For the most part the student presentations have been interesting, although I am already getting bored of people presenting about Lifeboat Ethics. It seems that over half the class has chosen this topic and that dampens any chance of having a discussion with those people. There are only so many times you can continually discuss the same topic. It was thoroughly discussed during the first student presentation day and now continually going over it is parallel to beating a dead horse. Outside the repetitive nature of these topics I found factory farming and testing on animals to be extremely interesting. These are events that happen on a wide scale in everyday life so they are more relevant to us than some theory.
In particular factory farming caught my attention due to a lengthy review paper I had to write in one of my biology classes. My topic was about antibiotic resistant bacteria, and one aspect of this is the transfer of immune microbes from animals to humans. Resistant microbes arise in animals from the use of growth promoters, which are sub-therapeutic levels of antibiotics given to animals in their feed to increase their weight gains. These growth promoters are also needed to keep infections low due to the overcrowded, dirty environments that compose factory farms. These low doses and frequent uses of antibiotics has given rise to resistant bacteria in animals. This would not be a problem except it has been shown that these microbes are cross resistant to human antibiotics as well, because the growth promoters are structurally similar to humans medicine. This has led to an increase in resistant infections that were not seen until certain growth promoters were used. An anthropocentric argument could be made that factory farming is wrong, because the effects on humans is negative. This fact, along with the obvious one that the animals are kept in horrid conditions, makes the case even stronger about why factory farms should be abolished.
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