Course Reflection

I really want to say that I am a strong willed person and for the entire class I stuck to my guns. To stick to my guns would mean that I was unmoved by anything we learned in the class and that I still do not like animals or care that we (America) kill billions of them per year to eat. This is completely untrue. Reading the "Animal Ethics Reader" made me soften a little towards companion and especially zoo animals even though I still do not want a pet of my own. Zoo animals really caught my attention when Ralph Acampora compared them to porn in his analogy "Zoos and Eyes: Contesting Captivity and Seeking Successor Practices" (Animal Ethics 501-506). Checking out "Eating Animals" actually made me reconsider what it really means that I eat animals. When reading "Eating Animals" in particular I could not believe how cruelly these animals are not killed by slaughtered! When I read where Jonathan Safran Foer describes killing chickens, "The next set of workers at the plant will sling the birds to hang upside down by their ankles in metal shackles; onto a moving conveyor system (more bones will be broken). The birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud you won’t be able to hear the person next to you and the birds will also defecate in pain and terror" (Eating Animals 48), I was actaully mortified.

The one writing skill that I have acquired through readings, writings, and research this semester that stands out above all would be how to weave my words in with citations. In every single essay we had to cite sources from either "Animal Ethics Reader", "Eating Animals", or both and doing so helped me to be able to better place cited quotes in my paper where it runs really smoothly and does not give off the impression that I just added a quote in a paper just for the sake of it.