Cowspiracy Analysis

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Cowspiracy Analysis

The 2014 documentary Cowspiracy, directed by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn, attempts to show the world what kind of impact raising cattle makes on the earth. Andersen and Kuhn do an exemplary job of exploiting expert testimony to explain their views but lacked emotional appeal. The logic seemed to fall short since the documentary was packed with many facts that didn’t explain all contributors to the statistics. The directors did attempt to use all fields appropriately but only had one strong suit, therefore it was not as persuasive to viewers.

Cowspiracy utilizes experts in a way that persuasively move readers toward their opinion. The main person of cowspiracy ask, direct questions that persuades his expert to go into …show more content…

The comparisons tended to stay amid machines or humans versus cattle. Using only one comparison in a scenario tends to leave out background information that is imperative to understanding situations. Filmmaker of Cowspiracy, Kip Andersen verifies that, "hydraulic fracturing for natural gas uses... staggering 100 billion gallons of water is used every year in the united states... raising livestock just in the US consumes 30 trillion gallons of water, and it turns out the methane emissions from both industries are nearly equal"(5:37). Many other things use water in the US aside from cattle and hydraulic fracturing. The presented information leads us to believe that cattle are the main cause aside from outside factors or other contributors to water use. In the documentary they go on to a more generalized statistic. Kip Anderson continues this explaining, "...Domestic water use is only 5% of what is consumed in the US versus 55% for animal agriculture"(6:51). The statistic covers a broad expanse not really going in depth on different domestic use or different animals' contribution to the consumption of water. Also, there is 45% of water being used that is unaccounted for in the statistic. With the given statistics being bias to the cause it is easy to infer that there is more information that the documentary is withholding from

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