An Animal's Place Rhetorical Analysis

Michael Pollan writes “An Animal’s Place” in which targets mainly at the United States meat industry on how cruelty and unhuman they handle live stocks during the raising and slaughtering process. In this article, Pollan talks about how we, as human-beings, treat domestic animals with no respect and cause them a tremendous amount of pain both physically and mentally. Using Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation” as his fundamental reference, Pollan provides readers with facts and continuously asking readers rhetorical questions as a tactic way to evoke readers’ emotions. Flashback to the U.S. history of how African Americans, women, and LGBT community gained their rights, he suggests it is now time to give animals their “rights” as well. In his …show more content…
Including quotes and using their ideas in his essay shows readers that Michael Pollan did his in-depth research from different perspectives. In his essay, he writes” Singer had planted a troubling notion, and in the days afterward, it grew and grew, watered by the other animal rights thinkers I began reading: the philosophers Tom Regan and James Rachels; the legal theorist Steven M. Wise; the writers Joy Williams and Mathew Scully”. Pollan’s interest in animal’s right grew after he read “Animal Liberation” by Peter Singer. However, he seek for more information and statistics on this topic from other specialists because he does not fully agree to Singer’s belief. Beside from researching, Michael Pollan claims that he visited a family’s owned farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. At Polyface Farm Pollan interviewed Joel Salatin (the owner) on how their live stocks being treated “differently” comparing to domestic animals at the meat industry. Polyface Farm is “designed to allow each species, in Salatin’s words, ‘to fully its physiological distinctiveness’”. The main purpose of raising live stocks is to collect the meat, yet, how the American meat industry raise and kill animals is what concern Pollan. At Polyface Farm, “Salatin’s chickens live like chickens; his cows, like cows; pigs, pigs”. Animals should get the …show more content…
He does not believe that we should all become vegetarians or treat animals human like. Pollan on the other hand believes that it is okay for human to consume animals as long as we let them grow naturally and treat them with respect during the slaughtering process. In his writing, Michael Pollan applies different methods of development using comparison where he talks about both animals and human beings capable of feel pain and that both are interest in avoiding it. He also uses classification to distinguish the differences between human and animals as a way to explain why we cannot treat animals like human because of moral considerations. A strength of Pollan’s argument is that he includes a lot of descriptive details of how animals being treated to evoke reader’s emotions. He attacks readers with framed questions to make them feel “guilty” about how careless Americans are toward animals. A weakness of Pollan’s argument is that the way he structures his essay is very difficult for the reader to follow. The overuse of lines of argument and refutations creates confusion to readers on fully understanding the author’s main