Most people have respect and admiration for animals because they are another species that we share our planet with. Animal lovers can take this so seriously that they want to extend the rights of animals to ensure their survival. In the article “A Change of Heart about Animals,” the author, Jeremy Rifkin, writes how animals are more like us than most people think. Rifkin makes the effort to persuade the reader to extend our empathy towards animals by citing different animal studies that show how similar animal’s actions and emotions are to human actions and emotions. The author used the rhetorical devices of ethos, logos, and pathos to prove this argument.
The author uses the three rhetorical devices which are, ethos, logos, and pathos to explain and also persuade the audience into believing that animals are so much alike to humans. “What these researchers are finding is that many of our fellow creatures are more like us than we had ever imagined. They feel pain, suffer and experience stress, affection, excitement, and even love – and these findings are changing how we view animals” (Rifkin 59). This means that since we are discovering new things about the animals we have on earth with us are very much alike to humans than we thought, which is making us want to treat animals with kindness or just treat them with the same respect as we intend to humans. Rifkin seems to be very straightforward should be getting treated. For example, the author states that “ the government is encouraging pig farmers to give each pig 20 seconds of human contact each day and to provide them with toys to prevent them from fighting.” The author states this because many farms mistreat animals very badly and damage them mentally and physically, causing them to feel sad and eventually dying.
Most people will agree with Rifkin that animals should be treated nicely and be cared for because animals do not harm people. An animal study that Rifkin stated was about two crow birds who were choosing resources that were given to them to get to their food. According to Rifkin, studies on the two crows show that when the two crows “…were given a choice between using two tools, one a straight wire, the other a hooked wire, to snag a piece of meat from inside a tube.” When researchers were observing the birds, they saw that the more dominant bird took what they needed, leaving the other bird without a choice. “… Researchers repeated the experiment and she fashioned a hook out of the wire nine out of 10 times.” Based on the experiment, birds can use their type of problem-solving techniques to make a solution just like humans would.
127 our experts are availableright now
References
- World Wildlife Fund
- Humane Society
- National Geographic
- NCBI: Animal Emotions and Human Moods: A Comparative Review
- Time: Do animals have rights?
- Los Angeles Times: To boost their well-being, pigs taken on roller-coaster rides in Denmark
- SAGE Journals: Toward a More Rigorous Science of Animal Welfare
