Animal Abuse Speech
When given the prompt for the motivational speech, which was "to educate your audience of the scope, severity, and urgency of a significant social problem, and then motivate your audience members to take a specific action that will assist in solving the problem"(Henderson 1), I immediately knew which social issue I wanted to write about. Animals have always been a big part of my life, and I love the animals living at my house as much as any person. Animal abuse is a topic that everyone knows about, but not many people realize the seriousness of it. They see dog fighting rings get busted on television, but they never think that it could be happening in their very own neighborhood. The solution to animal abuse is very simple: to educate people about mistreatment. Many people guilty of animal abuse are guilty simply because they are not well enough educated about the proper treatment of animals, so if we were to give everyone the ability to learn about animal care, we could very nearly eliminate abuse.
I feel that my speech worked well to motivate the audience into doing something about the topic. The simplicity of the solution (education) made it easier for the audience to actually get involved, yet still kept their interest. Many people in the audience indicated that they had animals at home, and I feel I used pathos well to appeal emotionally to to audience. By keeping it simple and making the audience think about their own situation, I believe my speech did a good job of motivating people to help stop animal abuse.
