I looked at two pieces of media.The first was a video about factory farm abuse in Ohio. Employees would beat, and hit animals with pitch forks.In the other piece of media, it told the story of two men that were camping and decided that they were hungry. They stole a baby calf and shot it with an arrow and sliced its neck.
In the first piece I feel that Beating and stabbing cows with a pitch fork is no better than the conditions with in a farm factory. Most animals with in a factory farm are already placed in horrible conditions in which they fight with other animals causing death or health problems. There are other forms of cruelty to the factory farm animals that are around the same level. In an article by Jim mason and Mary Finelli called "Brave New Farm", they describe the harsh realities of factory farm conditions. For example, many chickens are caused stress by their by "the crowded,poorly ventilated sheds.[Because of this] Birds pecked each other to death and ate their remains...[this] could be reduced by burning off the tips of chickens' beaks with a blowtorch"(Mason 159). Usually this causes chickens pain for many months or longer. Chickens have lots of nerves within their beaks. This action of debeaking causes longer pain than beating an cow. Another example of cruelty near the same extent is among veal and "beef cattle" practices. After a day of having been given birth to, many calves are taken from their mothers and placed in veal crates or wooden stalls. They are "confined to a space scarcely larger than his own body, and is tied at the neck to restrict movement further"(Mason 162). These calves are practically starved for a living to keep their skin white because that is a higher valued product. The reason the neck is tethered is because the farmers do not want them to eat the iron from their own secretion. The skin will turn more brown and have less value in the veal market. For beef cattle, they call "be dehorned and branded, and males are castrated, all without anesthesia"(Mason 162). Castrating and dehorning without pain killers can be just as painful or more compared to the beating of the cows in the video. Abuse at the Ohio farms are bad but they are no better than the conditions at a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation).
The perspective of Both articles show that the people in the video and article relate to Aristotle.The men who killed the calf can be seen in Aristotle's "Animals are for Our Use". Towards the beginning of his writing, he says that "for tame animals are naturally better than wild ones, and it is advantageous that both should be under subjection to man; for this is productive of their common safety: so it is naturally with the male and the female[female being the calf]; the one is superior, the other inferior"(56-7). A cow is looked at as a tamed animal for the necessity of providing food for humans. Due to this explanation, The men in the article see it fit to steal and eat a cow because cows are used as a main source of food and are inferior to the men. Also using this to critique the video, Because humans make use of cows and see them as inferior, it does not matter how cows are treated. I do not agree with this view because just because some "tame" animals like the cows are used as a food source and seen as nothing more, does not mean we have a right to treat them that way.Singer who wrote "All Animals are Equal" would say that these animals are being seen in a speciesist view point. This means that people value one animal over another based on their belonging to a certain species. The men who killed the baby calf would fit this description because they chose the cow because it is seen a source of meat due to the United States preferring beef as one of its main sources that are daily consumed. If they were camping they could have found different types of animals in the area that could have just as edible as the calf.
These perspectives are just one way of viewing these articles on farm animal abuse. Animal abuse publicized by news is just as bad as many conditions animals live in on factory farms. Also due to the idea that a cow is meat, we look down on them and that can be seen as a speciesist view on the type of animals we eat in the United States.
Links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUhm9mctSwc
http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2009/05/02/2766704-hungry-ny-men-accused-of-stealing-eating-calf
picture of debeaking:
http://www.liveexportshame.com/photos/welfare/Debeaking.jpg
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