Student columnist: eating meat is 'speciesism'

You wouldn’t kill a human being, so why would you eat a Big Mac?

This, essentially, is the argument recently advanced by Texas State University senior Kirsten Peek in a column for TSU’s The University Star.

“Choosing to eat meat outside of a life and death situation means the craving for a hamburger is more important than the entire life of the cow being eaten,” Peek writes.

Worse yet, “[t]he factory farming industry, the source of 99 percent of meat in America, offers a short and miserable life to overcrowded animals before a painful death.” Even “humane farming operations,” Peek says aren’t truly humane. And yet nobody would treat human beings that way.

“When a human is murdered in his or her sleep, no one refers to it as a humane death,” Peek argues. But animals don’t get the same consideration. 

“This disconnect between the two situations is speciesism,” Peek writes. “It is not even putting a human life ahead of an animal life. It is putting a human appetite ahead of the life of another sentient being. Choosing to eat meat outside of a life and death situation means the craving for a hamburger is more important than the entire life of the cow being eaten.

"Like humans, farm animals are self-aware, sentient beings. They are capable of experiencing pleasure and try to avoid pain and death. Though humans may be more powerful, we owe non-human animals moral consideration and should not needlessly inflict suffering."

Peek told Campus Reform that the on campus reaction to her column “has been mostly positive.”

“I think I educated some people,” the journalism senior said.

Peek, who also recently wrote a column advocating for gender-neutral pronouns, concludes her column by arguing that “it is unethical to eat meat when humans do not need it to survive.”

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @peterjhasson