There’s a Paul McCartney quote popular with veg-heads: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” It may not be quite as simple as all that, but he’s definitely got a point.
For a little over 10 years, groups such as Mercy for Animals, the Humane Society of the United States, and Compassion Over Killing have conducted undercover investigations into abuses and rules violations on factory farms, and publicized what they’ve documented to lobby for change.
It’s worked: Individual campaigns have resulted in business closures, criminal charges, and even broader changes in social behavior. That has got Big Animal Ag scared.
So it has done what Big Ag does best: crafted legislation and lobbied for it. State farm-protection laws, or “ag-gags,” as The New York Times‘ Mark Bittman lovingly called them, come in many different forms, mixing various combinations of restrictions on undercover filming and activist access to farms and slaughterhouses. Some of the laws give a nod to the value of whistleblowers but require that damning footage be handed over to law enforcement within a day […]
Factory Farming
Meet Lucy, the Pig
Mercy for Animals aided in the rescue of a baby pig, who was destined for slaughter.
Excerpt:
Recently, MFA had a special opportunity to help in the rescue of a very lucky piglet named Lucy, who was found running through the streets of Riverside, California. After a kind person rescued her from a local animal shelter and provided a temporary home for her, we jumped at the chance to help this piglet by bringing her to Animal Place, a wonderful farmed animal sanctuary in northern California.
You can read the full story here:
“Meat, Lies & Videotape (A Deeply Flawed TED Talk)” – Robert Goodland, Free From Harm
Allan Savory’s TED talk (Source: Free From Harm)
Excerpt:
Climate change is transboundary, meaning it doesn’t respect borders. So wherever livestock might be raised under Mr. Savory’s approach, they would surely be vulnerable to disruptive climate events. Such events caused large-scale livestock die-offs in 2009 in every region of the world, including
And
However, while Mr. Savory himself cautions that most livestock today are produced unsustainably, meat promoters can be seen spinning Mr. Savory’s claims as if they apply equally to factory-farmed meat. Yet it’s no new trick to promote factory farmed meat as grass-fed. A grassland producer has himself noted that most marketing of “grass-fed” beef is a hoax.Beef marketed this way commands a 200-300% price premium — so the incentive for producers to cheat is overwhelming, as evidenced in one videotape after another.
You can read the full Article at: Free From Harm.org
“If you want to be labeled a terrorist these days, all you have to do is show enough concern for animals that you are willing to be a watchdog.” ~ Robert Grillo, Free From Harm
Anxieties Rising in Meat Industry as Animal Activism’s Perceived Threat Looms Large
By Robert Grillo | March 25, 2013 |Free From Harm
The 2013 annual stakeholder’s meeting for the Animal Agriculture Alliance in May is entitled “Activists at the Door: Protecting Animals, Farms, Food & Consumer Confidence.” The expansive animal rights section of the AAA website features a subsection entitled “Agriculture is Outnumbered, Outfunded by Animal Activists.” It’s becoming increasingly clear that the perceived threat of activism to the agricultural industry and its key lobby group, AAA, is factoring heavily into their concerns.
The opening statement to the animal rights section of the AAA website sets the distorted tone with the following absurd misrepresentation of animal activism: “Radical activist organizations are leading the fight to grant animals the same legal rights as humans.” To suggest that the animal movement seeks to grant animals human rights to vote, to gay marriage, to abortion and to equal housing opportunities is no accident. It is a deliberate, underhanded smear tactic that shady politicians use to turn public sentiment against their opponents. The AAA sees their nemesis as a force to be defeated.
Keep reading. It gets even more interesting. Below this statement is a flowchart (AAA calls their “Activist Map”), displaying all of the major animal activism groups and how they …
Enlisting your help because I need a new name for my blog.
Recently I was chatting with Hannah at Gypsy Roller’s Veggie Kitchen about changing the name of my blog. What prompted the discussion is she had posted about changing the name of hers. At the time she started her blog, she was living in an RV she so eloquently named: The Gypsy Roller, while her house was under construction. Now that she and her family have moved out of the RV she felt it was time to retire the name seeing as she wouldn’t be *cooking* and *dispatching* from the Gypsy Roller. Which makes total sense. Although, secretly I did love the name: Dispatches from the Gypsy Roller. It sounded soooooooooooo, I dunno, Janis Joplin-ish.
😉
The reason Hannah’s post resonated is because like her blog name, my blog and its name was born from a purpose that has since grown and changed. The original intent or purpose of my blog was to talk about living green and reducing one’s carbon footprint. However, over the course of almost 1 1/2 years, my blog has morphed and now I prefer to focus my attention on an issue I am quite passionate about (almost too much so) and that is: animal rights, animal exploitation — exposing the egregious abuse that is taking place on factory farms, back yard butchers, research labs, fur breeders, puppy mills and so on… Why? Well, since becoming a vegan, I have learned about the dark side of animal exploitation and now that my eyes are open, I can no longer close them or turn my back on what is happening to animals at the hands of very cruel and heartless humans. I can no longer recline back into my velvety world of ignorant bliss. I know what is happening. I don’t like it and dammit, I am going to do something about it, even if it kills me. I would be incomplete as a woman, a human (!) if I turned my back on the plight of animals.
Despite my desire to change my name, I have been unable to come up with anything that truly reflects my cause. I’d like to keep GiRRL (which originally stood for: Grow it, Reuse, Recycle & Love our Earth) but perhaps change the spelling to Girl.
I still care about the earth; however, my focus is the impact that Factory Farming et al. is having on our planet versus other environmental issues.
I’d also like to incorporate any or all of the following words in my title: Animal; Humane; Voice; Compassion…something (!) in the title. And yet, sadly, no matter what I scribble on paper, nothing seems to work or flow.
[sigh]
😦
I prefer to not burden people by asking for help; however, today I finally decided I needed to move past that fear and open this up to my few but loyal followers.
If you follow my blog and are reading this, do you have any suggestions for a new name for my blog that would enable me to keep “Girl” in the first part of the title
Or dare I say it: do you think I should just retire this blog and create a shiny new blog with a shiny new name?
Thoughts?
Anyone?
Hello?
I promise full credit will be given.
Thanks and smooches.
🙂
Protein Innovation Summit
OK! OK! I know I said I wouldn’t post anything “animal related” but I just found out about the Protein Meat Innovation Summit from this source: Free From Harm and I laughed so hard I nearly peed in my Spanx!
Are these people for effing real?!?! If you read the Free From Harm Post, the Protein Meat Innovation Summit’s intent is to promote meat flesh consumption and factory farming. They even went so far as to defend the likes of Pink Slime!
Here is an excerpt from Free From Harm:
Not only has the meat industry been hard at work making it illegal to take photos or record video inside of their farms and slaughterhouses, they also need media sources that function as “early warning systems,” according to Gabbett (or perhaps what they really need is an impenetrable fortress to keep the consumer out of their business).
The title of Gabbett’s talk seems to suggest that the meat industry has science on their side and that their critics are just unscientific and irrational social media hacks. But for me there is something a bit more insidious and slimy than pink slime. It’s one thing to defend pink slime and portray it as the victim of unfair criticism.
It’s yet another to attempt to manipulate public opinion through well-funded public relations campaigns that seek to legitimize what is nothing short of a war on millions of animals each day trapped inside of a system they had the great misfortune of being born into it.
Just how low will the meat industry stoop to defend their immoral behavior, treating animals as commodities instead of living breathing sentient beings? Well read the post from Free From Harm and find out for yourself.
GE 2013
Factory Farming in 60 Seconds Flat
The video titled ‘Factory Farming in 60 Seconds Flat‘ takes viewers behind the scenes of the dairy, meat and egg industry, uncovering the truth behind factory farming. After overwhelming success from the videos release in 2012, Peta have re-published the video in an attempt to generate viral notoriety and a change in consumer behaviour.
The demand for meat has seen production increase by over 20 percent in the last 10 years, to the point where farmers have no option but to introduce factory farming into their process. This means of farming is one of the leading causes of animal cruelty to date, and yet the trade is continually condoned through the lack of support for organic produce. Over time and through the accessibility of meat within supermarkets, humans have grown so distant from the realities of what they are putting into their mouths and the practices associated with generating it. For…
View original post 314 more words
Question of the Day: Why are some humans so cruel to animals?
Help Stop Backyard (illegal) Butchers
If you’ve got the stomach for it, watch this video footage of an illegal backyard butcher. Oh and BTW, if you think this sort of thing only takes place outside the USA — think again. A good percentage of these illegal backyard butchers are in…ready…wait for it… FLORIDA!!!!! That’s right. The video you’re about to watch, if you can stomach it, was taken from good ole sunny vacation spot Florida!
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Backyard Butchery: An Ethical Alternative to Factory Farming?
With such a focus on factory farming today, there is little attention on a growing movement in the backyard slaughter farms which operate under the radar and without any regulatory oversight. But some activists are hoping to change that. In Southern Florida in particular, the backyard butchery movement is thriving, and investigator Richard “Kudo” Couto of Animal Recovery Mission (ARM) is a pioneering activist who does a tremendous job exposing these covert operations. His investigations have turned up some of the most horrific cruelty to animals perhaps ever documented in modern times. The photos and video footage obtained from Cuoto’s investigations are indeed harrowing and devastating…
The source of the story can be found here:
Meet Nicholas
The next time you tuck into a glass of milk, yogurt, ice cream, cheese… think of Nicholas.
Nicholas: The Story of a Rescued Steer, Casualty of the Dairy Industry
Nicholas is a five-year-old steer rescued by Animal Place last Christmas day. He was found at only one day old, tied up outside an apartment complex with no food or water. Lucky for him, he is living out his life at the sanctuary. Male dairy calves have little value to dairy farmers. They don’t produce milk. Watch this informative and inspiring video featuring Marji Beach, Education Manager at Animal Place explaining the story of Nicholas.
Story Source can be found here:
A picture is worth a thousand words…
Take a look at this female pig, trapped in a gestational crate, unable to turn, move, breathe fresh air or feel the sun on her back — living out her miserable life in a factory farm Tell me you cannot feel her pain and sadness just by looking at her in this photo.
Photos Courtesy of Free From Harm
Oh and btw, gestational crates are the equivalent to being strapped into an airline chair for your entire life… noodle on that the next time you board a plane. This is what life is like for sows in factory farms.
Now look at this picture of a rescued pig living her life on a farm sanctuary. Can you see the difference? It’s pretty obvious isn’t it.
Photo Courtesy of Free From Harm
Folks I beg you, please stop eating all pork products which only supports this horrible industry.
Oh and…
allow me to leave you with this disturbing photo — baby pigs some dead, some still alive, bulldozed or tossed into a dumpster. Nice, huh?
Photo Courtesy of Free From Harm
If you like to see more disturbing photos or learn more about what you can do to prevent these egregious acts, nav here: http://freefromharm.org/photo-galleries/photo-gallery-highlights-from-the-we-animals-project-by-photojournalist-jo-anne-mcarthur/
“Welfare labels, as they now operate, are thus not only useless, but may ultimately cause more animal suffering than they prevent.” –James McWilliams
Hello GE Followers,
This post is directed to you non-vegans who justify your meat consumption by buying into “labels” that ease the guilt of your actions. If I haven’t’ said it five times, I haven’t said it once, labels such as “humane” “grass-fed” “free-range”, DON’T MEAN SHIT! If you continue to buy into this propaganda, then you should call you Primary Care Physical tout suite because, and I hate to be the one to say it, you are suffering from head-up-ass disease. The only way to ease the guilt of eating animals is to become a vegan – plain and simple. There is no other way. Stop funding the egregious treatment and slaughter of innocent farm animals. As Phillip Wollen said, “…2 million animals are slaughtered per week.” If we keep going the way we are going, “we will need two planet earths to sustain us and we only have one and she is dying.” Wake up people! My crusade against the meat/poultry/dairy & fish industry isn’t for my own benefit; it is for the benefit of animals and the planet.
If you do not believe or trust a word I say, then perhaps this article from Free From Harm will convince you. I have copy and pasted the article in this post for your ease, as well as included the link. http://freefromharm.org/farm-animal-welfare/animal-welfare-labeling-what-theyre-not-telling-you/
Animal Welfare Labeling: What They’re Not Telling You
By James McWilliams | August 8, 2012 |
In the angst-ridden quest for an ethical cut of meat, conscientious consumers, voting with their forks, have deemed Niman Ranch the paragon of animal compassion. The reputation seems well deserved. Niman’s welfare standards, initially approved by the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), were once among the world’s strictest. AWI certification requires producers to follow stringent regulations designed to enhance a farm animal’s quality of life. An AWI-approved pork chop, for example, comes from a pig that was never crated, never pumped with growth hormones, never tail docked, never affixed with a nose ring, never transported, and never denied easy access to a verdant pasture.
Niman Ranch, however, abandoned AWI standards several years ago. As demand for humanely raised meat increased, supply lagged. To bridge the gap, Niman (according to an anonymous source) supplemented its responsibly supplied meat with meat sourced from large-scale industrial producers. This decision abruptly ended Niman’s relationship with AWI, which refuses to certify industrial feedlots. If Niman Ranch hoped to sustain its reputation, and maintain profitable relations with companies such as Whole Foods, it would have to acquire new certification. To do this, it turned to Global Animal Partnership (GAP), a welfare certifier supported by the Humane Society of the United States and Temple Grandin, the noted animal behaviorist known for her book Animals in Translation (and her autism). GAP quickly complied with accommodating labels.
It’s tempting to see this change as an innocuous, if not a positive, turn of events. Grandin, for example, is widely respected for her unique insight into animal minds. But GAP and Grandin are no AWI. Most notably, they routinely certify–one might even say cater to–factory farms. In so doing, they not only undermine the strict welfare standards of a certifier such as AWI, but they perpetuate an insidious paradox. In certifying industrial farms with a humane label, they empower big agriculture to capture niche markets once supplied by sustainable farms–farms that already treat their animals with relatively high standards. Welfare labels, as they now operate, are thus not only useless, but may ultimately cause more animal suffering than they prevent.
Ninety-five percent of meat eaters today express an avid interest in animal welfare. Given the extent of this concern, certification has become big business. Unlike “organic,” however, there’s no legal definition for “humane.” Interpretations therefore flex as far as industrial producers can convince their certifiers–who are paid by producers–to stomach. Turns out the biggest certifiers can stomach quite a bit of suffering. Consider the following sketches of the dominant welfare labels, the ones you are likely to see in high-end chains such as Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Fresh Fields, and Wegman’s:
American Humane. AH was founded by Tim Amlaw. Amlaw came to the business of welfare certification by way of the cattle industry. American Humane Certified has been described by one Canadian watchdog group as “the worst of the worst,” doing little more than providing industrial farms with “a meaningless label conferring a meaningful marketing advantage.” The AH label is extremely popular with chicken farmers hoping to avoid pasture requirements. American Humane doesn’t believe pasture time is essential to animal welfare. It never audits the slaughterhouses that process its animals and it places no limits on how far animals can be transported (a terrifying experience for all farm animals). AH is the bottom of the barrel.
Certified Humane. This label, offered by Humane Farm Animal Care (HFAC), holds equal appeal to industrial producers, largely due to its tacit allowance of farrowing crates–cruel confinements that prevent sows from moving enough to even roll over–and for its lax pasturage standards (CH beef can be fattened in feedlots). CH does not require outdoor access. Its meat is processed in industrial slaughterhouses and, as a result, the label allows the unlimited transportation of farm animals. CH audits its slaughterhouses, but only to ensure that they meet American Meat Institute standards, which were designed with industry oversight in 1990 by none other than Temple Grandin.
Global Animal Protection. Mentioned above, GAP has a five point rating system that offers something for everyone. A rating of 1 is all a producer needs to achieve to earn the label. This rating allows for intensive crowding, minimal access to pasture, castration without anesthesia, and nose ringing for pigs (a painful procedure that prevents them from rooting up pastures). Every other GAP improvement (2-5) is elective. Standard 1 is so lax that its packing density requirement for cattle (250 sq/ft per cow) is less than that of the cattle industry itself (350 sq/ft). Four out of GAP’s nine board members work in industrial agriculture. Whole Foods, which helped initiate the 5-point system, is the most famous retailer of GAP certified meat.
These dominant certifiers, in bed with industry, stand in stark contrast to certifiers that refuse to lend legitimacy to industrial farms–organizations such as AWI, Britain’s Soil Association, and previously Canada’s PGI, a stringent certifier that walked away from certification because of widespread cheating across the marketing group. These stricter certifiers are insistent that, as one representative told me, “certification has done nothing to break the stranglehold of industrial farming.” Smaller certifiers have every reason to be spiteful. When AWI fired Niman, it lost over 500 farms.
The reason is simple: there’s no oversight. The growth of industrialized farming has been made possible by the total lack of governmental regulation of animal welfare. In the 1990s the livestock industry, under pressure from welfare groups, established voluntary guidelines for producers to follow. These regulations were duly ridiculed. Further pressure came in the early 2000s, with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nationand Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Industry responded this time by seeking third-party certification. However, if the growing popularity of labels from certifiers such as American Humane, Certified Humane, and GAP are any indication, this solution is equally ineffective. Fact is, it’s worse than ineffective. What we now have is business as usual parading under the banner of righteous reform. When consumers see a “humanely raised” label they think they’re getting “happy meat.” All they’re really getting is a dose of slick marketing.
There are, finally, two other aspects of animal welfare that never enter into discussions about “humanely” raised animals, but must. They’re absolutely central to an animal’s quality of life. In order for standards to have more than symbolic meaning, the following three aspects of animal production should also be considered:
Genetics. The Virginia farmer Joel Salatin was made famous by Michael Pollan in the Omnivore’s Dilemmafor his system of rotational grazing. Salatin strikes me as half-nuts but his farm has captured the attention of the food movement. Chickens fertilize pastures, pastures produce vegetables, vegetable waste feeds chickens, foodies spend big bucks. But there’s a catch to Salatin’s scheme, one Pollan neglected to mention: he uses birds that were bred to live in industrialized settings. You can’t take the narrow industrial genetics of poultry and expect the birds to do well in an open environment. These birds–mostly Cornish X’s– suffer a long list of health problems (namely bone fractures) because they aren’t “designed” to move about as their wild ancestors once did. The genetics and the environment don’t match. A genuine government welfare program would take into account this factor, rewarding farms that paid attention to adaptive genetics as they moved to open-pastured arrangements.
Enriched Environments. Farm animals adapted to free movement require more than space. They need enriched space–something, as my previous post suggested, we may not be able to accurately provide. Even a strict certifier such as AWI believes that access to the outdoors is enough to keep, say, a chicken happy. But this is incorrect. Animal ethologists are quick to note that chickens, especially heritage breeds, require shade and shelter to behave as they normally would under natural conditions. To be comfortable they need places where they can seek shelter from predators. A free range pasture without trees that chickens can hide under or roost in, or pastured pigs out on the range without enough material make paddocks–both common arrangements–can lead to animals that are just as confused and tormented as they would be under intensive industrial conditions. This factor, too, must be taken into account.
If these prescriptions for welfare labeling overhaul sound impossible to achieve, well, yeah, that’s kind of the point. The act of raising, killing, and commodifying sentient beings capable of feeling pain and pleasure is so ethically complex that, should we truly take farm animals’ welfare seriously, we’d be looking at a task as complex as anything the government has ever attempted. There are, and thankfully always will be, people who evaluate the situation as it now stands and quit eating animals. However, given the reality of the western diet–that is, given the endless depth of our dedication to eating meat–we have an obligation to think seriously about establishing a legitimate welfare label. Should we continue to brook the unregulated welfare designations that are growing in popularity, we’ll only fuel the industrial beast that caused all this suffering in the first place.
“Animal Rights is now the greatest Social Justice issue since the abolition of slavery.” – Philip Wollen
I am a vegan. Yeah, that’s right, VEGAN. I am also an animal rights activist. Oh I can hear your comments and see your eyes rolling. I know what you’re thinking — here we go again, another rebel, another radical, another troublemaker. People who turn a blind eye and closed ears to animal rights assume those of us who protect and speak for the voiceless are nothing more than a pack of troublemakers.
Think what you want. Someone has to be the voice of animals. Someone has to fight against the brutality of slaughterhouses. Someone has to end the suffering of the innocent. I am not interested in taking up space for the sake of taking up space because I feel I am superior to all other organisms on this planet. I am not going to sit idle, narcotize myself with fake “reality” TV, talk shit about people and spend my hard-earned money in retail stores so as to numb myself to the world. Nope, not me kid. I chose to view the world with a different lens.
I have known for a very long time that my purpose on this planet is to protect animals. I suspect I inherited this trait from my father. He has tremendous compassion for animals that cannot be measured. He instilled this compassion in me. Throughout the years, my father and I rarely saw eye-eye on anything, except for one: animal rights — this is our common ground. This is one arena where we merge into one being, one point of view. Animal cruelty of any kind, including the egregious abuse taking place in factory farms and slaughter houses is wrong and must stop.
People say they care about the planet and to prove it they “recycle”. (Big deal!) They purchase million dollar houses in upper class neighborhoods so they can prove how accomplished they are. They call themselves wine connoisseurs (snobs really!) and my particular favorite: “foodies” (barf!). They think because they buy “organic” “free-range” “grass-fed” they are immune to the injustices to animals. Know this: “organic, free-range and grass-fed” mean nothing. NOTHING! These are just words, nothing more. These are labels the industry uses to fool the American public into thinking the animals they are eating, lived at country club farms until they were gently slaughtered. If you truly believe your eggs are free-range, then visit the factory farm and chickens that produced the eggs. Check out the confined, stressful conditions they live in order to produce the eggs you want to eat. Do me and all the animals who cannot speak a favor. OPEN YOUR EYES. Stop believing the labels. If you don’t believe me, read this: http://freefromharm.org/food-and-culture/marketing-versus-reality-the-myth-of-the-organic-happy-cow/
“I am not giving up my steak, my bacon, my chicken or my milk, sorry. I don’t care how many animals are suffering.” This is an example of the types of comments I receive when I speak about veganism and animals rights. I think the phrase: “I don’t care.” sums it up. Most people do not care. I have met people who say they would never ever eat a doughnut, and yet do not give a second thought as to how their eggs/chicken/pork/beef landed on their tables – the abused life the animal lived before it became food. In my opinion, if you’re eating all the aforementioned animals with nary a care, then eat the fucking doughnut. What’s the difference? You clearly do not give a shit. If you saw how most farm animals lived and died, you would be a vegan like me.
Remember that outbreak of swine flu? Remember how farmers had to kill all of their pigs due to this disease? How exactly do you think they went about killing their livestock? Do you think veterinarians in white coats went around to all the farms, euthanizing each pig? Sadly, NO! Do you want to know what really happened? The farmers used a back-ho, dug huge/deep holes and bulldozed all the pigs (Alive!) into this hole and then buried them alive. Nice, huh? This reminds me of the Nazi death camps.
A cow is a pig is a human. Soylent Green anyone?
Still don’t care?
Dairy anyone? The next time you tuck into a glass of milk or yogurt, think about this. When a Dairy cow gives birth, before she even has a chance to bond with her baby, it is taken away from her. If the baby is female, her fate will be that of her mothers. If the baby is male, then G-d have mercy because one of two things will happen. He will either be killed, or locked in a crate so that in a few months, he can land on your dinner table as veal cutlet. Mmmmmmmmmm. Not! Recently, I watched a video about egregious activity that was taking place on a dairy farm. A dairy cow had just given birth (awe!). As she tried to reach down to sniff and nuzzle her newborn baby, an employee of the farm (a barbarian), grabbed the baby by its head, dragged it away from its mother and proceeded to smash its head with a sledgehammer, killing it (because it was a male). He killed the baby, right in front of mother cow with nary a care. The milk she produced for her now dead baby is the milk you are drinking and eating EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Imagine giving birth to your baby, only to have some person come along and rip away from you and kill it right before your eyes. (Drink up everyone!) Hormone fed or not, all dairy cows are treated this way. Still don’t care? Well know this: every time you tuck into a dairy product, dairy cows are giving birth, to baby after baby. In order to keep a dairy cow producing milk, the cow must stay pregnant which means, after she gives birth, she will be hooked up to what is known it the industry as the “rape rack” where she will be impregnated so she can go through the whole process, again, and again, and again. The average life span of a dairy cow is 3 years. Do you want to know what happens to her after she is “spent”? Do you think she will be sent to some retirement community for dairy cows? Think again. She will be ground up into hamburger meat. Oh hey, thanks for your 3 years of dairy producing service. How would you like to become a Bubba burger? Pass the ketchup please…
http://freefromharm.org/food-and-culture/marketing-versus-reality-the-myth-of-the-organic-happy-cow/
Still not convinced? Don’t care? Well if you are so heartless that none of this bothers you, then how about this. Watch the movie Earthlings and circle back with me. If Earthlings doesn’t shake you to your core, perhaps a terrific speech from a great man will. Below is a speech by a particularly awesome animal rights activist who I admire greatly. His name is Philip Wollen. He is the former VP of Citibank and is an Australian philanthropist. I extracted this speech from here: http://freefromharm.org/videos/educational-inspiring-talks/philip-wollen-australian-philanthropist-former-vp-of-citibank-makes-blazing-animal-rights-speech/
King Lear, late at night on the cliffs asks the blind Earl of Gloucester “How do you see the world?”
And the blind man Gloucester replies “I see it feelingly”.
Shouldn’t we all?
Animals must be off the menu because tonight they are screaming in terror in the slaughterhouse, in crates, and cages. Vile ignoble gulags of despair.
I heard the screams of my dying father as his body was ravaged by the cancer that killed him. And I realized I had heard these screams before.
In the slaughterhouse, eyes stabbed out and tendons slashed, on the cattle ships to the Middle East and the dying mother whale as a Japanese harpoon explodes in her brain as she calls out to her calf.
Their cries were the cries of my father.
I discovered when we suffer, we suffer as equals.
And in their capacity to suffer, a dog is a pig is a bear. . . . . . is a boy.
Meat is the new asbestos – more murderous than tobacco.
CO2, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide from the livestock industry are killing our oceans with acidic, hypoxic Dead Zones.
90% of small fish are ground into pellets to feed livestock.
Vegetarian cows are now the world’s largest ocean predator.
The oceans are dying in our time. By 2048 all our fisheries will be dead. The lungs and the arteries of the earth.
Billions of bouncy little chicks are ground up alive simply because they are male.
Only 100 billion people have ever lived. 7 billion alive today. And we torture and kill 2 billion animals every week.
10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one species.
We are now facing the 6th mass extinction in cosmological history.
If any other organism did this a biologist would call it a virus.
It is a crime against humanity of unimaginable proportions.
The world has changed. 10 years ago Twitter was a bird sound, www was a stuck keyboard, Cloud was in the sky, 4 g was a parking place, Google was a baby burp, Skype was a typo and Al Kider was my plumber.
Victor Hugo said “there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come”.
Animal Rights is now the greatest Social Justice issue since the abolition of slavery.
There are over 600 million vegetarians in the world. That is bigger than the US, England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, Australia combined! If we were one nation we would be bigger than the 27 countries in the European Union!!
Despite this massive footprint, we are still drowned out by the raucous huntin’, shootin’, killin’ cartels who believe that violence is the answer – when it shouldn’t even be a question.
Meat is a killing industry – animals, us and our economies.
Medicare has already bankrupted the US. They will need $8 trillion invested in Treasury bills just to pay the interest. It has precisely zero!!
They could shut every school, army, navy, air force, and Marines, the FBI and CIA – and they still won’t be able to pay for it.
Cornell and Harvard say’s that the optimum amount of meat for a healthy diet is precisely ZERO.
Water is the new oil. Nations will soon be going to war for it. Underground aquifers that took millions of years to fill are running dry. It takes 50,000 litres of water to produce one kilo of beef. 1 billion people today are hungry. 20 million people will die from malnutrition. Cutting meat by only 10% will feed 100 million people. Eliminating meat will end starvation forever.
If everyone ate a Western diet, we would need 2 Planet Earths to feed them. We only have one. And she is dying.
Greenhouse gas from livestock is 50% more than transport . . . . . planes, trains, trucks, cars, and ships.
Poor countries sell their grain to the West while their own children starve in their arms. And we feed it to livestock. So we can eat a steak? Am I the only one who sees this as a crime? Every morsel of meat we eat is slapping the tear-stained face of a starving child. When I look into her eyes, should I be silent?
The earth can produce enough for everyone’s need. But not enough for everyone’s greed.
We are facing the perfect storm.
If any nation had developed weapons that could wreak such havoc on the planet, we would launch a pre-emptive military strike and bomb it into the Bronze Age.
But it is not a rogue state. It is an industry. The good news is we don’t have to bomb it. We can just stop buying it. George Bush was wrong. The Axis of Evil doesn’t run through Iraq, or Iran or North Korea. It runs through our dining tables. Weapons of Mass Destruction are our knives and forks.
This is the Swiss Army Knife of the future – it solves our environmental, water, health problems and ends cruelty forever.
The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. This cruel industry will end because we run out of excuses.
Meat is like 1 and 2 cent coins. It costs more to make than it is worth.
And farmers are the ones with the most to gain. Farming won’t end. It would boom. Only the product line would change. Farmers would make so much money they wouldn’t even bother counting it. Governments will love us. New industries would emerge and flourish. Health insurance premiums would plummet. Hospital waiting lists would disappear. Hell “We’d be so healthy; we’d have to shoot someone just to start a cemetery!” So tonight I have 2 Challenges for the opposition:
1.) Meat causes a wide range of cancers and heart disease. Will they name one disease caused by a vegetarian diet?
2.) I am funding the Earthlings trilogy. If the opposition is so sure of their ground, I challenge them to send the Earthlings DVD to all their colleagues and customers. Go on I DARE YOU.
Animals are not just other species. They are other nations. And we murder them at our peril.
The peace map is drawn on a menu. Peace is not just the absence of war. It is the presence of Justice. Justice must be blind to race, colour, religion or species. If she is not blind, she will be a weapon of terror. And there is unimaginable terror in those ghastly Guantanamos.
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, we wouldn’t need this debate.
I believe another world is possible.
On a quiet night, I can hear her breathing.
Let’s get the animals off the menu and out of these torture chambers.
Please vote tonight for those who have no voice.
Thank you.
Girl for Animal Liberation 