Respect

Animals are not just the food on our tables. They are lives; they have feelings just like human, so they deserve respect too. However, sometimes people just avoid thinking about it because they don’t want to be guilty when they feel the meat on their table are delicious. In the book Eating Animals, the auther Jonathan Safran Foer wrote a short coversation with his son, His son asked if his dog, George, will be lonely when they leave the house without Geoge, and he said “George doesn’t get lonely”(Foer, 46). Of course dogs feel lonely, and Jouathan knew it; he just refused to admit it. He lied to his son also himself. He didn’t want to upset his son, and he didn’t want to feel guilty, so he lied. When he noticed his dog has similar emothion with himself, he got scared. Like most people. If animals are not just animals; if they have feelings such as happiness, upset, anger, loneliness, does that mean we have to respect their feelings? If we have to, how should we treat them? Should we eat them? Therefore, people avoid thinking about it. People don’t want to feel guilty or give up eating them.

Food

According to dictionary, food is any substance that people or animals eat or drink or plants take in to maintain life and growth.  Different creatures eat different kinds of food. Big fish eats small fish; pandas eat bamboos; herbivores eat grasses and grains; predators eat herbivores and some predators…  This is the way that world gets balance. However, for human beings, food is not only the substances that maintain life and growth. Human eat everything that can be eaten, everything tasted.  For satisfying this purpose, corporations find a way to increase the supply of food. For example, chicken are engineered for different “founctions”. Scientists use special way to raise chicken to make them have big chests because people like to eat chicken chests. However, chicken can’t walk with the huge chests; they even have difficult to stand up. Some chicken’s founctions are making eggs. They are called “layers”. Male layers can’t make eggs, so they are destroyed.more than 250 million chicken are destroyed per year in United States (Jonathan 48). In this situation, chicken are not considered as lives, they are just products; they are just food for human. On the other hand,  ranchers find a way to decrease their costs. For example, ranchers use dead dogs and cats to feed cattle. Cattle don’t suppose to eat meat, they eat grasses and grains. They even eat their own excrement. Just because cattle are assumed to be human’s food already, as long as they can grow fat, their destinies are finished, no one cares about what they eat. Human choose the food they want to eat, but animals don’t have choices because they are the food for human.