Mckibben's Argument For The Pro-Vegetarian

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In modern day society, the argument over the consumption of meat has gained in strength and popularity in the last several years. With this debate the rise of people who have not considered the repercussions of their meat filled diet, and those who have pledged themselves strictly to the vegan side of the argument. For clarification, a vegan is someone who does not consume any animal products whether it be food, personal products, or cosmetics. Peter Singer, Gary Steiner, and Bill McKibben are three authors who have chosen to take a stance on the pro-vegan side of the debate. In their essays, they discuss the treatment of animals on factory farms, the effects these farms have on the environment, and some of the social issues faced by vegans…show more content…
Although McKibben does agree with Singers view of meat being inefficient when he states in his essay “The Only Way to Have a Cow” that “we now use an enormous percentage of our arable land to grow corn that we feed to cows who stand in feedlots and eructate until they are slaughtered in a variety of gross ways and lodge in our ever-larger abdomens” (McKibben 201). McKibben’s point is that we could be using the land that we are using to plant corn for the cows to grow fresh fruits and vegetables, which could come to replace the meet in our diets, therefore sparing these cows their lives on a factory farm. In addition to essentially wasting crops, the environment is compromised by the fact that cows produce an exuberant amount of methane when they eructate. In fact, according to Singer, “The livestock industry… contributes more to global warming than the entire transport sector” (Singer 179). This is not to say that all farms contribute to this statistic, but instead that the factory farms where too many animals are housed in too little space is contributing immensely to global warming. It only gets worse for the animals from here. In order to make the environmentalists happy, the owners of these factory farms have started giving the cows shots and feeding them genetically modified corn to lessen the amount of methane they eructate. While this may make a miniscule impact on the environment as a whole, there is no way that it can be comfortable for the cows to hold all of that gas inside. Yet, some readers may challenge the view that the amount of methane is affecting the environment by arguing that cows have been around for a long time, and this problem has just recently came into light. McKibben addresses these concerns by pointing out that cows used to freely
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