I enjoyed the second assignment, Critical Thinking and Social Organizations, because it motivated me to look up organizations that I was familiar with, but not quite knowledgeable about. Also, I got to work with the same people from the first group paper, so it was more comfortable and easy-going to communicate with each other when breaking up the parts of the paper for each person to work on.
As a group, we decided to analyze PETA. All of us knew about PETA and their mission to protect animal rights, however we wanted to explore the other key focuses of PETA through their videos, campaigns, and advertisements. PETAs website had a good amount of fallacies, claims, and arguments regarding the protection of animals and it really let me reflect on the concepts I learned throughout this course.
PETA is very good at using pathos, which is an appeal to emotion, in their advertisements and videos. I was happy to be able to identify the pathos in videos that showed animals being skinned for their fur and sick cow being pushed by a forklift in order for them to stand upright. Their words to describe the issue they are fighting for is very captivating and descriptive: "Every day in countries around the world, animals are fighting for their lives. They are enslaved, beaten, and kept in chains to make them perform for humans' "entertainment"; they are mutilated and confined to tiny cages so that we can kill them and eat them; they are burned, blinded, poisoned...." PETA's message against animal cruelty helped me decide whether their arguments were valid or good and if they can be deemed plausible and made me realize how powerful using pathos as a tactic to convince people can be.
Yes I agree with you the PETA website and organization uses a lot of pathos in their website so that people can stop to think. I mean having graphic videos and pictures always help get support from people and this is what PETA is doing. Yes is really bad that many animals get tortured and skinned alive but its just a conflict that will take time to resolve. Its really good that you wrote about pathos because there is a lot of emotion appeal when seeing all the videos, facts, and photographs that leaves one speechless.
ReplyDelete