People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Boston University Debate Society butted heads over eating animals on Thursday.
About 60 students and PETA activists came to watch PETA Vice President Bruce Friedrich argue with Debate Society Vice President and College of Arts and Sciences senior Alex Taubes in Boston University Debate Society's forum entitled "Is Eating Meat Ethical?"
In his opening argument, Friedrich raised three main issues with the ethics of meat consumption.
Friedrich first spoke of environmentalism and the environmental detriments associated with the meat industry.
He argued, for example, that it takes about 20 calories of food consumed by a chicken, pig or cow in order to get one calorie of meat out of that same animal.
According to Friedrich, every time someone sits down to eat, they use about 20 times the fossil fuels, 14 times the water and 25 times the land of what they would use by just consuming grains or beans.
Friedrich also said that the meat industry is responsible for 18 percent of global warming worldwide.
Taubes countered this argument and said the environmental harms of eating meat are "overstated."
"We make environmental trade-offs all the time," Taubes said, citing decisions like turning up the heat instead of putting on a sweater, or flying home instead of using buses or trains.
Taubes said these practices do harm the environment, but that doesn't necessarily mean people should stop doing them altogether.
"We just need to take the environmental costs into consideration," he said.
Friedrich also cited the issue of global poverty in his argument.
"The Amazon is being chopped down to grow soy to feed farm animals, which drives up the price of food and causes people who have nothing to eat to be unable to buy something to eat, and they starve," Friedrich said.
According to PETA, the meat industry's demand for feed causes its price to rise, which in turn causes the poor to be "literally priced out," he said.
Taubes rebutted and said PETA "severely misunderstands the food crisis."
"Even with all of the current meat production in the world, there's more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet," he said. "The problem is not that food is fed to animals, the problem is that poor people don't have enough money to buy the food that is produced."
Even if the feed given to livestock were to be disregarded, farmers that used animals for purposes other than meat production would still be responsible for feeding them, Taubes added.
Friedrich's final point concerned the quintessential animal rights argument.
"I think all of us would be hard pressed to come up with anything approaching a cogent argument for why there's a difference between a cat and a chicken or a pig and a dog," he said. "Morally, there's no difference."
Taubes then pushed the argument of personal preference over moral obligation.
"The fact of the matter is, animals don't have rights in our society," he said.
He argued the distinguishing factor that separates humans from animals is not the ability to feel pain or pleasure, but rather human intelligence and rationality, and therefore there should be no moral qualms with calling animals an inferior species.
Friedrich then showed a video of inhumane practices on chicken farms, which elicited emotive responses from the audience.
Most attendees were part of the vegan/vegetarian movement, however some said they were there to support the Debate Society.
One attendee, animal rights activist and PETA demonstrator Laura Ray, said she has been a vegan for 11 years, since she read PETA founder and president Ingrid Newkirk's book "You Can Save the Animals: 251 Simple Ways to Stop Thoughtless Cruelty."
"For me, it's all about the animals," she said.
Friedrich, who has been visiting campuses across the United States such as Yale University, Texas A&'M University and Boston College, said he hopes to raise consciousness about the ethical concerns that are associated with eating meat.
"We don't want people to be paying for practices that they most likely oppose," he said.
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