Animal Slaughter Should be Illegal

I would like to start by personally thanking the one who accepts this challenge ahead of time, and I look forward to debating with whomever it may be. The issue that I want to talk about it the slaughtering of animals. Each day thousands of animals are brutally killed-- shackled upside down, shocked into paralysis, throat slit, and then drowned in hot water all while the animal is conscious. The main question is, is this really necessary? Here are my arguments:


1. Many may argue that we need meat to survive, but I will assure you this is not the case. According to a study by Michael Bluejay humans are biologically herbivores. Just like herbivores we have well-developed facial muscles, jaw at an expanded angles, small mouth openings, we need extensive chewing like herbivores, a stomach acidity of pH 4-5, cannot detoxify vitamin A, and there are plenty more statistics. The point is, carnivores and omnivores do not have these certain characteristics, therefore we humans are pretty much herbivore. Furthermore, saying we are omnivores because we are capable of eating meat is not a reliable answer. We are capable of eating cardboard, too.


2. What they do to those animals is wrong. Pigs are castrated without painkillers, chickens have their beaks cut off, and practically all animals that are to be slaughtered are stuffed inside cages or pens with many others of their own kind, not having any comfortable living space and forced to live under their own excrement. Most can't even walk by the time they are taken to be slaughtered. No creature deserves to be treated like this. Animals feel pain and are capable of suffering, just like people.

3. Making animal slaughter illegal will help the environment enormously. According to the United Nations, raising animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, planes, ships, and trains in the world combined. Chickens, pigs, turkeys, and cows on factory farms generate billions of pounds of feces every year. This waste frequently spills over into nearby waterways, killing millions of fish and causing dangerous effects. Eating meat is far less efficient than eating plants. It can take up to sixteen pounds of grain to produce just one pound of meat, and because of the need to grow so much grain to feed farmed animals, millions of acres of native habitat are destroyed and replace with a single crop. And finally, more than 90% of the Amazon rain forest cleared since 1970 is used for global meat production.

As my opponent worded the resolution in a highly biased manner, I would like to take the beginning part of my round adressing it and re-wording it as to remove bias. The revised resolution, that excludes no ground and encompasses the same issues, is this:

The killing of animals should be illegal.

There. No biased words like "slaughtering" that obviously connotate negativity present. That's a nice resolution. Now, to present my argument. I contend that we must kill animals in order to survive. Without being able to kill animals, we would eventually collapse into nuclear war on a massive scale. Let me explain:

Point One: The Meat Industry

The part of our economy that handles all things meat. Beef, poultry, fish, that's all in the meat industry. The meat industry is a massive contributor to our domestic economy. In 2011, the Department of Agriculture reported that the equivalent retail value of the meat industry was $79 billion(1). In 2011, America alone consumed 25.6 billion pounds of meat(1). In 2011, we exported roughly 2.8 billion pounds of meat, equivalent to over $5 billion(1).

Moreover, the meat industry is one of the country's biggest employers. According to the American Meat Institute, in 2009 more than 520,000 workers were employed in the meat industry, whose salaries combined were more than $19 billion(2). Through it's production and distribution links, the meat industry also has an impact on all 509 sectors of the US economy in every single state and congressional district in the nation (2). Through the economic ripple effect, the meat industry generates $864.2 billion annually, which is 6% of our entire GDP(2).

In short, the meat industry is a massive asset to the US economy, something that we cannot afford to lose.

Point Two: Affirming leaves us without meat

This one is fairly self-explanatory. If we can't kill animals anymore, we don't have meat. No meat, no meat industry.

Point Three: No meat industry -> Economy collapse entirely

If you think that the current depression America is going through is bad? Think about something on the scale of, or possibly worse than, the Great Depression in the 1930's. That's what removing the meat industry would do to our economy. It would make it non-existant.

Point Four: American Economy collapse -> Nuclear War

This is where most of you are scratching your heads thinking "Hold up, Zaradi. Wtf?" I know, it's an interesting thought to think about, but let me explain. As Lieutenant Colonel Bearden puts it(3):

As the collapse of the Western economies nears, one may expect catastrophic stress on the 160 developing nations as the developed nations are forced to dramatically curtail orders. International Strategic Threat Aspects History bears out that desperate nations take desperate actions. Prior to the final economic collapse, the stress on nations will have increased the intensity and number of their conflicts, to the point where the arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) now possessed by some 25 nations, are almost certain to be released. As an example, supposea starving North Korea launches nuclear weapons upon Japan and South Korea, including U.S. forces there,in a spasmodic suicidal response. Or suppose a desperate China - whose long range nuclear missiles can reach the United States - attacks Taiwan. In addition to immediate responses, the mutual treaties involved in such scenarios will quickly draw other nations into the conflict, escalating it significantly. Strategic nuclear studies have shown for decades that, under such extreme stress conditions, once a few nukes are launched, adversaries and potential adversaries are then compelled to launch on perception of preparations by one's adversary.The real legacy of the MAD concept is his side of the MAD coin that is almost never discussed. Without effective defense, the only chance a nation has to survive at all, is to launch immediate full-bore pre-emptive strikes and try to take out its perceived foes as rapidly and massively as possible. As the studies showed,rapid escalation to full WMD exchange occurs, with a great percent of the WMD arsenals being unleashed .

Yeah, bet you didn't think of that. Because of our collapsed economy, we would be pushing other nations to war, and the defense treaties of the world would push other countries into war, which would push other countries to war, which would turn into a nuclear World War III, where the only way to have a hope of survival is to attack first and not to worry about asking questions. So, to avoid the extinction of mankind via nuclear war, we need the meat industry. Thusly, we need to be able to keep killing animals.

I will now respond to the points my opponent brought up.

A1: Humans are herbivores?

False. Herbivores are only able to eat plants and vegetables. The very fact that we are able to eat meat AND vegetables proves that we are omnivores. The structure of our mouths does not determine what we are safely able to digest and what we aren't. We need meat to survive because without meat, no meat industry. No meat industry, we get nuclear war. So we DO need meat to survive.

A2: Animals are suffering! Oh no!

So? All we have to do is change the methods of killing animals to make it more humane. This doesn't give us a reason to stop entirely, but only just to change our methods to a more sensible way. This proves nothing.

A3: Raising animals causes greenhouse emissions! Save the planet! :D

I'm not even going to bother refuting this one, as the link to relevancy to the topic is threadbare, at best. Which would we rather have: a problem with our ozone that will really only screw us over hundreds of thousands of years into the future, or a nuclear winter that will happen in the near future and kill us all. I outweigh in terms of imminency and impact.

The resolution is negated.

Sources:
(1) http://www.ers.usda.gov...
(2) http://meatami.com...
(3) Bearden 2k (Liutenant ColonelBearden, The Unnecessary Energy Crisis: How We Can Solve It, 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com...

Guess he just couldn't hanlde the nuke war impact....

Yep, couldn't handle the nuke war impact.
Vote con!