Argumentative Essay: Why Beat Innocent Animals

Why Beat Innocent Animals? To start off with, I am an avid dog lover who currently has four dogs. In the last couple years my family and I started with two dogs and adopted two more. There is this neighbor who always got frustrated with my dogs when they barked. One day he thought that it would be okay to use a pellet gun on my dogs to get them to be quiet. When he shot my dogs with the pellet gun, all you heard was a loud yelping sound from one of the dogs. My mom and I went outside to see what was wrong with her and we saw him with a pellet gun in his hand pointing it at my dogs. We took the dogs inside and we went back outside to go talk to him but he had gone inside his house. Another time that this same man was cruel to another animal
was a couple months ago. The dog next door was always barking because his owners were in the middle of moving in. This man thought there was a better way to shut the dog up and that was to throw fireworks over the fence and scare the dog out of its wits. This man was out of control and was and still is very cruel to animals today. The ironic part to all this is that he has a dog of his own now and I can only imagine what that dog is going through. How is it that a person can be cruel to an animal for no reason at all? Why should people care about protecting animals? America contradicts themselves when it comes to the treatment of animals (Why Animals Matter, 11). The green pastures and the idyllic barnyard scenes of our past are now a distant memory. Most of these animals are raised for the use of food, clothing, experiments, and entertainment. These animals would be taken away from their mothers at a young age for these purposes. Each one of these purposes has a consequence for the animals, but all the animals want in return is some tender loving care. “We cannot just do whatever we want with them…. Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible” (Why Animals Matter 11). This statement was made by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now known as Pope Benedict XVI. So ask yourself, why should we protect animals from harm? The simple reason is animals don't deserve to be treated as they were dirt. They should be treated like humans are. Animal owners should not beat, use their animals for food or entertainment, use animals for testing experiments, and they should never neglect their animals either. All around the world there are animals that are getting beaten, killed, and neglected by their owners or just random people.
People that abuse animals have usually been abused themselves when they were younger. These people are mostly males. But when it comes down to it, people just never give animals the chance to speak for themselves like we can as people. Animals have rights just like we do and we just walk all over what they have. People need to understand that like humans, animals have the capacity to feel pleasure or pain. If you go up to anyone they can tell you that unnecessary harm to an animal is unacceptable. The law states: “neglecting a pet by depriving it of food, water, or medical attention is a misdemeanor crime penalized by costly fines or in some cases jail time” (Animal Rights, 8). There are more severe cases of abuse towards animals, for example torture, and the charges for this is a felony and can be punished up to a minimal of five years in jail. Laws towards animal cruelty did not come about until the 1800s, but public displays of abuse were very common during the nineteenth-century in England. This consisted of carriage horses being driven until they collapsed from exhaustion; calves being packed in carts with their feet tied together; cattle and sheep were “prodded” with sharp iron hooks or whipped to death at the whim of slaughterhouse workers (Animal Rights, 8). There are also some forms of amusement that include dog fighting, cockfighting, and
bull baiting, which is a dog and a bull go in for a vicious battle and the battle often ends in a bloody death for both animals. All though animal fighting is illegal, people still find it entertaining. There is nothing that can justify what people do to these poor, innocent animals. Animals should be loved and taken well care of, not neglected or abused by us. People that have been abused when they were younger grow up to either abuse other people or animals (The Link Between Animal Abuse and Family Violence). They usually go after animals because most animals fear humans only for the fact they never know when we can turn on them. I have experience with a dog being left alone in a house without food and water. My great uncle Record, from Denmark, was looking for a place here in Fort Myers. He came across the small place and he seemed to like it until he looked in and saw a little puppy locked inside this house with nothing to eat or drink. He brought the dog back to my aunt’s house and he gave her to my family. Still to this day, Ravyn is part of our family and we take good care of her. When looking at statistics, six to eight million companion animals go to shelters and about half of that die. Then there are puppies that are come from puppy mills, which breed sick, suffering grown dogs and then send them to pet stores (Animal Use and Abuse: The Shocking Numbers). That is where everyone sees all these cute and cuddly animals. About two to four million puppies are bred there in a year. These poor animals go through really hard times throughout their lives. Most people that abuse or neglect animals have been physically or sexually abused at a young age.
Adults would tell their children that they would harm their pet to punish their children. Some statistics of animal cruelty in a home of someone of domestic violence show that parents will threaten to harm an animal to keep the child from telling anyone they are physically or mentally abused. Another is, some adults of violence will stay and take abuse longer because they’re afraid the abuser will harm the family pet. It’s astounding that about seventy-one percent of battered women who enter shelters that own pets reported that their abuser injured, maimed, or killed that pet (In Association with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence). Sometimes children would see what their parents would do to animals and not knowing that it was animal cruelty these kids would copy what they saw. It’s hard to believe that statistics showed that these children felt they could identify with their abusers and hurt these animal because they saw them as a weaker victim than the themselves (The Link Between Animal Abuse and Family Violence).People that abuse animals show it in many different ways; such as, letting the animals roam the community wild and freely, not giving them acceptable attention, nice place to live, not having good vet care, malnutrition, or keeping the animals from suffering from parasites and other diseases. There is no excuse for people to abuse animals at all,
whether they were abused or not. Statistics show that in 1983 there were eighty-eight percent of child abuse cases that happened in New Jersey and in almost every family there was a member that would abuse their pet. “In 1997, one hundred fifty-three violent animal abusers whose behavior was tracked for ten years, seventy percent committed other crimes and thirty-eight percent committed violent crimes (Animal Abuse – statistics and studies). So many animals get the crap end of the deal when it comes to love and protection. What can people do to stop the animal abuse and neglect? If there is any suspicion of animal abuse then you can always contact the SPCA, which stands for Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or a veterinarian to see if they cannot help find this animal some temporary care. With the SPCA, they could have an investigator come out and educate some of these people who neglect their pets. The investigators goal is to improve the quality of life for animals. You can tell if an animal has not been fed by either seeing their bones or if you try and feed it and it chows it down like it is nothing. If an animal tried to attack or is very timid then it has been beaten or left alone. You should never take it a pawn yourself to try and help the animal, let the professionals handle it. In conclusion, animals should have rights like a human do. There are better ways to take out anger than on animals. They have done nothing wrong to deserve the treatments they get. Animal cruelty has many forms, such as, neglect to torturing them. People just need to see what they are doing and stop the abuse they put on these animals. You can help them by reporting anything that you see, but remember you should never try to do it alone. So why are people so abrasive towards animals?