More than 273 million turkeys are raised for food every year in the U.S.; about 79 million of them are slaughtered and eaten for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter.(8,9) Before ending up as holiday centerpieces, these gentle birds spend five to six months on factory farms, where thousands of turkeys are packed into dark sheds with no more than 3.5 square feet of space per bird.(10) To keep the extremely crowded birds from scratching and pecking each other to death, workers cut off portions of the birds’ toes and upper beaks with hot blades and desnood the males (the snood is the flap of skin that runs from the beak to the chest).(11) No painkillers are used during these procedures.
Genetic manipulation and antibiotics enable farmers to produce heavily muscled birds who can weigh 35 pounds in as little as five months, and “their internal organs are noticeably crammed together in the little bit of space remaining for the body cavity,
a stress-induced condition that causes young birds to simply stop eating.
This report estimates that 10,378 million land animals will be killed for food in 2007, including 39 million cows, 121 million pigs, 4 million sheep and goats, 10 million rabbits, 317 million turkeys, 28 million ducks, 9 billion "broilers" chickens and 450 million "layer" hens
This is an actual case which demonstrated the various points as to why the use of animals as a resource is wrong. Tom Reagan explains that the people who are against the right of animals believe that their only purpose in our world is to be eaten, surgically manipulated and to be exploited for sport or money. It even sounds awful to say such a thing.
Tom Regan is an American philosopher who specializes in animal rights theory. He teaches at North Carolina State University. He is the author of numerous books on the philosophy of animal rights, including The Case for Animal Rights. His studies, books and cases have significantly influenced the modern animal liberation movement.
I was not able to sticky note the page but here are some parts i would have highlighted:
Singer and Frey both offer arguments that are motivated by utilitarian concerns
Regan offers his own Rights View as an adequate moral theory: to respect the rights of an
individual is to treat that individual as if she was inherently valuable rather than merely
useful (improvement on utilitarianism)
Nothing less than the abolition of using animals as food, in science, and in industry
is morally acceptable according to Regan
The capacity for suffering is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be met before we can speak of rights.
In both the historic and modern views of animal rights, the key point is "sentience," or the capacity to experience pain or pleasur
In the animal rights view, if a being is capable of suffering, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.
They don't have to speak a word. Screaming, writhing about, crying and other behavior tells us they are in pain. We see the same sort of behavior in animals.
This website gives us the utilitarian point of view on how animal cruelty and their use as resource is continuously horrid. Jeremy Bentham said that as long as a being is capable of suffering, then there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. He said that the question is not can animals reason but do animals suffer?
This article found in the New York Times discusses how the Department of Justice is finally bringing charges to the C.I.A for more that two dozen abuse cases of suspected terrorists.
This website is a description written by Jim Manzi one the utilitarians point of view as to why torture is wrong. This man is currently the chairman and managing director of Applied Predictive Technologies (a business analytics software company which is a contributing editor at the National Review), a senior worker at the Manhattan Institute, and a continuous blogger. In his writing based on a utilitarian case against torture, he describes how in no matter what was a person looks at torture, you will always be dehumanizing a human being.
This site is more of a blog post explaining various reasons as to why torture continues to look like a process that really does nothing for our societies. The blogger, "Thurstjm," even brings torture back to the topic of terrorism which is a constant discussion world wide.
This website is basically book notes from the book titled, "Morality Matters," by Roger Trigg. It gives us a detailed definition of torture and continuous to explain how the process or torturing in clearly ineffective.
In this text we learn how Canada has strict rules against the torture of prisoners. The government believes that no matter what, we must respect the dignity of a human being and that no cruel punishments should ever be brought upon prisoners. There is said to be no international treaty that deals exclusively with the treatment of prisoners and the conditions of incarceration but one of the more known and respected instrument that deals with the rights of these criminals is the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.