragraph write your opponents’ major claims against your position and write how you will refute those claims.

 

Your body paragraphs will correspond to your point by point refutations of your opponents. Your conclusion will be a restatement of your thesis.

 

For this essay, you will NEED MORE RESEARCH THAN YOUR OTHER ESSAYS: A MINIMUM OF 5 SOURCES, BOTH PRIMARY AND SECONDARY. Remember: Give your essay a catchy, salient title.

 

One way to write a convincing refutation is to avoid common logical fallacies and to point out these fallacies in your opponents' arguments.

Common Fallacies to avoid in your refutation and to point out in your opponents' views. 

 

Part Two. Common Arguments in Support of the Vegetarian’s Position

1.   Meat eating diet is based on backward cultural traditions that some vegetarians equate with slavery. This is controversial. Many are offended by the analogy.

2.   We’re not obligate carnivores like some animals. We can choose to eat in ways that don’t result in cruelty to animals. This is controversial. Many argue that our evolution and optimum health are based on killing and eating meat.

3.   Animals are sentient, which means they feel and suffer. It’s our moral duty to minimize suffering in the world. The controversy here is that plants may be conscious. Where do we draw the line? Can’t we kill a rat that is in our baby’s room?

4.   Raising plant protein is more efficient than raising animal protein. This is controversial. Some studies show that plowing fields for agriculture result in killing the native wildlife.

5.   Raising animal protein creates far more pollution and devastation to the environment than does raising plant protein. I haven’t seen any arguments to refute this.

 

Part Three. Common Arguments Against the Vegetarian Position

1.   Humans have a biological, evolutionary, nutritional dependence on some animal protein and fat according to many, including Nina Plank, author of "Death by Veganism."

2.   To help the environment, the issue isn’t meat or plants; it’s what is local. See Amazon review of The Face on Your Plate by Ted Kerasote.

3.   Bovine animals are often still alive while jungle cats eat their entrails. Eating and being eaten are part of the necessary cycle of nature, cruelty not withstanding. This is controversial. The jungle cat acts on instinct. We have choices to not be cruel and two wrongs don’t make a right.

4.   Agriculture devastates the environment more than hunting, but not factory farming.

5.   We’re dependent on animal products beyond food: glue, gel capsules, leather clothes, furniture, etc. Where do we draw the line?

 

Part Four. Another Argument in Favor of Vegetarianism: The Preservation of Our Soul.

 

1.   Brutality against animals coarsens (toughens) our soul and in some ways encourages sadism.

2.   Greed affects our ill treatment of animals: To cheapen production costs, we torture and mutilate animals. Vegetarianism isn't the exclusive realm of some liberal fringe, some Southern California "lifestyle elitists." See the essay“Fear Factories” by Matthew Scully. And see George F. Will’s essay “What We Owe What We Eat.”

3.   To treat animals as we do for our benefit, we kill our empathy through willed ignorance and this kills the core of our humanity.

 

 

Sample Thesis That Counter-argues common arguments in favor of vegetarianism.

 

While the vegetarian argument is built on noble aspirations and makes a convincing case for reforming the cruelties and abominations that take place on factory farms, the vegetarian diet does not provide optimum nutrition. First, we must consider we have evolved into omnivores and as such we have a biological/evolutionary need for some animal protein; second, we must consider that there is an abundance of evidence that points to malnutrition and even death that infants suffer who are forced by their parents to eat a vegan diet; third, we must consider there is a strong link between the vegetarian diet and obesity and related metabolic syndrome as a result of relying too much on agricultural, carbohydrate-laden foods.

 

Sample Thesis That Counter-argues an Anti-Vegetarian Position

While I concede that there are many advantages to a meat-eating diet, these advantages are off-set by several factors, which include the inevitable cruelty that animals suffer as we try to feed a world of billions of people; the environmental devastation that occurs when we reserve the Earth’s land for grazing livestock animals; the environmental damage that occurs from the animal waste that cannot be adequately refined at factory farms; and the myriad of diseases that are spread from farm factory animals. 

A Third Example

The brilliant lecturer Jeff McMahon has apprised us of the intractable conflict between the dangers of the vegetarian diet and indiscriminate meat eating as he successfully shows that the only solution to this conflict is to eat organic, sustainable animal protein. Such an eating program is the only viable way to eat because _____________, _________________, _______________, and ___________________. 

Thesis 4

Is McMahon "brilliant"? Balderdash. His argument for killing animals in an "organic setting" rests on so many illusions that he has been stripped of any intellectual credibility. His illusions are too numerous to cover in their entirety, but we can begin by focusing on McMahon's most egregious critical thinking lapses, which include the fact that it is impossible to feed the world with the organic process; _________________, ______________, _________________, and _____________________.

Class Exercise: Write two thesis statements: one that refutes Masson and one that refutes Masson's critics

 

 

 

 

Vegetarian Debate Lesson #1: Overview (Second Revision September 2010)

 

Part One: Your Essay Assignment

One. Based on The Face on Your Plate

 For your essay to be successful, you will have to use a refutation argumentative style. In doing so, I suggest you begin my summarizing, in about one page, Masson’s major arguments, Be sure to include what you think are the strengths, weaknesses, and fallacies, if any, in his claims and arguments.

 

Then begin your thesis paragraph that will either defend or refute Masson using a REFUTATION ARGUMENT MODEL. You will find 5 arguments that your opponents rely on to contradict your position and you show how your opponents’ arguments, point by point, can be refuted. What if during your thinking about the topic and your research you find yourself agreeing with your opponents? THEN CHANGE YOUR POSITION.

 

In your thesis paragraph write your opponents’ major claims against your position and write how you will refute those claims.

 

Your body paragraphs will correspond to your point by point refutations of your opponents. Your conclusion will be a restatement of your thesis.

 

For this essay, you will NEED MORE RESEARCH THAN YOUR OTHER ESSAYS: A MINIMUM OF 5 SOURCES, BOTH PRIMARY AND SECONDARY. Remember: Give your essay a catchy, salient title.

Two. Open-ended Option for Vegetarian Debate:

Defend or refute the author's main arguments using a refutation essay model. Same research requirements above. 

 

A word about intellectual rigor: Don't approach the essay with a preconceived thesis based on your biases and eating habits.

Rather, begin your essay with a tabula rasa, a blank slate, having no preconceived notions, and let your research and intellectual struggle determine your argumentative position.  

 

 

 

Part Two. Reasons We Eat Meat

1.   Family traditions. We learn what to eat from our family first and culture second.

2.   Faith. Some eat meat because it’s encouraged from their holy book.

3.   Some people crave meat. The vegetarian Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, admits he still salivates upon smelling barbecued meat. Some research indicates that animal protein is superior to plant protein and as such animal protein satisfies the appetite in ways plant protein cannot. 

4.   We’re able to compartmentalize. This means while we love eating meat, we don’t want to know about how the animals are killed. We go into a state of mind called “willed denial.” Another way of putting it: Our left hand doesn't know what our right hand is doing.

Vegan rock star Paul McCartney said “If there were glass walls on the slaughterhouses,  everyone would be a vegetarian.”

5.   We become convinced that the science backs up the idea of an omnivore diet, including meat eating, for optimal nutrition. Nina Planck, author of Real Food, and Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth, are leading proponents of meat-eating. The human brain needs animal amino acids and fats. However, it should be pointed out these women do not eat factory-killed animals. My doctor supports their view as well.

6.   Some people eat meat because when they tried to be vegetarian, they got super hungry and gained a lot of weight. It seems animal protein fills us up for longer periods of time. When we don’t eat meat, we “carb out.”

7. We live in a state of learned denial according to Masson, the author of The Face on Your Plate. 

Part Two. Arguments for Being a Vegetarian or a Vegan: Humanitarian, Environmental, Nutritional (most controversial)

One. Argument of sentience. Animals feel pain. We should afford them the same humanitarian concern, to be spared from pain, that we afford ourselves. Part of the sentience argument rests on empathy. Should we empathize with animals’ pain?

Two. Danger of compartmentalizing morality. Can you be kind to humans but cruel to animals? Or is there a link? And if there is no link, are we dealing with disassociative personality disorder? How does that speak to integrity?

Three. The argument of Carnism or speciesism, which says we can abuse animals as we please or as we see fit for our perceived benefit. Carnism or speciesism is, according to many vegans, a moral flaw.

Four. The sadistic argument. A lot of “research” has predictable results and suggest an unconscious cruelty at the very least.

Five. Indoctrination argument. See Chapter 2, page 70 in Singer. See Eating Animals and the use of language.

Six. Farm factory argument. See Jonathan Safran Foer. 99% of meat comes from factories with all their horrors and abuses.

Seven. The Glass Wall or Willed Ignorance Argument. Also called Willed Denial. See Eating Animals and the use of language. The misuse of language.

Eight. The Efficiency Argument, which is in the realm of the environment. A meat-eating diet is more harmful to the environment than a vegetarian one.

Nine. The Nutritional Argument, the most controversial because of conflicting data.

Ten. The Story Argument. How we eat determines the story we tell to ourselves and our children. Our stories define who we are.

Part Three. Impediments to Being a Vegetarian or a Vegan.

One. Your family, on your side and your spouse’s side, are not vegetarians and to reject their meaty meals is in a way to reject your family, its traditions, its intimacies. You may even be scorned, shunned, and looked at as a “weirdo,” a misfit, and a malcontent.

Two. Your spouse eats meat so your not eating it carries implicit condemnation of his or her eating habits. Eating is part of your intimate bond with your spouse. You don’t want there to be a wedge between you two in this regard.

Three. Not eating meat and its place eating rice and beans and such, you find yourself eating more calories a day because a vegetarian diet doesn’t fill you up as much as a much as a meat-eating one. While some lose weight when they convert to vegetarianism, you blow up and become rather pudgy.

Four. There is the whole soy issue with some warning of its dangers, which are analyzed in detail; however, you also know that these findings are disputed. Nevertheless, not knowing who to believe, you are concerned about the dangers of soy.

Five. There are those who write that from an evolutionary standpoint, you need to eat some meat, including Nina Planck, Lierre Keith, and the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Six. You suffer from meat lust. Your most indelible food memories are the salivations that occurred during childhood barbecues. To this day, the smell of barbecued meats intoxicates you to levels of euphoria that you cannot deny.

Seven. You realize that milk and eggs result in animal cruelty so that vegetarianism, a relatively easy “lifestyle choice,” doesn’t fully absolve you of your guilt. You must be a vegan, and this entails an effort and a circumspection that you find too rigorous.

Eight. You and your spouse want children and read literature about the need for some animal protein to maximize fertility.

Nine. You hate to acknowledge this, but like Lierre Keith, you feel better when you eat some animal protein.

Ten. In the end, you find you’re agnostic on the meat issue, but eat meat only twice a month or so because you want to minimize your support of an industry that is cruel to animals. This flexitarian stance makes you feel better and minimizes the guilt that might compel you to become a full vegetarian. One thing you're not agnostic about: Factory farming is unacceptable. If you don’t believe me, watch the documentary Food, Inc.

 

Part Four. Jeffrey Masson's and Peter Singer’s Arguments Against Eating Meat and Experimenting on Animals

 

1.  What is the initial challenge in advocating equal rights for animals? Being looked upon as a joke, a radical, and a freak. Other movements started this way but are now held as mainstream ideas. He uses the example of women’s rights.

2.  Since animals and humans are not the same, what is the basis for equal treatment of animals? They are sentient beings, meaning they suffer, they feel pain, anxiety, trauma. Our empathy revolts at allowing cruelty to be inflicted upon feeling beings. As Alice Walker has said: “I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It’s like…you’re just eating misery. You’re eating a bitter life.”

3.  What does it mean when we say that animals, like humans, have interests? Rights are given to those who have interests, which includes the capacity for suffering and the capacity for joy. We don’t fret the fate of a rock that we kick because the rock has no interests. In contrast, an animal is not “unconscious automata.” All the signs of pain in humans are evident in animals: writhing, screaming, facial contortions, increased pulse rate, elevated levels of stress hormones, etc.

4.  What is a speciesist? The overwhelming majority of humans are speciesists, that is they respect and acknowledge the interests of humans over other animals. Most humans are ready to cause pain to animals for their own benefit. We talk about the sanctity of human life but not animal life, for example. This benefit might include eating animals as food, hunting them for sport, experimenting on them for medical research, fighting them for entertainment, killing them for furniture, car seats, clothing, etc.

5.  If speciesism is morally abhorrent, then can one be good in other areas? Or does the speciesism contaminate the entire being? 

 

Part Five. Three Resources That Refute and Defend Vegetarianism

How to Make a Case Against Vegetarianism

How to Make a Case For Vegetarianism

Common Arguments Against Vegetarianism And How to Answer Them

 

Part 6: Sample Refutation Thesis Statements

 

An example that refutes Masson:

While Jeffrey Masson is a sincere soul with deeply humanitarian concerns about the abuses animals face in factory farms, his plea for us to follow a vegan diet fails to be persuasive because it is too rigid and extreme to be realistic, it is nutritionally unsound, perhaps even dangerous, it assumes, erroneously, that the average person has the resources to eat a varied, healthy vegan diet, which is exceedingly costly, and fails to grasp the important lessons of human evolution, which are built on the killing and cooking of animals. 

A more explicit refutation

Masson's argument fails on many counts, not the least of which are his dogmatic rigid ideology, his moral inconsistencies, his ignorance of the needs of everyday people, and his ignorance of the relationship between animal protein and human evolution. 

A refutation that supports Masson

While we have, as the above thesis claims, evolved to eat meat and while Masson's vegan diet is too rigid and expensive for many, we must do all we can to embrace his humanitarian plea because the vegan diet is essential for our next stage of evolution, which is to eat in a way that saves us from the horrors of factory farming. These horrors include the disease that is spread throughout factory farms, the abject cruelty that animals suffer, the manner in which our abuse toward animals harms us morally and spiritually. Finally, let me conclude my thesis by saying that there are enough nutritional breakthroughs to make a vegan diet affordable and healthy for all. 

A more explicit refutation of Masson's critics.

Those who dismiss Masson's arguments do so at their own peril. They do so at the risk of denouncing their moral integrity; their moral call to treat animals with respect; their susceptibility to animal-born disease, and their foregoing the advantages of a vegan diet. 

Lesson #4 for the Vegetarian Debate: Sadism, Brutality, and the Misuse of Language (First Revision)

 

 

Part One. Sadism and Brutality: Faulty Comparison?

Thesis That Defends Vegetarianism by Refuting the Comparison Meat-Eaters Make Between Humans and Animals

Some argue that we must kill animals for food because killing animals is part of nature. Animals kill animals. And that’s what we do. Tim, a reader from my blog, argues that vegans base their ideals on a false utopia. He writes:

 

I agree that man should be humane in all things, including the manner in which he kills his food. But let me add one little remark that the anti meat-eaters seldom appreciate.

Have you ever gone camping? What do the woods sound like at - say - 2 or 3 AM? To exaggerate a little, they sound like a slaughterhouse. Animals kill and eat other animals. They don't fuss over HOW the killing is done or how MUCH killing is done; they just do it. And it can be pretty horrible. Nature is savage; period.

So, don't forget, vegans, that nature itself is not a serene pacifistic green little utopia, whereas man is an abominable meat-lusting monster. Nature is often brutal and ugly.

In agreement with Tim, is another reader, Angelo. He writes:

I had a crayfish a few years ago---and he would eat "feeder" goldfish thrown in the tank. The "feeders" are sold for a dime each. The crayfish would ambush the goldfish, grab the fish and puncture its gill. Then, with the goldfish struggling, the crayfish would scrape the goldfish's scales off, before beginning to eat. The fish was still alive as the crayfish would chomp down on the tail, body parts, etc. Admittedly on a smaller scale--- that's still worse than electrocuting a cow.

 

But another reader, Shorty, believes comparing nature’s brutality with the brutality animals are subjected to in the slaughterhouses is a false one. He writes:

Nature is indeed savage, but animals seldom kill but for hunger. The animals that get eaten in the wild don't know what it's like to be confined in a pen, wallowing in their own waste - only to die fat and tender. Livestock warehousing, and mass killing will never be vindicated. It will always be a symbol of greed, arrogance, and a barometer of the human condition. Eating meat is OK if you hunt for it in an ethical manner. Otherwise, vegetarianism is the holy grail for me.

 

Animals are obligate carnivores; humans are not entirely; animals eat out of necessity; too many humans eat out of gluttony; animals eat to survive; people kill animals for profit; animals don’t slaughter animals on the mass scale that humans do. Therefore, the comparison between nature’s brutality and man’s brutality is a faulty one and as such it constitutes a logical fallacy.

 

Another Faulty Comparison: Animals Don’t Cause Waste and Pollution the Way Humans Do

1.   Pig waste ruins lakes and rivers.

2.    Cattle feedlots contaminate water over 1,900 times the state’s maximum standard for E. coli in surface waters (Masson).

3.    Raising pigs and cattle (animals don’t raise animals to eat) creates 80 million metric tons of waste nitrogen annually (Masson).

4.    Animal waste is 130 times greater than human waste annually in America (Masson).

5.    Animal waste results in E. coli, Salmonella, and other diarrheal diseases (Masson).

6.    Rain forests are being destroyed to grow soy, but the majority of the soy is used to feed livestock (Masson).

7.    According to the Smithsonian Institution, every  minute land the size of seven football fields is currently being bulldozed to create room for farmed animals and the crops need to feed them (Masson).

8.    Livestock accounts for 18% of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions in carbon dioxide, more than the entire transportation sector of the whole world, including cars, ships, airplanes, and trains (Masson).

 

Another Faulty Comparison: Humans Subject Animals to Horrors on a Mass Scale That Can’t be Compared to Predator and Prey

1.   Humans separate calves from their mothers at birth so mother can give milk for human consumption

2.    Cows are transported in boxcars where they panic.

3.   Chickens like to sunbathe but are doomed to a life of cramped darkness.

4.   Ducks crave water but are doomed to a life of arid dryness.

5.   Hens have their beaks cut off with a hot blade and live their lives in pain from the nerve damage.

6.   Birds raised in pens and kicked so they scatter and are shot at close-range (like Dick Cheney did when he shot someone) requires no skill and suggests a certain amount of sadism. There’s even a business where you can use computer graphics to kill your prey.

7.   Cows are forced to feed on corn, which is cheaper than grass but can’t be digested properly so the cows suffer indigestion and a bacteria count that leads to food-born disease.

8.   One million calves are used for veal every year. They are removed from their mothers and holed up in a small crate, about two-feet wide, with no straw or bedding. They cannot stretch. Mortality rate is 20%. That is their life before being slaughtered.

9.   Pigs tails are cut off with no anesthesia so they don’t bite each other’s tails off during confinement.

10.               Confined, often the pigs go crazy, biting the bars or their own tails, or shaking their heads constantly.

11.               Confined, pigs have elevated levels of cortisol (stress hormone).

12.               Too often, pigs, cows, chickens, and other livestock are still alive on the conveyer belt as pieces of their body are taken apart. They die slowly, piece by piece, and in essence are tortured. The slaughterhouses won’t let you see what is happening.

 

Part Two. The Abuse of Language

1.   Organic is associated with elitist, rich, out-of-touch. Organic may be that in part, but that’s an over simplification.

2.   Veal is French for calf but we don’t want to admit to eating calf.

3.   Pork is French for pig but we say we eat “pork,” not “pig.”

4.   Words like “meat,” “bacon,” and “burger” hide the association with the animal origin.

5.   Downer, an animal that collapses from ill health or is crippled. By law, this animal is not supposed to be slaughtered, but these downers are slaughtered all the time.

6.   Factory farm is euphemism for slaughterhouse

7.   Fresh food: According to USDA “fresh” chicken can be frozen and for any length of time. What?

8.   Processing: euphemism for slaughter and butchery

9.   Radical, anyone who doesn’t agree with you or challenges your beliefs or challenges your capacity for denial.

10.               Sportsman, a euphemism for someone who sadistically hunts and tortures animals.

 

 

Part Three. Example of a Thesis That Refutes Factory Farming by a Meat-Eating Omnivore

Let's be clear. I am a failed vegetarian, a man for whom the vegetarian diet left me weak and so hungry that I overate carbs until I gained lots of weight to the point that I was saddled by corpulence. So let's put this on the table: I eat animal protein. Having confessed my carnivorous ways, let me say here that I am morally revolted by factory farming and that I am prepared to refute with all my heart and soul the major arguments that factory farm apologists use to defend the abominations that ensue in 99% of the slaughterhouses. 

The central weakness of the farm factory apologists is their specious claim that we are entitled to brutalize animals since brutality is the norm in nature. Comparing farm factory slaughter with animal-on-animal slaughter is anegregious comparison wrought with many fallacies. First, animals kill for hunger while farm factories kill for profit. Second, the scale of brutality in the farm factory far surpasses that which occurs in nature. Third, the amount of waste farm factories impose on the environment cannot be compared to the almost nonexistent waste that occurs in the animal world. Fourth, farm factory butcheries spread disease like E.coli on a mass scale whereas in Nature such spread of contagion does not occur. Revealing this faulty comparison for the outlandish fraud that it is, what are meat eaters like me to do? Surely, the answer lies in trying to eat meat that comes from non-farm factory sources, such as meat labeled "organic" and "sustainable." 

Part Four. Refuting the Vegetarian Diet

While I concede that there is way too much mindless cruelty in the factory farming of animals, we must not obfuscate the truth, namely, that the vegetarian diet does not provide optimum nutrition. The omnivore diet, which includes meat eating, is defensible from an evolutionary, biological, and nutritional point of view.

Essay’s First Page

Summarize the book’s major arguments that support a vegetarian or vegan diet for animal rights. Since I rotate the books, your book might be Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, The Face On Your Plate by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer or Dominion by Matthew Scully.

 

Essay’s Second Page

If after reading the book, you are not convinced that you should “convert” to vegetarianism or veganism, you may want to defend an omnivore diet. To write a defense of the omnivore diet (which includes meat eating), one would have to concede that the current system of factory farming needs reform and that the system is changed. Also one would concede that people eat too much meat but that the solution is not the elimination of meat eating but the reduction of it. One will cut down from the national average of meat consumption (200 pounds) to approximately one-third of that (70 pounds). One would concede that that 70 pounds of meat would be as organic and sustainable as much as possible even at the higher costs. This section would take about a page.

Essay’s Final Four Pages In Which You Support Your Thesis Mapping Statements

 

You would have to argue that the vegan diet is not optimum nutrition and may even be dangerous, especially for pregnant woman and newborns. You might look to Nina Planck in her New York Times article or her book Real Food. Or you might look to Lierre Keith’s book The Vegetarian Myth or her book excerpt from her website.

 

Part Two. Other Sources That Challenge the Vegan/Vegetarian Diet

Weston A. Price Foundation

Nina Planck Interview

Death by Veganism Updates

Meat Eating Was Essential to Human Evolution

Evolving to Eat Mush

Paleo Diet

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Evolution by Fire

Home Economics and Evolution

How Our Vegan Diet Made Us Ill

In Defense of Meat

In Defense of Meat Eaters, Parts 1 and 2

In Defense of Meat and Fire

An Animal's Place

 

 

 

In Defense of Meat Eating Links

In Defense of Meat

In Defense of Meat Eaters, Parts 1 and 2

In Defense of Meat and Fire

An Animal's Place