Pain And Suffering Of Animals For Humans Sake Right Or Wrong Essays

Pain And Suffering Of Animals For Humans' Sake: Right Or Wrong Pain and Suffering of Animals for Humans' Sake: Right or Wrong When you go out to eat and look at your thick and juicy T-bone steak what do you think about? When you look at that gorgeous mink coat in the department store what is going through your mind? When you here that cigarette smoke causes cancer in lab animals what is the first thing that comes to mind? Chances are that in each of these cases you were not thinking about how the cow suffered while it was being fattened up, ho painful the trap was that caught those mink, or the conditions those lab animals hat to endure to develop that cancer. Most people do not think about these things. However, in this paper, you will be enlightened on the pain and suffering of animals in three different industries and you will also hear from the other side of this issue. First, one of the biggest culprits of animal suffering is the animal food industry. This is an industry in which people have a tendency to block out or ignore the animal mistreatment; this is done by disassociating oneself with the direct harm and ignoring the indirect harm (Harnack 133). A good start under this example in the case of pigs. Normally, pigs are intelligent animals capable of showing affection. They have very good senses of smell, which is why pigs have been used as hunting animals (Coats 31). This normal behavior is disrupted however in the food industry. Pigs are taken to slaughter at about twenty-four weeks of age when they are approximately 220 pounds (Coats 32). Pigs are usually mass-caged into groups that consist of other pigs of the same sex and age. This can cause excessive aggressiveness in the animals due to the stifling of the natural social orders, which are accomplished though mixing (Coats 33). Due to inactivity in cages, pigs become ?bored? and do things such as gnaw on the bars of the cage or on the body parts of other pigs. Factory owners attempt to remedy this by doing things such as cutting off a piglet's tail shortly after being born (Coats 33). There is also gender specific cruelty. To reduce aggressiveness, male pigs are castrated. Most of the time, this is done without anesthetic. This is a practice seen in other divisions of the farm industry as well (Coats 33). ?A factory breeding sow [pig] averages two and a half litters a year and ten litters in a life time. With ten or eleven piglets per litter, she brings 100-110 piglets into the systems during the first four to five years of her life? (Coats 34). The pig factory owners try to get the greatest amount of piglets in the least amount of time. They do this by trying to find the optimum amount of time to leave a piglet with his mother. The later a piglet is weaned away from his mother, the better chance it will live, however this is time that the mother is not pregnant (Coats 34). Pigs confined in cages in factories have a high rate of disease and physical problems that range from respiratory diseases to lame and broken legs (Coats 45). Next, we have cows. Cows have the ?opportunity? to go into three different division of the farming industry: dairy cow, veal calf, or beef cow (Coats 7). Firstly, concerning milk cows, the only time that a female cow produces milk is after she has had a calf, and she only produces for as long as the calf suckles (Coats 50). To keep the cows producing milk, they must be impregnated about once a year and give birth (Coats 56). While a calf is still getting milk from its mother, it drinks small quantities about twenty times a day. The cow replenishes itself as needed. In the dairy farm, a cow is ?sucked dry? approximately two to three times per day. This forces a cow to be over loaded and weighed down with milk (Coats 50-51). When an exceptional cow is found, she is put aside for breeding. She is given drugs to induce the production of more eggs. These eggs are