Animal Rights in the Classroom

On Wednesday, we are scheduled to discuss animal rights as they relate to business ethics. Perhaps I should be more excited about covering this with my students, but I am too close to the subject. In thinking about the upcoming class, I was reminded of an incident in my MBA program.

In my Operations Management class, we had to give group presentations on a topic related to the course. (I can't remember at all what my group's presentation covered.) One day, a group helmed by a student I remember as a jerk presented on slaughterhouse waste. I suppose that the topic was legitimate, and perhaps not even controversial in an Oklahoma classroom, but the group treated the concept as a joke. To me, the death of animals is never a joke, and in fact, the entire premise of slaughterhouses is immoral.

I had to leave the classroom until the presentation was over. It's bad enough that animals are killed in a cruel and inhumane manner, but to laugh about it? This is what they found so humorous:

Unforgivable.