Animal Rights

I'll begin my opening argument and then go into rebuttals my next round. Contention 1: Factory Farms= Cheeper and more affordable prices. The method of factory farming is extremely cheep and more effective than traditionial farming/cageless farming. Take for instance the egg industry. If the egg industry were to switch back to traditionial methods the cost of eggs would increase by a whopping total of 40%! [1] "According to the Worldwatch Institute, 74 percent of the world's poultry, 43 percent of beef, and 68 percent of eggs are produced this way. " ([2] You can see from the above statement that a majority of our products are produced at factory farms and this shows how much of a price increase that it would cause from closing down Factory Farms. It will also take up a total of 580,000 additionial acres for farmers which takes away from their other livestock driving up prices all across the board. People who grow such foods usually place the "Organic label on the food, but those who buy such food are found to pay 20% more then food made by factory farms. Dary products would also suffer a 30% increase under the closing of factory farms. [3] The switch is also expected to increase from the average of $6,372 to $8,232 per year. It does not seem like much, but that is a 30% increase for the average family in America. [4] The last large jump in dary was in 2011 when the price of milk jumped 30% from $3.30 per gallon to $4.40. There were experts perdicting that the world would face certain doom and starvation in the 1900s as the world population was growing largely, but due to factory farming and Green Technology the food production has been able to keep pace with the world population. It is said that if it weren't for this technology that we would only have 1/27th of the world's current population. Between 1961-1985, the world's ceral prodcution has more than doubled. [5]Not to mention that they get stronger and all the sex they want to reproduce more product and we all, including animals, like sex. Picture of stronger pigs bellow for humor. Contention 2: Economic Benefits Factory farms have many economic benefits, for example, each year they provide the US with a total of 700,000 jobs. [7] These jobs are mainly helping people in the rual comminity. Since the factory farms are very reliant on machinery this has caused the increase in other jobs in producing the machinerery of such equipment. [6] In 2005, factory farming accounted for 40% of the Global meat production. Meaning that alone, the factory farming had helped support and feed over 2.8 billion people. [8]We also have to look at JS Mill's Utilitarianism. Even it states that humans are superior on the grounds that humans are able to expierence better level's of pleasure. Contention 3: Utilitarianism of Animal TestingFor this case of Utilitarianism I will be focusing on John Stuart Mill's case of Utility here. We have to look at the Greatest Happiness for the Greatest Number of Sentient Beings. I will concede to the fact that animals are Sentient beings, but something we should focus on is the Greatest number portion. Before we dive into that I would like to point out a key argument that Mill makes and that is humans have priority over animals concidereing that humans can expierence a greater amount of pleasure and a better potential in this case. [9]Now as we begin here I have to prove that through Animal Testing we would be providing the Greatest Utility in this case and henceforth win the debate on these grounds, because if the ultamate utility isn't achieved then we will have more pain than pleasure and thus harming humanity which will ultamately lead to our downfall and depletion of human progress. First let's look at the benefits that these animal tests have provided humans. If we can look at the past 100 years we can see that almost all of the medical break throughs have actually came directly from Animal tests. [10] There have been tests of which the dog's pancrease was removed and insulin was discovered this way. Now we save tons of diabetic patient lives each year. We have also used animals to test for polio and this has effectively helped bring down those numbers from 350,000 in 1988 to a mere 233 in 2012. [13] There's also progress and come close to vaccines and treatments on a long chain of other illnesses it has helped with that I don't have time to go into detail with them all, but to list a few: Hep B, Hep C, polio, Brain Injuries, Breast Cancer, TB, Leukemia, Cardic Valve Subsitutes, and several others. [11][12]Let's move on to animals and how they actually benefit from this. Now I would like to clarify to the voters here. I'm not the anti-PETA guy who thinks that we should put lipstick on a bunny to see if it makes it bullet proof, but more of a reasonable expierements over these vacines and such. First we have to look at some of the cures that actually came from testing on animals and the animal diseases that had vacines for them. There has been a countless list, but just to name a few: Rabbies, CPV, Feline Hep, Distemper, Antrax, and Feline Leukemia. [11] We can see that in this case countless millions upon millions of animals lives would have been lost if it wasn't for animal testing. As for the number of research subjects it is just over 26 million total. We consume more than 1800 more animals than test subjects. [14] We cannot deem this unethical without attacking eating meat amongst other things. Now we can see that overal more humans and animals have been saved than those animals who have lost their lives and in current use. This is important when weighing this argument as we can see that this plan creates a net benefit of pleasure while my opponent's plan would be that of a net pain and shouldn't be ennacted as her position not only harms society and ends the golden age of medical research, but it kills humans of which we could have saved through animal research. Sources1. ( . http://smallfarms.cornell.edu...)2. (. https://en.wikipedia.org...)3. (. http://eartheasy.com...) 4. (. http://www.creditloan.com...) 5. ( . https://en.wikipedia.org...) 6. ( . https://en.wikipedia.org...) 7. (www. foodispower. org/factory_farm_workers. htm) 8. ( . https://en.wikipedia.org...) 9. ( . http://faculty.frostburg.edu...) 10. California Biomedical Research Association, "CBRA Fact Sheet: Why Are Animals Necessary in Biomedical Research? ," ca-biomed. org (accessed Oct. 15, 2013) 11. AnimalResearch. info, "Diseases & Research," animalresearch. info (accessed Oct. 15, 2013)12. Elizabeth Fisher, "Why We Should Accept Animal Testing," huffingtonpost. co. uk, July 17, 201313. California Biomedical Research Association, "CBRA Fact Sheet: Why Are Animals Necessary in Biomedical Research? ," ca-biomed. org (accessed Oct. 15, 2013)14. Tom Holder, "Animal Research Is an Ethical and Vital Tool to Fight Disease," blogs. law. harvard. edu, Jan. 14, 2013