Animal Rights Experiment

Social Experiment #2

For this experiment I have chosen the issue of animal rights. Many sociologists, philosophers and writers state that there is an indisputable link between ethical attitude to animals and fundamental moral values. David A. Nibert points out in his article that, “Immanuel Kant … recognized the relationship between people 's callous treatment of animals and their treatment of each other” (1994, p. 115). Probably, someone would ask me, “What are you talking about? Nowadays we face many severe problems: drugs, wars, diseases, child abuse, and environmental pollution. Is the issue of animal rights so important to you?” I will answer affirmatively, because, undoubtedly, our attitude toward animals is a reflection of our moral

Such different social issues as animal rights, fast food problems and strengthening the power of corporations are closely interconnected. Let’s take the documentary The Food, Inc. The filmmakers describe the cruel practices of chicken industry, “Chickens today are often raised in huge metal buildings with no access to light or fresh air, confined together with thousands of birds in one building, and made to grow so quickly that often their bones cannot keep up and they can lose their ability to walk” (p. 23). However, the film presents not only the shocking pictures of cruel attitude to the farm animals, but also demonstrates the harmful effect of the fast food on our health and on the environment in general. The filmmakers state that “corporations often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment.” They provide cheap food regardless of the harmful consequences for our health. Eric Schlosser states, “The fast food industry fought against giving you the calorie information. They fought against telling you if there is trans-fat in your food. They fought not to label genetically modified foods; and now 70% of processed food in the supermarket has some genetically modified ingredient.” The negative impact of fast food on our health is well-known. However, it is cheap and tasty; therefore, its huge market has no boundaries. Consequently it has a negative environmental effect. In this regard, I would like to remind of Marc Bekoff (2007) who argued in his book Animals Matter that “A reduction of meat consumption by only 10% would result in about 12 million more tons of grain for human consumption. This additional grain could feed all of the humans across the world who starve to death each year- about 60 million