November 7, 2016

Dear Future President,

Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be an animal held captive, locked in a cage your whole life? You barely have room to run in a full circle. But that’s not all. The one time you get a chance to be out of your cage, you’re brought to a laboratory where chemicals are forced down your throat and wires are implanted inside of you. Some of these pointless experiments are for the human benefit of adding one more hairspray bottle to their collection. Even the more noble efforts of medical research can cause you to grow tumors the size of your own body. You are then sent back to your cage to die with no pain killers. These are just some of the ways of animals are abused every day. Animals are living things too and they deserve to be treated with the same respect as humans.

The type of animal abuse I’d like to draw the most attention to is animal slaughter. I strongly believe animals shouldn’t be born to be slaughtered for food if they don’t have a good life before they are killed. Over 56 billion farm animals are slaughtered every year for food (not including fish and seafood.) “On industrialized farms, calves raised for veal and breeding pigs are confined to crates measuring only slightly larger than their own bodies. They are so tightly penned they cannot even turn around for months at a time. Egg-laying hens are kept in equally poor conditions: barren wire cages with less space per hen than a single letter-size piece of writing paper” described Barry Kellogg, a member of the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association board of directors. Once these animals are fed and plump enough, they’re killed and butchered for food.  Eventually, the animals are commercially sold for food.

One option to remedy this issue is to eliminate meat eating from the US in general. Although this may be hard to pull off, it would help the environment in many ways, including saving water, decreasing greenhouse gases from cattle excrement, and improving the general health and well being of the American population. However, this concept may not be the most realistic, since the idea of giving up meat would be hard for many Americans to even comprehend. I believe animals should live a good life for at least 3 years before they are killed for food. This way, humans get to eat the same meats they always do, and animals will also get a good life before they’re killed. Now that humans have evolved to go way beyond hunting animals for food and clothing, we need to consider how to treat animals with care and respect.

In all sincerity,

Melanie C.