The Debate on Animal Exploitation

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A 50-minute lesson

1. 5 min
   Opening. Ask the question and let the class answer without correcting them: What do you actually know about how the animal behind some product you used this week lived?
2. 15 min
   Reading. How Do the Animals Exploited by Humans Live and Die? (22 min read) and Why Is Animal Exploitation Unjust? (8 min read). For younger classes, read the “For kids” layer: Most animals used for food live locked up in cramped places, far from their mothers, sometimes injured, and are killed very young. If this happened to people, everyone would think it was horrible. Their suffering is just the same.
3. 15 min
   Discussion.

   • What do you actually know about how the animal behind some product you used this week lived? (How Do the Animals Exploited by Humans Live and Die?)
   • Which version of animal exploitation did you consider “acceptable”? Does it pass the impartiality test? (Why Is Animal Exploitation Unjust?)
   • If you explained to someone why you don't buy a certain product, what reason would you give? (What Is Veganism?)
   • Do people who use the plant objection usually change anything in their own diet because of plants? What does that reveal? (What About Plants?)
4. 10 min
   Activity. Project the debate simulator. In groups, the class chooses the best reply to each objection and explains why the others are weak.
5. 5 min
   Wrap-up. Each person writes one sentence about what changed in their thinking. Compare it with the volume summary: How exploited animals live and die, why exploitation is unjust, and what veganism is. Then, one by one, the most common objections: plants, "it's natural," the desert island, the economy, jobs, the law, insects and animal experimentation.

Exercise sheet

1. Which form of exploitation kills by far the most animals?

   1. Use for entertainment
   2. Use for food
   3. Use as companions

2. According to the chapter, why is it unjust to do to humans what is done to exploited animals?

   1. Because humans are our species
   2. Because suffering and dying in those ways seriously harms the victims
   3. Because humans are rational

3. Does animal exploitation stop being unjust if the animals are killed without suffering?

   1. Yes
   2. No, because it still violates equal consideration and impartiality
   3. Only if it's small-scale

4. What are the two grounds of the injustice of exploitation in the chapter?

   1. Profit and tradition
   2. Equal consideration and the impartiality test
   3. Health and the environment

5. Why doesn't the chapter reduce veganism to “avoiding animal products for any reason”?

   1. Because there would be no word for the position of avoiding harm to animals out of respect for them
   2. Because that's forbidden
   3. Because that doesn't exist

6. Besides avoiding harm, veganism can...

   1. expose the injustice animals suffer
   2. increase exploitation
   3. do nothing else

7. According to the chapter, what is the main criterion for assessing whether a being is sentient?

   1. Being alive
   2. Having a nervous system with centralization
   3. Reacting to light

8. If plants were sentient, what would follow?

   1. That it doesn't matter whether we eat animals or plants
   2. Fruitarianism, not eating everything
   3. That we should eat only animals

9. What common mistake do the objection and the reply “eating meat isn't natural” share?

   1. Assuming that if a behavior is natural, it's justifiable
   2. Talking about nutrition
   3. None

10. Which example shows that the appeal to what animals do fails?

    1. Animals also commit infanticide and theft, and we don't imitate them
    2. Animals don't eat
    3. Animals are vegetarian

The lesson plan and exercises are a study layer written for this site. The texts read are by Luciano Carlos Cunha.