Win a $50 Westfield Gift Card Writing Competition
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Competition Winners
Are you a budding writer? A would-be social commentator? A critic? A poet? Just someone with an opinion to share?
Welcome to our weekly Writing Challenge, where you’re invited to write on a topic of our choosing.
The best entry of the week will be published on Student Edge.
To enter, simply write a 400-word response to the topic outlined below, in the style of our previous writing challenge responses.
You have one week to submit your entry. The author of the winning article will receive a $50 gift card from Westfield.
Keep it smart, keep it clean and most of all, keep it under three minutes reading time.
Here's a tip: One line answers don't tend to make for an entertaining article (this isn't one of those 25 words or less competitions), so put your thinking caps on and write something you think others will find interesting.
Check out our guide to winning the writing challenge for some dos and don'ts.
This week's topic: Is Eating Meat Ethical?
Depending on who you ask, eating meat could be considered a biological necessity or the height of animal cruelty. Where do you stand?
Deadline: 18/09/2017 11:59:00 PM EST
This competition ends 18/09/2017 08:59PM
I'll just put it here and hope people still read it haha :) Thanks
When you sit down for a breakfast of bacon and eggs, do you think, and I mean – really think - about what it is you’re eating and how it got to your plate? I know I didn’t, and I wish I had earlier than I did.
Scrolling though Facebook, I stumbled upon a video of hundreds of baby male chicks being chucked into an industrial grinder. I found out that this was done because male chicks don’t produce enough meat to be profitable and are seen as unwanted by-products to the industry.
I was filled with anger. Why didn’t anyone tell me that this happened? And why hadn’t I thought about it? Now that I knew, I couldn’t stop researching about how other types of meat are produced, and what I found made me stop eating animals and their products for life.
Modern day consumerism and the introduction of the industrial revolution have created a plethora of issues in the animal agriculture industry on a global scale. The demand for meat is just too great for the regulations of ‘ethical’ meat production to be properly observed, but what is ‘ethical’?
We choose to befriend cats and dogs, but we kill and eat cows and pigs. What gives us the right to choose which animals to eat and which animals to love? If someone takes the life of a dog or cat, it is a crime, so why is it that a cow or pig being killed isn’t even given a second thought?
When a child finds out that the food they eat is made out of the cute animals they read about in their story books, they more often than not will get upset or, at the very least, find it strange. We are not born with the innate desire to kill and consume animals, we are taught to. The societal norm that is consuming the flesh of animals is nullifying the empathy that we were born with.
The worst part of it all? We don’t even need to eat meat. Every nutrient that we obtain from meat is there because of the grass, grain and feed that the animals are given, and that is where we can get them from as well. There is not a single vitamin or mineral that we can’t obtain from a plant-based source that doesn’t involve the mass production, exploitation, killing and consumption of animals.
So, the next time you go to the supermarket, you have the chance to save a life and not support the suffering of another living being, by doing something as simple as just refusing to buy and eat meat.
I just submitted, in Perth its 10:08 pm I feel so dumb
I put so mush effort in darn it :(
This comment has been deleted
Hi Jasmine,
Amanda is right - to enter the competition you will need to Submit your entry from the How to Enter section under Competition Details. You still have time to re-submit your entry!
Nice response but it won't be counted if you only put it in the comments section.