Free Essays on Courage to Exceed Ourselves

The Courage to Exceed Ourselves If you give a child a book but do not teach them to read will the child understand the story? If only half of a lesson is presented to a child, the full picture is unattainable. There are many personality types and a varity of role models available to children today, to choose right from wrong is often difficult. In our society there are adults who are blind of the truth by choice, they take only the facts that are attractive to them and form a canon or belief that is not justified. Then, pass along their opinions to the children in their midst as if it were truth. Most religions, governments, and families are attempting to achieve, on a basic level, the same goal, but are using to many different approaches. This behavior can be observed throughout time in any country from daily family life to government policies, laws, and in the separation of religious beliefs or practices. For example: a child born to a Mormon family raised with heavy influence by the church could have easily been born into a Catholic family and raised within the influence of the Catholic beliefs. When the Mormon child grows to an adult and stands within their church, can a Catholic or any other person of different religious beliefs honestly chastize them for following and abiding by the standards of life they were taught? We instill fear of the world outside of the familiar into to our children from the day they are born. In every individual home there is a history to learn from. Often those histories are not all laid before the child. This creates only a partial picture for the child to learn values and make decisions from and with this try to understand the past that follows them to the future. We teach our children not to talk to stangers, to take a stand for what they believe in, and to be cautious of the unknown. Then we push them out into the unknown and hope they will find a way to improve the world we have mad... Free Essays on Courage to Exceed Ourselves Free Essays on Courage to Exceed Ourselves The Courage to Exceed Ourselves If you give a child a book but do not teach them to read will the child understand the story? If only half of a lesson is presented to a child, the full picture is unattainable. There are many personality types and a varity of role models available to children today, to choose right from wrong is often difficult. In our society there are adults who are blind of the truth by choice, they take only the facts that are attractive to them and form a canon or belief that is not justified. Then, pass along their opinions to the children in their midst as if it were truth. Most religions, governments, and families are attempting to achieve, on a basic level, the same goal, but are using to many different approaches. This behavior can be observed throughout time in any country from daily family life to government policies, laws, and in the separation of religious beliefs or practices. For example: a child born to a Mormon family raised with heavy influence by the church could have easily been born into a Catholic family and raised within the influence of the Catholic beliefs. When the Mormon child grows to an adult and stands within their church, can a Catholic or any other person of different religious beliefs honestly chastize them for following and abiding by the standards of life they were taught? We instill fear of the world outside of the familiar into to our children from the day they are born. In every individual home there is a history to learn from. Often those histories are not all laid before the child. This creates only a partial picture for the child to learn values and make decisions from and with this try to understand the past that follows them to the future. We teach our children not to talk to stangers, to take a stand for what they believe in, and to be cautious of the unknown. Then we push them out into the unknown and hope they will find a way to improve the world we have mad...

Pigs Pork and Animal Rights - What is Wrong with Eating Pork

Pigs Pork and Animal Rights - What is Wrong with Eating Pork Approximately 100 million pigs are killed for food each year in the United States, but some people choose not to eat pork for a variety of reasons, including concerns about animals rights, the welfare of the pigs, the effects on the environment, and their own health. Pigs and Animal Rights A belief in animal rights is a belief that pigs and other sentient beings have a right to be free of human use and exploitation. Breeding, raising, killing and eating a pig violates that pigs right to be free, regardless of how well the pig is treated. While the public is becoming more aware of factory farming and demanding humanely raised and slaughtered meat, animal rights activists believe that there is no such thing as humane slaughter. From an animal rights perspective, the only solution to factory farming is veganism. Pigs and Animal Welfare Those who believe in animal welfare believe that humans can ethically use animals for our own purposes as long as the animals are treated well while they are alive and during slaughter. For factory farmed pigs, there is little argument that the pigs are treated well. Factory farming began in the 1960s, when scientists realized that agriculture was going to have to become much more efficient to feed an exploding human population. Instead of small farms raising pigs outdoors in pastures, larger farms started raising them in extreme confinement, indoors. As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency explains: There has also been a significant change in how and where hogs are produced in the U.S. over the past 50 years. Low consumer prices, and therefore low producer prices, have resulted in larger, more efficient operations, with many smaller farms no longer able to produce pigs profitably. Pigs are cruelly abused on factory farms from the time they are little piglets. Piglets routinely have their teeth clipped, have their tails cut off and are castrated without anesthesia. After weaning, the piglets are put in crowded pens with slotted floors for the manure to fall through, into a manure pit. In these pens, they each typically have only three square feet of room. When they become too large, they are moved to new pens, also with slotted floors, where they have eight square feet of space. Because of crowding, the spread of disease is a constant problem and the entire herd of animals is given antibiotics as a precaution. When they reach their slaughter weight of 250-275 pounds, at around five to six months of age, most are sent off to slaughter while a small number of females become breeding sows. After being impregnated, sometimes by a boar and sometimes artificially, breeding sows are then confined in gestation stalls that are so tiny, the animals cannot even turn around. Gestation stalls are considered so cruel, they have been banned in several countries and in several U.S. states, but are still legal in most states. When the breeding sows fertility drops off, usually after five or six litters, she is sent off to slaughter. These practices are not only routine but legal. No federal law governs the raising of farmed animals. The federal Humane Slaughter Act applies only to slaughter practices, while the federal Animal Welfare Act explicitly exempts animals on farms. State animal welfare statutes exempt animals raised for food and/or practices that are routine in the industry. While some may call for more humane treatment of the pigs, allowing the pigs to roam on pastures would make animal agriculture even more inefficient, requiring even more resources. Pork and the Environment Animal agriculture is inefficient because it takes so much more resources to grow crops to feed to pigs than it would be to grow crops to feed to people directly. It takes about six pounds of feed to produce a pound of pork. Growing those extra crops requires additional land, fuel, water, fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, labor and other resources. The extra agriculture will also create more pollution, such as pesticide and fertilizer runoff and fuel emissions, not to mention the methane that the animals produce. Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society calls domestic pigs, the world’s largest aquatic predator, because they eat more fish than all the sharks in the world combined. We’re just pulling fish out of the ocean to convert it into fish meal for the raising of livestock, for pigs primarily. Pigs also produce a lot of manure, and factory farms have come up with elaborate systems for storing solid or liquid manure until it can be used as fertilizer. However, these manure pits or lagoons are environmental disasters waiting to happen. Methane sometimes becomes trapped under a layer of foam in a manure pit and explodes. Manure pits can also overflow or can become flooded, polluting the groundwater, streams, lakes and drinking water. Pork and Human Health The benefits of a low-fat, whole foods vegan diet have been proven, including lower incidences of heart disease, cancer and diabetes. The American Dietetic Association supports a vegan diet: It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Because pigs are now bred to be leaner, pork is not as unhealthy as it once was, but is no health food. Because they are high in saturated fats, the Harvard School of Public Health recommends avoiding red meats, including beef, pork and lamb. Aside from the risks of eating pork, supporting the pork industry means supporting an industry that endangers the public health and not just the health of people who choose to eat pork. Because the pigs are constantly given antibiotics as a preventive measure, the industry fosters the rise and spread of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. Similarly, the pork industry spreads swine flu, or H1N1, because the virus mutates so quickly and spreads quickly among closely-confined animals as well as to farm workers. The environmental issues also mean that pig farms endanger their neighbors health with manure and disease.