Specific Purpose: To persuade my audience that giving animals the rights they deserve can help reverse the effects of global warming, revive the beauty and health of the environment, and even rescue the starving around the world.

Central Idea: Factory Farming is directly related to global warming, environmental issues, and world hunger.

Introduction

I. Animal Rights: Why animals should be treated more like humans1. I’m sure you’ve read somewhere or saw on the

news about **fingerquotes** “Animal Rights” activists caging themselves for protest of animal experimentation or running around naked to protest wearing fur. (Transition to slide: But what does “Animal Rights” mean exactly? What are they fighting for?)

2. PETA(People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) defines it as the belief that animals are “not ours to use for food(**1**), clothing, entertainment, experimentation, (**hands out**)or any other purpose” and that animals deserve consideration of their best interests regardless of whether they are cute, useful to humans, or endangered and regardless of whether any human cares about them at all (just as a mentally challenged human has rights even if he or she is not cute or useful and even if everyone dislikes him or her).

3. Today I’m going to explain to you why giving animals the rights they deserve can help reverse the effects of global warming, revive the beauty and health of the environment, and even rescue the starving around the world.

II. Friends, Not Food1. When I was 12, I stumbled upon PETA. Com. I

read article after article talking about the cruel and unnecessary means by which animals were

raised and slaughtered for the production of food that I was eating nearly every day. It totally broke my heart and for the next three years, I practiced vegetarianism.

2. I don’t want to stand up here, show you pictures of sad puppies, and tell you to convertconvertconvert, but rather, I want to approach this at an angle you may not have heard of before and hopefully it will spark someone to examine their lifestyle and make a change for the better.

3. By a show of hands **raise arm**, who is into“Going Green”? Keep your hands raised. Raise your hand if you’re concerned about global warming. What about world hunger? If you knew of something you could change in your own life to greatly benefit all of these, would you do it?

4. Giving animals the rights they deserve and adopting a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle can make an intense difference in each of these areas. Here’s why.

(Transition: I’m going to show you a short video that will sum up what I’m going to talk about. Partially because I think it’s a funny video, and mostly because I don’t think I can say “farting” with a straight face.

III. Global Warming1. In Jeremy Rifkin’s keynote address at the

Animal Legal Defense Fund's "Future of Animal Law" conference at Harvard Law School in March 2007, he said, “The #1 contributing human cause of global warming is not the gas we put in our car, but the meat on our table.”a. According to the United Nations Food and

Agricultural Association report in 2006, Livestock production contributes more to global warming than all of transport put

together on this earth. **Change slide** That is around 760,000,000 vehicles.

b. And it’s not getting any better. As a matter of fact, the FAO projects that meat production will double between now and 2050.

IV. Care about the environment?1. because the animals raised for food produce 130

times more excrement than the entire human population--86,000 lbs per second. A typical pig factory farm generates a quantity of raw waste equal to that of a city of 12,000 people. That’s about the equivalent of taking all of the student population at Lee and tripling it.

2. A study in Texas found that animal feedlots in the state produce more than 14 million pounds of particulate dust every year and that the dust contains biologically active organisms such as bacteria, mold, and fungi from the feces and the feed.

3. According to the nonprofit group Greenpeace, all the wild animals and trees in more than

V. Care about world hunger?1. One average meat eater could consume that

pound of meat during a meal, while 16 people could have been fed on the grain it takes to produce that pound of meat.

2. Countries such as Ethiopia and some Central American countries use their farmland to supply the United States with cheap burgers instead of growing healthful grain foods for their own starving people.

3. And every 2 seconds, somewhere in the world a child starves to death

VI. Animal Rights: The Big Picture1. Treating animals more like humans isn’t an

unheard of concept and would not lessen who we really are. Maynard said, “Put a small child in a playpen with an apple and a bunny. If s/he

eats the apple and plays with the bunny, s/he's normal, but if s/he eats the bunny and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car. Somewhere along the line we must have been TAUGHT to do the wrong thing.”

2. Fundamentally, animals and humans are very similar. Animals have 5 senses, a brain, heart, and nervous system to feel tremendous pain and suffering when they are slaughtered for food. But they can feel even deeper than that.a. It has been well documented how elephants

treat their dead. They have even been known to bury a herd member. They stay with them for several days after death. Elephants have also been seen to bury humans if they come across a carcass. They also return to fondle the bones of their dead. At times they can walk around the 'grave' holding a family member’s bone in their trunks and calling quietly. They never remove the bones from the area but do return to the grave time and time again. They show respect for their dead as well as grief.

b. This is why I don’t want to just try to persuade you to take action against animal testing or to stop wearing fur. Those are major issues, but it goes beyond that. It’s a heart issue. C.S. Lewis said, If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons. 

VII. If any of this I’ve said steps on your toes, or troubles at all. Good. You’re thinkin about it now. And if any of the problems I’ve talked about are of concern to you, here’s how you can help. 1. Switch to a plant-based diet, or at the very least

reduce your meat and dairy consumption. Also, look at how you treat your animals at home.

Does anyone here enjoy being locked in the car in 90 degree weather even if the windows are cracked? Neither does your pet. Parked cars can get to upwards of 100degrees in minutes during the summer. Pets can die of heat stroke this way. a. Just examine how you treat them in daily

life, and consider making some changes to benefit them.

2. Find a way to plug in in your local community. There are plenty of animal shelters that need volunteers. Also, find an animal shelter to adopt from instead of buying from a pet store. Many pet stores get their animals from puppy mills, which often are terrible places that mistreat the animals.

3. Now that you have this information, tell someone. That’s the simplest thing you can do to get things started.

Paul McCartney said, “If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you can do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.” In conclusion, if we made an effort to treat animals more like humans, we could begin to reverse the effects of global warming, begin to revive the cleanliness of our planet, and begin to rescue the starving across the globe.

http://www.eatthis.org.uk/veg_anim.html

- Meat contains 14 times the amount of pesticides as plant foods.- Men have 17 times the death rate from heart disease, and, for women, five times the rate of breast cancer (Oxford-Cornell study), due to meat consumption.

It is easier for humans to digest grains, fruits, and vegetables because the HCL acid in our stomachs is 10 times weaker than meat-eating animals. Plants are immobile and have 2 senses as compared to

4) Nitrous oxide is about 300 times more potent as a global warming gas than carbon dioxide. According to the U.N., the meat, egg, and dairy industries account for a staggering 65 percent of worldwide nitrous oxide emissions.

5) According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the run-off from factory farms pollutes our waterways more than all other industrial sources combined. The EPA reports that chicken, hog, and cattle excrement have polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and contaminated groundwater in 17 states.

10) 75 percent of U.S. topsoil has been lost to date, 85 percent of that loss is due to livestock rearing. Meat is murder on the environment A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home.

ANIMAL TESTING

 "Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are like us.' Ask the experimenters why it is morally OK to experiment on animals, and the answer is: 'Because the animals are not like us.' Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction." -Professor Charles R. Magel

In 1929 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, he first tested it on rabbits, he found that it didn’t cure the infection they had, so he put penicillin on the shelf for a decade. The vaccine for polio was similarly delayed for decades because it didn’t work in animal tests. Many drugs have tested as safe in animals, but then were found to cause side effects in humans ranging from allergic reactions to birth defects to death. Animal tests results are at best a fifty--fifty proposition.