Customer Description: The research paper should deal with the issues of morality, it should be an argument paper using some of the author ideas, and if I agree or disagree and why. Try to get persuasive arguments and defend your position. 

Paper Body:

Animal production as a means for food and clothing has long been a practice that humans have performed for thousands of years. Today, more than ever, the issue on whether or not conduct of mistreatment is actively occurring in agriculture is passionately being debated. Those that oppose animal cruelty protest the destructive means of "production" at a cost of millions of animals each year. 

Some of the processes that slaughter houses, animal protectionists say, are unnecessary. On the other hand, corporations who own the agricultural industry say that the animals are not being mistreated. Today, many laws are in effect to help minimize the cruelty and abuse of animals in production. In this essay, the examination of one animal protectionists will be evaluated. Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, emphasizes the importance of animal realization and the notion that humans are not the only ones on this planet deserves life and liberty. Singer claims that morality requires that we all become vegetarians. The fact that animals suffer for the benefit of humans is exemplified in Singer's work. 

"The animal upside down, with ruptured joints and often a broken leg, twists frantically in pain and terror, so that it must be gripped by the neck or have a clamp inserted in its nostrils to enable the slaughterer to kill the animal in a single stroke." (Singer, p 154). Whether this is right or wrong can not be answered. It is ultimately up to the person in question and the basis of their moral values. 

Singer has several arguments that he offers for why we should not eat meat. This includes the support to stop inhumane slaughtering of farm animals, the saving of land to use for growing crops to feed impoverished countries instead of rearing farm animals, and the squandering of land ranging in the prairie lands to tropical forests. 

Singer claims that the general public is being misled on what really goes on in the farm industry. In general, people are blind of the mistreatment of animals that lies behind the food we consume. Buying food at the supermarket or eating at a restaurant is the culmination of a process of which, in the end, the brutality is hidden from public view. "We buy our meat and poultry in neat plastic packages. It hardly bleeds. There is no reason to associate this package with a living, breathing, walking, suffering animal." (Singer, p 95).

In everyday society, people hide the truth about slaughtering and animal abuse behind words that are less harsh than reality. In Singer's point of view, people seem to find it easier to cope with and to ultimately ignore the facts about what they are really consuming.
"The very words we use to conceal its origins: we eat beef, not bull, steer or cow, and pork, not pig…The term "meat" is itself deceptive. It originally meant any solid food, not necessarily the flesh of animals. By using the more general "meat" we avoid facing that what we are eating is really flesh." (Singer, p 96).

Another argument Singer offers is the saving of land to use for growing crops to feed impoverished countries instead of rearing farm animals. Millions of people today all over the world are dying from starvation. Even more often, people do get food but do not get the right vitamins, namely protein. Singer raises the question, "Does raising food by the methods practiced in the affluent nations make a contribution to the solution of the hunger problem?".

According to Singer, farms regulate the size of their live stock in order to meet the demand of meat markets. Animals must grow to be a certain size and weight before they are considered ready to be processed. Singer uses an example to illustrate the unnecessary waste of land projected for an animal in order to obtain the minimal amount of meat that the animal provides:
"If a calf, say, grazes on rough pasture land that grows only grass and could not be planted with corn or any other crop that provides food edible by human beings, the result will be a net gain of protein for human beings, since the grown calf provides us with protein that we cannot - yet - extract economically from grass." (Singer, p 164) .

Singer then goes on to point out that if that same calf were to be confined in a limited space and given food to eat (corn, sorghum, soybeans, etc) that same food could have been used to feed the millions of impoverished people all over the world. An additional note, it takes twenty-one pounds of protein to feed a calf in order to produce a single pound of animal protein for humans. We receive less than five percent of what was put into feeding the animal.

Collateral to the previous argument, Singer points out the squandering of land that not only affects American soil but other agricultural countries as well. Meat production puts a strain on many resources such as water, energy, and the soil itself. A researcher from the Worldwatch Institute has calculated that one pound of steak from steers accumulated 2,300 gallons of water, the energy equal to that of a gallon of gasoline, and close to thirty-five pounds of eroded topsoil. (Singer, p 166).

Eradication of the world's forests is the "greatest of all the follies created by the demand for meat." The market in grazing animals has been the dominant motive for clearing forests. In places like Costa Rica, Brazil, and Indonesia, forests are being destroyed to make room for cattle. The meat produced by these cattle are not market towards the poor people of these countries but rather it is exported and sold to the big cities of North America. If the clearing of the tropical rainforests continue at its present rate, the extinction of many species of animals will occur. Along with this, the clearing of trees will lead to erosion of the soil that will correspond to floods, which inevitably kill thousands of the poor living in those countries...

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