OK, guys, its my Birthday today, and THANK YOU ALL for your kind words! I have a birthday wish that all of you can be part of. I am using this only day in the year that maybe you will be more willing to take this extra step and spend next 5 minutes reading my post below. Its 5 minutes of your time, and if you can give it to me, please do. I grew up loving animals – I used to bring home stray dogs and cats, an injured seagull, an orphaned baby crow. But I also ate meat, dairy, eggs and other animal products. I don’t remember how I learned that I was eating animals, but I am sure when I first realized it I was horrified. Remember yourself as a child? When you loved all the animals – dogs, cats, pigs, bunnies. You felt the same bond with baby lamb, baby pig, or a puppy. The characters of your childhood books were animals, and you cared about them all. Then we learned that some animals are OK to eat – some should be cared for, but some are here for us to be killed for food. In order to assure us that that’s OK, our parents tell us one story or another, such as God wanted us to eat animals or that we would be weak and ill if we did not consume animal products so we grow comfortable with eating them. So we accept this idea and grow older not questioning what we were told when we were very very little - that some animals simply don’t matter. There are many stories we are told – but there are two main ones: 1. Humans are carnivores, therefore need animal protein, and it is nothing but natural for us to eat meat 2. Animals raised on farms where they live long happy lives and then are killed in the most humane painless way. Humans are not carnivores – everything in our bodies – from the length of our intestines to the PH of our saliva and the structure of our teeth and jaws point to the fact that our bodies are designed to consume plant food. We do not need animal protein AT ALL. We can be absolutely healthy on a plant based diet – We could now embark on long discussion of many studies that show that animals products are actually harming our health, but that’s not the point now – the point is that even if we don’t believe we’ll be more healthy without eating meat, we definitely won’t be less healthy. But it really doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter because I love meat, it tastes good, and it would be OK, right? only if the second story we hear was true. 2.The story that farms are these happy cool places where chickens roam free, pigs roll in the mud, and cows graze on a green grass. Ever seen the pictures on the meat packages or boxes of milk? Happy cows, happy chickens, good life, quick and painless death. I was true…once…just less than a century ago…but not anymore. Do you know that 99% of animal products in the United States come from factory farms? Let me read you the definition: Factory farming is industrialized production of livestock, including cattle, poultry (in Battery cages) and fish in confinement at high stocking density. No, not the places where chickens spend their whole life ( which is 39 days ) on the 57 sq. inches of space – space that small they cannot ever stretch their wings, in the windowless foul smelling sheds. Not the places where female pigs are kept constantly pregnant their entire lives in what they call gestation crates, and when they deliver piglets they are castrated and get their tails cut without painkillers, and being killed by “blunt force” meaning they are slammed against the floor. Not the places where baby cows are being taken away from their mothers right after being born to be kept for 6 month on a low iron diet in a crate so small they cannot turn around. Why do we castrate piglets and keep baby cows anemic? They taste better. We prefer the taste of castrated animals, how sick is that? And then we kill them in the most horrific way – skin them alive, scald them alive, bleed them while conscious. I didn’t know about that – debeaking, castrating, grinding alive, skinning alive – I didn’t want to pay for that. But this is the beauty of this industry – that if you don’t WANT to see, you won’t – the industry will never show you, they want to fool you into this “happy cow” crap. This way we raise and kill more than 57 billion animals a year for food. One billion is a thousand million. This number does not include the number of fish and other aquatic animals we consume. That number is estimated to be at the very least another one trillion. One trillion is a million million. That’s absolutely staggering amount of suffering and death. Try this thought experiment. Would you castrate animals without pain relief? Would you brand them? Would you slit their throats open? Most people wouldn’t do these things. Most of us don’t even want to watch them. So we are paying others to do this? And what for? A product no one needs – meat. I don’t want to overwhelm you with other ugly sides of factory farming – it’s a well known fact that it’s a total ecological disaster with its huge contribution to deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion and water pollution. It’s also the cause of millions of cases of illnesses annually, and the appearance of antibiotic resistant diseases. I don’t want to talk about the problem of feeding the world which could be easily solved with reducing of meat consumption. These are all topics for another time. Does all this matter – matter enough that we should change what we eat? Maybe all we need is better labels so we can make wiser decisions – about hormones, antibiotics, parasites, antibiotic-resistant diseases. There are some things we don’t need labels to know. You never have to wonder if the animals on your plate had to suffer. It did. Whether we’re talking about fish, pig, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that’s not a question. Is it more important than sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That’s the question. The question, for me , is this – given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family – should we eat animals? I answer this question as someone who has loved eating animals. A vegetarian diet could be rich and fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat. I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love a good steak. So you have to make a choice, we all do. Today’s social conservatives are yesterdays’ extremists on issues like women’s rights, civil rights, and so on. Why, when it comes to eating animals, it is suddenly problematic to point out what is scientifically obvious and irrefutable: other animals are more like us than they are unlike us? Please, think about it, and if you lasted ( I wonder if anyone did ) that long...thank you!
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 21:29:49 +0000
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