Is eating meat ethical? This is the question members of the Woodrow Wilson debate council, junior Omar Qureshi and senior Ali Boyle, addressed yesterday when they faced off against Bruce Friedrich, the vice president for policy at PETA, in a debate about the ethical implications of eating meat. Omar is also an Editor-at-Large on The News-Letter.
The debate took place from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in Maryland Hall before an audience of about 40 students, faculty members and other interested locals.
The event, initiated by PETA’s youth outreach program, PETA 2, was part of a series of similar debates Friedrich has been participating in at universities throughout the country including Georgetown and MIT among others.
He plans to engage in about a dozen of these events this semester and has participated in somewhere between 35 and 40 debates over the course of the last two years.
“The format is terrific,” Friedrich said. “Because it allows people to hear the best of both sides. And what that ends up being, almost every time, is the acknowledgement that what is happening now is horribly unethical; the way animals are treated and the consequences for the environment are immoral.
And then we get into a hypothetical discussion that tends to center more around animal rights, which is also fantastic.”
The debate began with a 15-minute opening statement from each side; Friedrich went first, followed by Boyle. Each team was then given five minutes to respond to the points presented by their opponents in the opening statements.
This time Qureshi stepped up to the podium for Hopkins. Finally, the debate concluded with each team asking and then responding to three questions from their opposition.
Over the course of the debate, Friedrich presented a two-pronged argument that addressed the environmental consequences of meat consumption as well as the ethical implications of factory farming.
He argued that feeding and raising farm animals was a waste of food and natural resources because he contended that it takes 20 calories of feed to produce one calorie of meat, the equivalent of throwing out 19 plates of pasta in the process of eating just one.
Friedrich then presented a more emotional appeal, playing video footage from factory farms featuring workers slitting animals’ throats and throwing them, still alive, in boiling hot water.
“We can all, every time we sit down to eat, live our values by taking the side of the oppressed against the oppressor,” Friedrich said. “And that means vegetarianism.”
Qureshi and Boyle responded by emphasizing the hypocrisy vegetarians engaged in by supporting fruit and vegetable farms, which kill billions of insects every year with the pesticides they use in the production of their plants.
In response to Friedrich’s environmental argument, the duo asserted that converting the world’s population to vegetarianism would require a substantial increase in the production of crops, like beans and rice, that vegetarians rely on for protein.
These crops, they noted, can only grow in rich soil near riverbeds and in rainforests. Such a substantial increase in the production of these crops would then inevitably lead to deforestation and water contamination, which would ultimately harm the environment more than if humans continued to consume meat.
However, they did concede that things needed to change, that the current system of factory farming was both unsustainable and unethical and that it could not continue for much longer.
Animal rights activist, Elena Johnson, was impressed by Friedrich’s ability to illicit such substantial concessions from his opposition.
“The thing I thought was most interesting was the fact that both sides agreed that factory farming is immoral,” she said. “That was not something I expected to hear at all, that really they agreed that factory farming was cruel and immoral and that was kind of the basis line for the conversation.”
For Qureshi the event wasn’t about winning or losing, but raising awareness about the debate team around campus.
“The debate team [is] trying to do more public events because we’ve had a lot of competitive success — national championships and the like — but we haven’t been on campus enough and we feel like that’s just a waste, that we should spend a lot more time here.”
