All About Animals: Secondary Teachers: Lesson Plan 3: This house believes …
How does this fit into the National Curriculum? Pupils should be taught to contribute to exploratory class discussions and take part in formal debates (2c).
Teachers’ Note: Divide the class in half and give one half the opportunity to promote the view expressed in the quotation of your choice (see below). The other half should argue against that view, irrespective of their own opinions. After 20 minutes (or a suitable time) take a break and summarise the points made. Then resume the debate with the pupils putting forward their own views and opinions on the matter.
1. Vegetable diet and sweet repose. Animal food and nightmare. Pluck your food from the orchard; do not snatch it from the shambles. Without flesh diet there could be no blood-shedding war.
Louisa May Alcott
2. I do not see any reason why animals should be slaughtered to serve as human diet when there are so many substitutes. After all, man can live without meat.
His Holiness The XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet
3. Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
Thomas A. Edison
4. To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
5. The way I feel about [eating meat] is, if you’re going to kill someone’s child and eat it, you might as well kill your own child and eat it.
Chrissie Hynde
6. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
C.S.Lewis
7. Alas, what wickedness to swallow flesh into our own flesh, to fatten our greedy bodies by cramming in other bodies, to have one living creature fed by the death of another!
Pythagoras, 6th century B.C.