Animal Writings

Dear Editor,

Yesterday's USA Weekend edition had a short piece and accompanying quiz called "Don't Know Much About Eggs," which coincided with National Egg Month. Here are some facts about eggs that most people don't know. I submit that these are more important than knowing whether a raw egg spins well.

• 95 percent or more of eggs come from factory farm hens. The hens live in small cages with slatted floors. They never see the sun or breathe fresh air.


• Factory farm hens have less space than a sheet of notebook paper in which to live.


• Factory farm hens typically are de-beaked. Hens use their beaks for foraging and to clean their feathers.


• The male offspring of breeder hens are killed by suffocation, exposure, gassing, or being ground up, shortly after they're born.


• Most factory farms have hens' cages stacked one on top of the other. The bottom hens become covered in excrement that falls on them from the top cages.


• "Animal Care Certified" (ACC) hens are subject to all the above harsh conditions. In addition, they may be starved for over a week to force more eggs out of them.


• The Better Business Bureau called the ACC program misleading.


• After a year, or two at most, factory farm laying hens are "spent:" nearly featherless, plagued with joint problems, weak, and generally looking awful.


• Spent hens are thrown into crates, loaded on a truck, and slaughtered. Hens are not protected under the Humane Slaughter Act. Their muscles are paralyzed but they are conscious and sentient when their throats are slit.


• Improperly hung birds may have their wings, heads, or other body parts ripped off while upside down, in shackles, on the slaughter line.

If inclined, please forward this email around the newsroom so the right people know the not-so-tasteful realities of modern egg production.

Thank you.

Ryan Cox was from Derby, Kansas. He liked to listen to Pink Floyd, and he had a soft heart for homeless animals.

He joined the Marines in 2002. He trained at Camp Pendleton and was subsequently dispatched to Najaf, Iraq. One night, during a scuffle in the barracks that got out of hand, he was accidentally shot. Dead at 19.

Shortly thereafter, three marines showed up on the Cox's doorstep to tell the family that their son had been killed.

Ryan's' parents still have his bed made up. His Marine fatigues hang in the closet. Jordan, the stray cat he adopted 12 years ago, curls up next to Ryan's boots. They all know he's gone yet they're waiting for him to return.

Today, flags are draped in Falls Church, Virginia, and in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and in Sandpoint, Idaho, and in Derby, Kansas—and perhaps in your home town, to remember Ryan Cox and other veterans.

For your cookout this weekend, pick up some Gardenburger Riblets. They're amazingly good. Plus there's an important bonus reason for trying them, which I hope you'll take into consideration.

Most pigs raised today live their entire lives in cages barely bigger than they are. They never see the sun, feel grass, or breathe fresh air. These intelligent, curious, social animals exhibit severe frustration from their constant confinement, biting aggressively on the cage bars, surely wishing to break free. In many operations, the cages are stacked three high and the bottom pigs are covered in the excrement from the pigs above them. This is a highly unnatural situation. The pigs have no exercise, no toys, no affection, nothing. Their treatment would result in a felony conviction in 38 states if done to a dog. Eventually the inhospitable, empty environment gets to the pigs and they simply give up, becoming lifeless and unresponsive. All the while, they're standing on concrete, their unexercised legs barely able to support their huge upper body.

Then it gets worse. They're crammed extremely tightly into trucks without food or water and taken to the slaughterhouse. Many of the pigs are still fully conscious as they're immersed in scalding hot water. They flail and scream as this is happening. This is well-documented and admitted by slaughterhouse workers.

So each time you buy Riblets, or veggie bacon or ham, you're sparing animals from horrible suffering. That's amazing power — use it.

I like my Riblet sandwiches on a bun with cole slaw piled high on top. Some folks prefer them with a slice of red onion and tomato. Delicious either way. Or make up your own variations. Load up with side dishes like corn and pasta salad and you've got yourself a great meal. The Riblets are a little on the salty side, so you may have to wash them down with a beer. Try some, let me know what you think.

While we're on the subject, here are a couple of other vegetarian grilling ideas. I want to impress upon you that it's easy to work vegetarian entrees into your barbecues, and that there are many advantages to doing so.

A friend of mine could not find a veggie burger he liked, until he discovered Morningstar Grillers. Now Grillers still have some animal products, like eggs — and laying hens in factory farms probably suffer more than any animal on the planet; their lives are even worse than the pigs' — but the reason I'm recommending this product anyway is because I want to get you in the habit of cooking up veggie alternatives instead of always meat, meat, meat. Mountain climbers, triathletes, weight-lifters, and Olympians do it, so there's nothing un-macho about it. But I realize that sometimes there's this hump you have to get over; you're used to buying hamburger and frying it up for so many years, there's some resistance to change. Sometimes I hear something along the lines of "what are my friends going to think?" Don't worry about it, don't make a big deal of it. More than likely, they'll ask for a taste and like it, and eventually buy it themselves. This happens all the time. Or you can give them a copy of Even If You Like Meat. This pamphlet is a real eye-opener. Warning: some of the pictures are disturbing. But we can't close our eyes to pain and suffering that we help create. Better to face it head on, admit it, and divest ourselves of it. And you can do that in large part with a more humane diet.

Anyway, my friend and his wife, who rarely ate veggie burgers before, now eat Grillers regularly. They invited a non-vegetarian friend over for an all-veggie barbecue. He loved it.

Bonus — most of these products require practically no clean-up afterwards. You'll go to grab the wire brush, ready to scrape, and notice that there's nothing to clean.

Other veggie meat products to try out: GardenBurger BBQ "Chickn," and, actually, all the fake chicken products. Some taste more like chicken than chicken. I know that sounds strange, but you'll see what I mean. If you don't like one variety, don't give up, because there is tremendous diversity.

You don't have to go out of your way to find these products; they're available at major supermarkets like Safeway, Kroger, Albertsons, and Whole Foods. You can even buy many of them at WalMart in bulk. They're lower in saturated fats than the products they replace, so figure improved health into the equation. These products also tend to be high-protein and low-carb, and fit into low-carb diets very well. Plus, you are saving animals from God-awful suffering — that helps your heart, too!

Hope your weather is as good as the weather in the DC area this weekend. Enjoy your grilling. Remember the animals in cramped cages who suffer out of our sight — and who you can help simply by modifying your food purchases. Take a moment of silence to remember the fallen soldiers, who sacrificed so that we could live in freedom.

Welcome to Washington, DC again, freedom riders.

Yesterday we were riding back from the veterinary clinic. My cat, already traumatized, is usually visibly frightened when a motorcyle pulls up, and nothing I do calms him. I held him and told him that the motorcycle rider alongside the car is bringing attention to those who fought and died for our freedom, that it was okay. He purred. Rolling thunder.

Even the birds in the bamboo that sing for us every night seemed to have a more strident song. Perhaps they know?

I hope you enjoy your weekend and your Ride for Freedom. We appreciate the sacrifice made by you and we honor the ones left behind.

This was originally reported by Jim France of the Pavillion Hotel Group in Bangkok, amid the chaos of the tsunami, and appears in the latest issue of "Trunklines," from The Elephant Sanctuary. It demonstrates elephants' compassion and intelligence:


Perhaps now they'll be freed from their chains.

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Related stories about elephants:

Tyke's Last Performance

Chicago Zoo Under Fire Over Deaths

"Factory farming came about when resourceful men figured out...new technologies to raise animals in conditions that would otherwise kill them by deprivation and disease. With no laws to stop it, moral concern surrendered entirely to economic calculation, leaving no limit to the punishments that factory farmers could inflict to keep costs down and profits up.

"The result is a world in which billions of birds, cows, pigs, and other creatures are locked away, enduring miseries they do not deserve, for our convenience and pleasure. We belittle the activists with their radical agenda, scarcely noticing the radical cruelty they seek to redress."

— Matthew Scully in The American Conservative

"Whose life is more important, the pig's or yours?"

From whose perspective?

The anti-animal rights group "Center for Consumer Freedom" (CCF) claims that PETA's goal of animal liberation is a "strange Utopian vision."

Not really.

We can achieve 90 percent of that goal any day we want, by giving up meat and dairy. It's not that hard. I did it. I feel great. I used to cook spare ribs, meatloaf, Korean beef, pork roast, chicken Cacciatore, and turkey with stuffing. If I can do it, you can do it. As more people stop eating animals, the alternatives, the numbers of which are already exploding, become better, more diverse, and ubiquitous.

Now for the other ten percent.

Fur we can — and should — make passe immediately. Its production involves unimaginable horrors, and synthetics are better in every measure except snob appeal.

Giving up cruel bloodsports such as trophy hunting, cockfighting, and rodeo should be no problem; most people don't engage in those activities anyway.

There are plenty of alternatives to animal research that do not share its well-known, inherent extrapolation and artifact problems. What's lacking is will. It's easier to maintain the status quo, which is highly profitable and the path of least resistance to career advancement. Even when alternatives are proven to be superior, companies and especially the government drag their heels. Give to charities that help people instead of torture animals and the medical research industry will get the message. Converting to non-animal modalities won't take very long, and you'll see increased progress in finding cures. Indeed, when you examine recent Nobel prizes in medicine and modern medical discoveries you see that non-animal methods are key, and vague animal models are redundant or get in the way. (A partial list of advances hindered by or made independently of animal studies includes bypass surgery, pacemakers, balloon angioplasty, statins, penicillin, tamoxifen, MRI cans, CAT scans, PET scans, ultrasound, the effects of secondhand smoke, Gleevec which successfully treats leukemia, computerized canes, laparoscopic surgery, hip replacement surgery, cartilage replacement, the link between high blood pressure and stroke, the link between cholesterol and heart disease, the link between smoking and cancer, the link between dietary fat and cancers of the colon and prostate, the link between vitamin C deficiency or exposure to sunlight and cataracts, the relationship of diet and smoking to osteoporosis, the link between folic acid deficiency and spina bifida, the link between mercury and fetal cancer, the link between low birth weight and a number of conditions, how AIDS is transmitted, the genetic cause of Down's Syndrome and cystic fibrosis, the relationship of babies sleeping on their stomachs and SIDS, bacteria's role in ulcers, gene abnormalities that raise the risk of heart attacks and breast cancer, just about everything we know about Alzheimer's Disease, and the chemotherapy that helped Lance Armstrong win the Tour de France.)

Pets? Even the most ardent animal rights activist realizes that animals and people can be great companions. Most animal rights advocates live with one or more animals; some have a dozen. They adopt shelter animals that were abandoned by their owners. They take in strays and feed feral cat colonies. If we can work out the problems with pet abuse, pet abandonment, puppy mills, uncaring pet shops, backyard breeders, carnivals that give away pets as prizes, and pet overpopulation — no small feat — we may be able to come up with a well-regulated system of pet ownership that ensures that the animals' welfare will not be compromised. This is the stickiest area of animal rights, but I firmly believe it's not impossible to work out a compromise. The guiding principal should be an unwavering respect and heartfelt commitment for the animals' needs.

Liberated doesn't mean ignored. It means freed from human cruelty. Most of our dealings with animals are at their expense. Our commercial relationships with animals involve a degree of suffering never before seen on earth. I'm of Jewish descent and I include the Holocaust in that comparison. I've thought about it a lot. I hesitate to voice this opinion because I can anticipate the onslaught of dissension and lecturing directed toward me in response. But Jews, of all people, should recognize the indifference, denials, devaluation of life, and self-serving rationales that cause entire citizenries to become inured to institutionalized suffering. Many Jews agree with me. Some so much that they've written articles and books that articulate the point. Before you disagree, watch these two videos (Horror at Kosher Slaughterhouse and Meet Your Meat) in their entirety and multiply by several billion.

CCF: Forget Utopia if you think it's unreachable. Please just criticize forced starvation of laying hens. Forced feeding of ducks to the point that their livers become engorged to several times normal size and sometimes explode. Amputating horns, tails, beaks, toes, and genitals with no painkillers. Jabbing rodeo animals with 5000-volt electric prods. Beating circus elephants until they cry. Cutting off sharks' fins and throwing the animals back in the water to flail and drown. Speak out against research lab workers who laugh at monkeys getting their heads bashed in. Condemn the brutality of the fur trade: for vanity, we pen up wild animals in tiny cages that make them go insane; we beat them almost senseless, just enough so they can feel the pain of their skin being ripped off. Surely you can think up a discouraging word or two about that. We stab bulls, already weakened from strong laxatives, until they bleed to death. We cut off the dying animal's tail and ear. You don't have to be a Utopian to find that despicable. Speak out against it — don't remain silent! Please promote minimal protection for "the birds of the air" by lobbying to include them in the Humane Slaughter Act and Animal Welfare Act. Complain about slaughterhouse workers stomping on live chickens and throwing them against the wall. And about judges who claim that there's no cruelty in those acts. (Why is it then a felony to do that to a cat or dog — or a pet chicken?) Please condemn Brazil's Farra du Boi, a three-day orgy of cruelty in which oxen are chased, beaden, whipped, starved, and butchered alive. A thousand articles on your web sites and not ONE condemns the severe confinement of battery hens. Not one even considers that pigs, chickens, and turkeys might ONCE want to feel the sun or breathe fresh air. Veal calves  you know they suffer. Don't say they don't. Do animals need / want their mothers? What's worse for a mother than having her newborn taken away?

There's a recurring theme of meanness, indifference, and denial in all these institutionalized and personal abuses. The key to a peaceful world is not animal liberation. It's humility, compassion, practicing the Golden Rule as widely as possible. Liberation from cruelty follows naturally from that. Until we stop killing the animals for self-gratification, we cannot be friends with them; we cannot be merciful stewards. And we can stop the slaughter and exploitation tomorrow. I repeat — tomorrow. There's nothing stopping you but your lies.

I'll gladly do without Utopia for now. Just let's get out of this nightmare.

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Related Resources:

I have no clue if the author of this piece is an animal rights activist, but it is a well-crafted essay on another popular "Utopian vision" — world peace. The author challenges us to fundamentally transform ourselves, inasmuch as that inward-to-outward process is the foremost condition for real peace; I include forging a sympathetic and merciful relationship with animals as part of that transformation.

This sermon is Lutheran, but I suspect that non-Lutherans and even non-believers will appreciate the theme that excessive consumerism has morphed into a psuedo-religion, with false prophets that constantly tempt us with "dreams" that can be bought with a credit card. ("Dream On?")

"Like this bull I had last year--this bull was one of the biggest bulls I've ever seen. It was at the very front of the trailer. And the spirit it had, he was just trying his hardest to get off the trailer. He had been prodded to death by three or four drivers…but his back legs, his hips have given out. And so basically they just keep prodding it. So it took about 45 minutes to get it from the front nose of the trailer to the back ramp...

"Then from there it was chained with its front legs, and it fell off the ramp, smashed onto the floor, which I don't know how many feet that would be but quite a racket...I just said, 'Why don't you shoot the damn thing? What's going on? What about this Code of Ethics?'

"This one guy said, 'I never shoot. Why would I shoot a cow that can come off and there’s still good meat there?' When I first started, I talked to another trucker about downers. He said, 'You may as well not get upset. It's been going on for many years. It will go on for the rest of my life and your life. So just calm down about it. It happens. You’ll get kind of bitter like I did. You just don't think about the animals. You just think that they aren't feeling or whatever.'"

-- From an interview with a Canadian livestock trucker, A Cow at My Table, 1998 documentary



The Bush Administration is considering ending the ban on slaughtering downed cattle. The ban went into effect last year in response to concerns about Mad Cow Disease.

What you think of when you hear "free-range?" Golden chickens strutting in the barnyard? Green pastures? Sunshine?

Hold that thought in your mind and scroll down...


Below are two pictures of his farm:





You're looking at a typical deception from agribusiness. They know that the public wants to believe that farm animals are raised humanely. They know that people will pay extra to ensure that the animals are content and have a natural environment. Agribusiness corporations greedily manipulate those preferences to con consumers into buying products with labels that connote animal welfare but that are really the result of extreme confinement, deprivation, pain, and suffering. "Free range" is most often just a marketing ploy; a way to bilk consumers out of their money; to trick them into supporting practices they don't want to support. In this respect, the food industry's misappropriation of "free range" is not only anti-animal but anti-people.

It's exceedingly difficult to find truly humanely raised chickens or humanely produced eggs. And it's virtually impossible for a well-intentioned farmer to compete with huge industrial operations (with their huge marketing budgets) that drive down prices by giving animals the bare minimum space or care. (By the way, don't be fooled by "Animal Care Certified" logos — they're meaningless.)

It's much easier to find vegetarian alternatives to chicken. If you haven't tried them yet, I heartily recommend doing so. They're tasty, nutritious, and diverse. A new variety pops up on the shelf practically every week.

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Related resources:

15 years ago, if you wanted vegetarian or "faux" chicken, you had to make it yourself or go to a food co-op. Today, you can buy off-the-shelf products at Safeway, Albertsons, Kroger, or Whole Foods — and most other supermarkets. Even Wal-Mart and Target carry some of these foods. Here's a small sampling:

Boca

Yves

LightLife

Morningstar Farms

"People should know the chickens are better off in cages and why. They should know the chickens are content and productive."

"The technologies used by today's farmers provide the most comfortable living conditions that food animals have ever had."

"The welfare of my hens is top of my priority list and I know they're happy. They 'sing' to me in the sheds."

If it's such a nice environment for animals, why not advertise it? Show it off. Put pictures of battery cages, along with their six or more occupants per cage, on packaging and marketing materials. Show battery-caged hens on egg cartons.

Since hens are so happy in battery cages, why do all depictions of hens by companies in the food business show free-range hens? Hens in uncrowded barns, or outside in the yard, with comfortable roosts, instead of surrounded by metal bars and slatted floors?

The egg industry claims that debeaking protects hens from aggression, yet all the pictures of hens I see on food packages and delivery trucks show hens with intact beaks.

The United Egg Producers web site has no pictures of these happy battery-cage hens, with their living space of 8 inches by 8 inches. Must be an oversight.

As a free service to the industrial egg industry, here are some photos showing content hens in their idyllic environment: battery cages in factory farms.

What hen could resist this?


Hanging out in a roomy cage is better than dustbathing outside.


There are lots of games to play and exploring to do in battery cages. I'm sure the vet will be around soon to take care of that blister.


A happy hen trying to flap her wings — fun!


These hens' full, lustrous feathers are a clear sign of contentment.


Relaxing after a full day.


This picture just sings "welfare." Imagine your local animal shelter so clean.





Coming soon: How some hens adjusted to life outside this paradise.

"[B]roilers now grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive heart failure and tremendous death losses."

"Aside from the stupendous rate of growth...the sign of a good meat flock is the number of birds dying from heart attacks."

"[L]imiting the floor space gives poorer results on a bird basis, yet the question has always been and continues to be: What is the least amount of floor space necessary per bird to produce the greatest return on investment."

"Is it more profitable to grow the biggest bird and have increased mortality due to heart attacks, ascites [insufficient heart and lung capacity], and leg problems, or should birds be grown slower so that birds are smaller, but have fewer heart, lung and skeletal problems?....A large portion of growers' pay is based on the pound of saleable meat produced, so simple calculations suggest that it is better to get the weight and ignore the mortality."

"The modern [egg] layer is, after all, only a very efficient converting machine, changing the raw material — feedingstuffs — into the finished product — the egg — less, of course, the maintenance requirements."

Honest voices:

"Sure we used to throw 'em on the ground and cut their balls off with a pen-knife. Didn’t give them any pain-killer, are you kidding? And that’s not all; at the same time, we’d brand 'em and cut off their horns. And you know what? It didn’t bother me [. . .] I never felt anything for them."

"There's no way these [pigs] can bleed out in the few minutes it takes to get up the ramp. By the time they hit the scalding tank, they're still fully conscious and squealing. Happens all the time."

"I brainwashed youngsters into doing wrong. I want to say sorry to children everywhere for selling out to concerns who make millions by murdering animals."

"In my opinion, one of the greatest animal-welfare problems is the physical abuse of livestock during transportation... Typical abuses I have witnessed with alarming frequency are; hitting, beating, use of badly maintained trucks, jabbing of short objects into animals, and deliberate cruelty."

If biting into a turkey drumstick on Thanksgiving isn't covered by "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," then what is?"
--Richard Berman, director of the Center for Consumer Freedom

Here's one possible answer: biting into food that doesn't require another creature to forfeit life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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Related resource:

http://www.consumerdeception.com/

Posted by: Gary / 7:39 PM (0) comments  

"[The conclusion that smoking leads to disease] is an opinion. A judgment. But not a scientific fact."


(At some ridiculous threshold of proof, nothing in medicine is a scientific fact, including the conclusion that exercise is good for you and obesity is bad for you. Smoking is good for your bottom line, however, if you're a major cigarette manufacturer.)

"It is a fact that fur farming and good welfare go hand in hand."

Here's your "good welfare." See, the animals even have water.




"Fact?" No, it's an outrageous, shameful lie.

Animals on their way to becoming part of Jennifer Lopez's Sweetface clothing line:

China is the world's largest exporter of fur, in part because of its weak animal welfare laws and cheap labor. For the full report on this year-long investigation, click here.

Sweetface? No — Deadface.

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For a better view of this ad, click here.

• When you throw out a zip-lock bag, rip the side seams completely apart, so there is less chance that an animal could be trapped in the bag. For bags with no seams, such as the one that the newspaper comes in, cut lengthwise with a scissors to turn the bag into a flat piece of plastic.


• Before discarding the plastic that holds a six-pack together, tear all the rings, including the middle one. It's somewhat impressive if you bust open all the rings at the same time with your bare hands.


• Limit use of balloons, or quit using them altogether. The balloons end up in turtles' and fishes' stomachs. (Sea turtles are already endangered — let's give them a break.) Birds become tangled in the streamers. Please: no mass-releases of balloons in the air, no matter how pretty they look. They're a disaster once they land, and they may persist in the environment for months.


• When you take a hike in the woods or along the beach, make it a habit to pick up some debris along the way. Yes, it's not fair that you should have to clean up after others, but better that than just leaving the litter there where it poses a danger to fish, birds, and other creatures. And looks ugly.


• Reduce, re-use, recycle. The less garbage you throw out, the fewer chances for wildlife to be hurt or killed by it. The various ways that animals suffer from ingesting or being entangled in trash are uncomfortable and grisly to think about. But think about it a little bit — enough to help them out.

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Related article:

Aquatic Litter and Debris—Impacts, from Clean Virginia Waterways. The links in the article all have useful information that convey the dangers of a throwaway society to marine life — and to us.

I just heard about a study in which researchers conclude that lobsters don't suffer, because suffering requires an emotional component.

That's not true. One can suffer simply from physical pain. If you're severely shocked, it just plain hurts. Your response is immediate, reflexive, primal. You're not thinking, you're not emoting, you're just reacting. When subject to immense pain, our reactions are startlingly similar to the animals.

Many physicians used to think babies didn't feel pain. A few generations ago, respected scientists, considered tops by their peers, asserted that no animals felt pain, that animals' screams when being nailed to a table were merely like the squeakings of gears in a clock. It took the scientific community until just recently to acknowledge that animals have emotions. Now we're starting to see one study after another about this "discovery" that lay people have known through common sense and observation for thousands of years.

So the history of scientific investigation into animals' capacity for pain and suffering has been one of underestimating both. I have no doubt that scientists will eventually come to realize that lobsters, with their well-developed network of pain receptors, experience excruciating pain — suffering — as they desperately try to escape when immersed in boiling water. In all likelihood, the lobsters suffer prior to being killed as well. When they are crammed in the tank, starved, deprived of using their claws, it is reasonable to assume that their quality of life is significantly compromised. We know that in species after species, when individuals are denied the ability to perform basic tasks, they experience stress and emotional suffering. This suffering was once dismissed by scientists; now it is not.

Morally, we are compelled to give lobsters, and all animals, the benefit of the doubt if we are not sure if something we do to them causes them to suffer. If we refrain from boiling lobsters alive and it turns out that they really don't mind it, then we've given up one luxury food. If we presume that they don't suffer, and keep boiling them, and later find out we were wrong, then we've done about the worst possible thing to these creatures, purely to satisfy our indulgence.

We want to believe that lobsters don't suffer, because we want to exploit them with impunity.

A bumper sticker I sometimes see on the car in front of me: "He who dies with the most toys wins."

Wins what?

Fear Factories: The case for compassionate conservatism--for animals

I hope you like this article on animal rights, factory farms, and moral obligations, by former George W. Bush speechwriter and author Matthew Scully, as much as I did. If so, please pass it on to your conservative friends. It's important to include them in discussions about how and why we abuse animals, and how and why we should stop. Practicing charity and kindness, having the strength to resist temptation so that one may remain faithful to a higher principle — these are core conservative values, and also fundamental tenets of animal rights.

In the article, Scully brings up a number of important points and revealing anecdotes relating to the treatment of animals, and uses them as bases for thoughtful — and thought-provoking — analysis. He also doesn't shy away from recommending specific solutions to ease the plight of animals, especially those confined on factory farms. I'm not sure there's another writer today who knows so much about animal cruelty issues, and who can so powerfully express them as conservative calls to action.

I want to comment on a couple of the topics in the article. I invite your comments, too.

I'm sure you've run into this a hundred times. So has Scully, it seems. In the course of conversation, you bring up the cruelties of factory farms. Perhaps you're explaining to a meat-eater why you're a vegetarian. The person to whom you're talking puts up his hands, looks away as though afraid, and says "I don't want to know." End of discussion. The problem is, although he may prefer not to know, he has to know, so that he'll stop the thing that is so terrible he can't stand to hear about it.

The meat-eater who throws up his hands at the first mention of how his meat was produced doesn't want to think about the pain and suffering that he knows exists, because he guiltily enjoys the ill-gotten fruits of that pain and suffering — which is imposed on the animals only because people like him support the atrocities through their money and through their silence. If the conditions of factory farms are so awful to think about, imagine what it's like to live them. Meat-eaters should be not be allowed to willfully perpetuate horrid cruelties on animals and then be excused from facing up to the consequences of their actions.

To willingly make the decision to be a vital link in a chain of abuse, just because you derive some pleasure from it, or cannot seem to wean yourself from the habit, shows a disturbing weakness of moral fiber, or character. Yet character is one of the bedrock issues of the conservative platform. Conservatives often distinguish themselves from liberals by claiming to have strong moral backbone.

Scully asks why conservatives have no trouble delving into other difficult issues but throw up their hands in a "stop" motion when the subject of farm animal cruelty comes up. Here's my take. The average conservative is not responsible for partial-birth abortion or detainee abuse. But the average conservative plays a direct and causal role in farmed animal cruelty. To hear about it is to be reminded of your complicity in it, your sins.

Finally, a comment about Scully himself. His book Dominion: the Power of Men, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy was groundbreaking in that it was written by a credentialed Republican for Republicans. Scully may be the most important advocate in the U.S. for factory farm animals and other non-human victims of institutionalized abuse, because he can reach audiences that would otherwise tune out animal activists. His preaching really does go beyond the choir.

Excerpts from the article:

When you eat cheese or other dairy products, you cause a mother to cry out in pain -- emotional pain, because her newborn calf has been kidnapped and taken to a tiny stall, reeking of urine. The calf will live a short, motherless life, growing weak from an intentionally iron-deficient formula. Instead of his mother's milk, the iron-starved calf will suckle metal objects and even his own urine in a desperate attempt to obtain iron. It will all be over by the time he's 20 weeks old.

If you eat ham or bacon, you cause a sow, who's pregnant with piglets as a result of artificial insemination, to suffer. She's stuck in a crate not much wider or longer than herself. She lives this way for months, never turning around, walking, seeing the outside, or associating with other pigs. Her life is one of unimaginable emptiness. In some cases, she is strapped to the floor. The suffering is surely unbearable.

If you eat eggs, you take away motherhood from hens. Hens in nature are renown for being good, caring mothers. In battery cages, hens never experience motherhood. They are under constant stress, live in severe confinement, and generally waste away. A battery-caged hen can't spread her wings. She can't forage or dust-bathe. She can't take more than a step or two in any direction, and even when she does that, she disturbs the other hens with whom she shares the tiny cage. The lack of exercise combined with the cage's slatted floor makes her claws grow long and twisted and her legs ache or become crippled. She is starved for up to two weeks, so she'll produce more eggs. After a year, when she is "spent" and nearly featherless, she is thrown into a truck, driven to the slaughterhouse, and repackaged as Chunky Soup. In her adult life, she'll never see a chick, much less raise one. She is one of hundreds of millions of hens, praised for her tender care in the bible, whose lives are ruined in factory farms each year.

So for Mother's Day, call your Mom, send her flowers, take her out to lunch. But also remember...

his mother,  

her mother,  

her mother,  

and all their mothers, wherever they are.  

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"There is no difference between the worry of a human mother and an animal mother for their offspring. A mother's love does not derive from the intellect but from the emotions, in animals just as in humans."
—Maimonedes

Meat-eater to ethical vegetarian: "I respect your preference to not eat animals, but I prefer to eat them."

The person saying this may mean well, but she does not really respect the vegetarian. This is especially true if the meat-eater eats meat from factory farms (the source of most meat and dairy), and is at least somewhat aware of the cruelties in those places.

Why?

1. The meat-eater is implying that supporting battery cages, intense confinement, isolation, inhumane transport, and the whole rash of factory farm horrors is morally equivalent to boycotting them. In other words, choosing whether or not to pay people to lock a pig in a tiny crate for most of her life, and subject her to a slaughtering process in which she may be fully conscious when dunked into scalding hot water, is like choosing between two colors of paint.
2. The meat-eater is not really respecting the vegetarian when she engages in the act that the vegetarian finds morally objectionable. Merely stating that no one should be forced to eat animals misses the point. What the vegetarian objects to is forcing animals to suffer and die to satisfy a human's preference. (We are talking about people in the developed world for whom meat consumption is discretionary.) The meat-eater essentially commands that animals suffer and die on her behalf. I would say this pretty flagrantly violates the wish of the ethical vegetarian to spare cows, chickens, pigs, and other animals from unnecessary harm.


3. It is not nearly as important to respect the vegetarian as it is to respect the animals that bear the brunt of the meat-eater's decisions. The animals pay for the indulgences of the meat-eater with their lives and their happiness. They forfeit any chance of normalcy because meat-eaters don't want to change their habits. Please — disrespect me all you want. Just don't take it out on the animals, who have no recourse.

May 4 is International Respect for Chickens Day. The best thing by far that you can do to respect chickens is to not eat them.

Even if you are a meat-eater, perhaps you can do without for this one day. It won't kill you. If you haven't tried any of the faux chicken products in the market, you owe it yourself — and to the chickens — to try some. You will be surprised.

If you're religious, you may want to offer a prayer for these complex, inquisitive, and horribly abused beings:

All-Creatures.org is an inspired blend of animal advocacy and Christian ministry. Informed by their faith, the authors, Mary and Frank Hoffman, preach kindness and compassion toward "all the animals of the land, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the ground" (Gen 1:29-30), and to the fishes of the sea, and to our fellow humans...all creatures.

Part of the Hoffman's mission is to make us see the sickening and Hellish outcome when we deprive those creatures of any compassion. On this page, please read the photoessay on the various abuses that we inflict upon the cattle — cow, bull, and calf.

Starting at the top of the page, you first read about factory dairy farms, where calves, who need the milk, go without, so that we, who don't need the milk and often get sick from it, can drink record amounts.

Next you come to veal, in which newborn calves are placed in tiny urine- and feces-infested crates until they're slaughtered a few months later. Veal calves must be one of the loneliest creatures on earth.

As you go down the page, you enter the slaughterhouse. Cattle, who have a quiet majesty and dignity when grazing in the pasture, are hung by their hooves, stunned, and bled. Sometimes the stunner does not work perfectly.

Keep going down. See the horrid reality of Kosher slaughter. Animals with their tracheas cut out but still alive, dumped onto the floor.

Go down to bullfighting. The bull's death is drawn out, prolonged, lengthened, while the matador smiles and the crowd roars its approval. The bull, intentionally weakened even before the event begins, is slowly bled to death. While writing in pain and barely alive, his ear and tail are cut off. The final indignity. To some, this is entertainment.

In the U.S., the cowardly sadists wear cowboy hats and call their spectacle "rodeo." See tough guys pull the tails of baby animals and flip them on their backs. The cowboys also use shocking devices and bucking straps across the genitals to pile on the abuse.

Down near the bottom, a ritual you've probably never heard of: the Farra do Boi in Brazil. "Farra do boi, loosely translated as 'Festival of the Oxen' or 'Ox Fun Days,' involves the torture-killing of several hundred oxen each year in more than thirty communities throughout the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. This evil festival begins with starving the oxen for two days, with food in plain sight but out of reach." The oxen are also deprived of water that they can see but not touch.

Then the torture worsens. Gangs of mostly young men, but also women and children, inflict one punishment after another on the downtrodden animals. They pull their ears, stone them, hit them with sticks, and chase them until the animals are exhausted. One picture shows an ox with his legs cut off, still alive. The picture after that shows men bleeding an ox to death; the ox, after three days of torment, is too tired to fight any more.

I first learned about the Farra do Boi a few weeks ago, and it's one of the most despicable things I've ever heard of. How can people torment an innocent creature for three days without interruption? I want to learn more about this violent ritual and write about it in future posts. And yet I doubt that I will ever fully absorb the depths of its evil, or that any words will fully convey its depravity.

At the bottom of the page are pictures and text describing how we transport cattle. We pack them so tightly that the weary may not be able to lie down. We also deprive them of food and water. There is one destination that all animals suffering at our hands desperately seek: deliverance from our cruelty.

Some of you may want to pray for the animals. That is fine. Who can say that the animals themselves won't sense your compassionate pleas? The non-believers may want to pray in their own way, too. I believe that can be done. Fervently hope that humankind will evolve into kind humans. Praying and hoping are restorative, transforming. Derive strength from your prayers. Resolve to fight cruelty and injustice, while struggling to maintain mercy for the oppressors. They are lost souls. There but for the grace of God go all of us. No species is excluded from the Peaceful Kingdom. We are all capable of being redeemed. To be faithful to the ideas of peace for all creatures is the only lasting solution.

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Verses From the Book of Isaiah. Even non-believers may be mesmerized by the flowing beauty of the language in these verses. "They will do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain."

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace."

"Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander"

"What would you do different if you knew you could not fail?"

In calf-roping, the contestant lassoes a fleeing calf, then pulls the calf by her neck along the ground (by holding onto the rope as he commands his horse to gallop). Next, the contestant jumps off his horse, picks up the calf — who's probably scared and already in great pain — and slams her to the ground. By this point, the calf may be practically knocked out. The contestant walks away, pleased with himself. No one in the rodeo cares about the animal who was abused and lying on the ground.

In 1999, the Calgary Herald quoted a Calgary Stampede sopkesman as saying that calf-roping is declining in popularity due to "...people (who) feel that the ca;f is smaller and weaker than the cowboy and horse." Most rodeo calves are no more than three or four months old. Another rodeo event, steer busting, is so violent, it's not allowed in most states. The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association puts a positive spin on this restriction by saying that steer-busting is held at "select rodeos."

It's painful to even watch these events. What does it feel like to be whiplashed, dragged on the ground, pulled by a rope around your neck, and body-slammed? These two videos show the deliberate cruelty of rodeo. The animals in the videos have done nothing wrong; why are they being punished so much?

This video, by Mercy For Animals shows some of the ways that so-called cowboys inflict pain on rodeo animals that have no means of escape.

Rodeos are marketed to children. One was even held at a home for troubled boys. Part of the terror of child abuse is that the child doesn't know when the next round of torment will begin, and is unable to escape from it. Rodeo is very much like child abuse. But it is packaged as entertainment, and some people obviously find fake cowboys forcing terror, pain, and injury on animals to be entertaining. What a great lesson for young people: torment those less powerful then you, and get enjoyment from it.

Labels: animal cruelty, rodeo

What goes on behind the scenes at a rodeo? "Tough" cowboys take a hand-held probe that delivers a 5000 volt shock, walk up to a steer, bull, or calf that is restrained in a chute, and shove the device into the animal's hide. The animal may be shocked repeatedly, and cannot escape. Videos taken by investigators show the captive animals jumping and jerking in response to the pain. This is beyond cruelty. This is torture. This is the same technique used by terrorists to force a confession out of a prisoner.
But for the animal, the abuse is not over. Look at calf-roping, one of the cruelest events in the rodeo. As soon as the gate is opened, the calf bolts out of the chute at top speed, because he's terrified — he's just received multiple inescapable shocks. While the calf is fleeing, at up to 25 miles per hour, a rodeo contestant throws a lasso around the calf's neck, tightens it, and slams him to the ground. If the throw is off a little, the rope may wrap around the calf's legs or stomach, causing him to slam into the ground head-first. Every year rodeo animals suffer neck and back injuries, and some are killed, in part because of cruelly-design events like this. The rodeo participants never show the slightest amount of consideration for the injured animal. Maybe that would erode their "tough guy" image or reveal that the rodeo is really all about cowardice and bullying, not "sport."

Labels: animal cruelty, rodeo