Animal, Vegetable, Miserable Analysis

In the article “Animal, Vegetable, Miserable”, Gary Steiner uses both moral reasoning and statistics to explain the levels of violence of nonhuman animals suffering at the hands of humans. In response of Steiner’s article people from New York wrote letters expressing their feelings on the topic. Steiner’s article helps readers better understand people's’ opinions of consuming animal products of all kinds. Steiner focuses on whether it is right or wrong to kill animals for human consumption.
He asks, “how can people continue to eat meat when they become aware that nearly 53 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption” (846). He says the answer is quite simple. That people just don’t care about animal’s lives …show more content…
There were letters that disagree with Steiner’s thoughts. One letter talks about how humans have had to evolve to accommodate an omnivorous diet, not strictly vegetables. At one point our, “energy-hungry human brains depended on a transition of our ancestors’ diets to include meat” (850). Basically saying that we have grown to eat meat or else we might get a deficiency disease. In a letter that was all for what Steiner said had a quote from Alice Walker, “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men” (850). I think this letter is trying to say that God didn’t make animals for our consumption alone, but I also think plants aren’t for our consumption alone too. I understand why vegans and vegetarians can be frustrated with meat eaters, but I think that we are meant to eat meat. For example, if we left a cow to roam free and untouched by humans, another animal like a mountain lion would eat it for itself if given the chance to. In the article he relates us to being animals ourselves. If other non-human animals eat one another, then it’d be just as normal as humans eating another