"Animal Cruelty is the Price
We Pay for Cheap Meat"
Reposted from
Exposing the Big Game ~ Jim Robertson.
Posted on December 10, 2013
An impressive report, “Animal Cruelty is the Price We Pay for Cheap Meat” has just been published in Rolling Stone.
It contains graphic images and video and details the brutal lives and deaths our “food” animals on our factory farms have to suffer. The facts in the article are eye-opening:
500 million tons of factory-farm animal waste generated each year;
35,000 miles of rivers and streams across 22 states reporting polluted waterways caused by farm-animal excretement;
9 billion broiler chickens, 113 million pigs, 33 million cows and 250 million turkeys raised and killed for food each year.
And that’s just beginning. Animals on factory farms live a nightmare. Read the descriptions of how a broiler chicken and a dairy cow, respectively, are made to suffer:
If you’re a broiler chicken (raised specifically for meat), thanks to “meat science” and its chemical levers – growth hormones, antibiotics and genetically engineered feed – you weigh at least double what you would in the wild, but lack the muscle even to waddle, let alone fly.
Your hooves have rotted black from standing in your own shit, your teats are scarred, swollen and leaking pus – infected by mastitis – and you’re sick to the verge of total collapse from giving nearly 22,000 pounds of milk a year. (That’s more than double what your forebears produced just 40 years ago.)
If the above descriptions make you feel ill and you wonder, “How can this happen? How can these businesses get away with this?” then I am sorry to say that a lot of what is seen at factory farms in undercover footage is perfectly legal. There are no federal statutes pertaining to livestock while being bred or raised for food, only slaughter (and a de minimis statute on transporting food animals across state lanes). So while one may think a statute such as the Animal Welfare Act would be relevant, that Act only covers research, exhibition, and the pet industry, and specifically exempts farmed animals raised for food. Therefore, as the Rolling Stone article rightly points out, the Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act is the only federal law governing our food animals, and that Act only covers slaughter. Furthermore, birds are completely exempt from the Act.
The lack of satisfactory federal law on the welfare of our food animals means that undercover activists, like the ones profiled in the Rolling Stones article, must rely on state anti-cruelty laws. But that’s not simple or easy to do: 36 states expressly exempt “customary” farming practices from their anti-cruelty statutes. Consequently, agribusiness has the sole authority to determine which farming practices are cruel or not. Additionally, there is the threat of ag-gag laws; these laws criminalize whistleblower activity at factory farms. These laws help keep hidden the cruel practices of agribusiness and allow our food animals to continue to be abused.
Read the article and learn the true cost of the cheap meat you eat. Do you think it is worth it?
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO ALL THE ANIMALS IF
EVERYONE WENT VEGAN?
EVERYONE WENT VEGAN?
by Exposing the Big Game
Dr. Will Tuttle: Educator & Author
November 20, 2013
Those of us eating a plant-based diet often find our food choices causing more questions and consternation during the upcoming weeks than during the rest of the year. One of the perennial concerns I’ve found people have is that if everyone went vegan, what would happen to all the animals—chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows? If we stopped eating them, wouldn’t they just take over the Earth, threatening our survival?
For years this question irked me because it seemed patently ridiculous, and worse, would be used to justify the cruelty of eating animal foods. Now, though, whenever I hear this question, I see it as an opportunity to deliver a brief meditation on how our world can be healed.
Imagining the world gradually going vegan is imagining the most positive possible future for our species, for the Earth, and for all living beings. First of all, as we reduce the number of animals we are eating, that will send a message to agribusiness to forcefully inseminate fewer female pigs, turkeys, cows, fishes, and other animals, so fewer animals will be imprisoned, and there will be less mutilation, killing, violence, terror, and suffering. It also means there will be lower demand for GMO corn, soy, alfalfa and other feed grains, and thus less deforestation, monocropping, and pollution. As this continues, there will be more food to feed starving people, and also monocropped land can be returned to being critically-needed habitat for wildlife, whose populations are being decimated by the habitat loss caused by grazing livestock and growing feed grains.
As the vegan trend continues, streams will come back and run cleaner. More birds, fish, and other animals will be able to thrive, there will be far less toxic pesticides and fertilizers needed, and the oceans, which we are devastating, will begin to heal. As studies continually demonstrate, livestock production is the main driving force behind global warming, and this also will decrease. In addition, by eating less animal-based foods, people will be healthier physically as they eliminate the toxic fat, cholesterol, and animal protein that drive obesity, diabetes, arthritis, cancer, kidney disease, heart disease, and drug use. People will become healthier emotionally and spiritually, also, as they cause and eat less misery, and our culture, as its level of violence decreases, will become healthier as well.
As forest, rainforest, and prairie communities come back to life, along with riparian and ocean communities, the devastating mass extinction of species that is going on right now will slow down. To raise and slaughter hundreds of millions animals daily for food on this planet, we are forcing hundreds of species of animals and plants into extinction every week. Because of our appetites for a few species of birds, mammals, and fish, we are destroying the Earth’s genetic diversity, and it seems absurd to be unconcerned about these tens of thousands of species, but to care only about the few that we’re eating. In any event, the animals we imprison today for food lived freely in nature for millions of years and could do so again. The animals that we most intensely enslave for food and products, such as turkeys, ducks, geese, chickens, and fish, are all doing just fine in the wild (aside from being hunted and having their habitat destroyed). They would continue to do so, and this is also true for pigs, sheep, and goats, which even today have substantial wild populations. There is no reason to think that the animals we are eating and using wouldn’t be able to return to their natural lives living freely in nature—they already are!
Cows are the only possible question—their progenitors, the aurochs, were forced into extinction in the 1600s, but it is certainly conceivable that cows could be reintroduced into central Asia and Africa where they lived for millions of years, and with time would return to the ecological niche they inhabited before cruel human enslavement tore them from their ancestral homelands.
So, it’s a refreshing question to ponder. It’s remarkably uplifting and heartening to reflect on “what will happen if we all stop eating meat, dairy products, and eggs?” Contemplating this, we see clearly that there’s nothing stopping us from creating a heaven on this beautiful and abundant Earth – nothing except the culturally mandated, deeply-ingrained, and deluded habits of routinely abusing animals for food. Each one of us can question this, and I hope the next time you hear this question, you’ll welcome it enthusiastically!
We can all discuss this question a few times during the holidays, and by doing so, pull back the curtain to reveal the positive future we can create together. There is no action more powerful anyone can take to subvert the dominant paradigm of exploitation and inequality than to shift to a plant-based diet for ethical reasons. By going vegan, and spreading the vegan message creatively, we take the most effective action to create a world where peace, abundance, sustainability, freedom, and universal joy are not just possible but natural.
Exposing the Big Game | November 24, 2013 at 6:57 pm | Tags: animal-rights, veganism | Categories: Animal Rights | URL: http://wp.me/p2nX5S-Y7
http://exposingthebiggame.wordpress.com/author/exposingthebiggame/
THE NONHUMAN RIGHTS PROJECT
photo courtesy of the Nonhuman Rights Project
The Nonhuman Rights Project is the only organization working toward actual LEGAL rights for members of species other than our own. Our mission is to change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere “things,” which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to “persons,” who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and those other legal rights to which evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them. Our first cases are being prepared for filing in 2013. Your support of this work is deeply appreciated.
http://www.nonhumanrightsproject.org/?gclid=CI_6zeCR4LkCFepFMgod7EYA1Q
THE CASE FOR NON HUMAN ANIMAL RIGHTS
http://www.lifeaftercapitalism.info/downloads/read/Ecology-and-Environmentalism/Veganism/Tom%20Regan%20-%20The%20Case%20for%20Animal%20Rights.pdf
ANIMAL RIGHTS: WHAT IS THE NONHUMAN RIGHTS PROJECT?
http://freefromharm.org/animal-rights/what-is-the-nonhuman-rights-project/
ANIMAL RIGHTS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_rights
PERSONHOOD ~ NON-HUMAN ANIMALS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-human
A CLOSER LOOK AT 'NON - HUMAN PERSONHOOD" AND ANIMAL WELFARE
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/a-closer-look-at-nonhuman-personhood-and-animal-welfare/?_r=0
ETHICS GUIDE - ANIMAL RIGHTS
This article discusses whether non-human animals have rights, and what is meant by animal rights.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/rights/rights_1.shtml
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANIMAL RIGHTS
http://www.cultureandanimals.org/pop1.html
THE 10 RIGHTS FOR DOLPHINS AS 'NON-HUMAN PERSONS'
http://www.takepart.com/photos/declaration-rights-cetaceans/dolphin%20rights%20intro%20size
DO NON-HUMAN ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?
http://www.debate.org/opinions/do-non-human-animals-have-rights
PRIMER ON ANIMAL RIGHTS
http://www.vrg.org/nutshell/animalrights.htm
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