Cruel Pig Pen

Food animals are on my mind a lot lately. I have viewed some intensely disturbing video of how farm animals are treated, from pigs that are kept in such tight areas they can not even roll over and never walk a single day in their life, to cows that are brutally beaten, have broken bones and backs, and are made to suffer cruel, agonizing deaths.

The attitude that it doesn’t matter because they are going to die anyway is deeply disturbing. Many people ignorantly think that animals don’t feel pain, fear, or trauma. The attitude that humans are superior to other animals, and that we have the right do do with them as we please is also incorrect and very destructive and disturbing.

In our modern day society of grocery stores and easy access to food in the US, a wonderful convenience, has also been a detriment to our animal sensitivity. Our growing population and food needs worsens the situation. We are so far removed from the source of our bacon and steaks, that we hardly even consider them animal products. Steak and hamburger are not cow in people’s minds, but simply delicious dinners.

I am advocating that we get a grip on our diets, our meat consumption, and most of all our long lost empathy for animals. We need to get back to understanding what is involved in farming animals humanely, but also cutting back as much meat in our diets as we can. A benefit in our evolution is that we can live on vegetarian diets. We don’t have to have meat.

Realistically speaking though, the world isn’t going to go vegetarian. So we must rally our efforts into protecting farm animals from cruel living conditions, chemicals, and humane methods of dying in the end. The first step is increasing awareness to animal cruelty that is happening in the farming industry. Secondly, we need to support local farmers who treat their farm animals humanely, even if it means paying more. Lastly, we have to push for regulation, farming animal standards, and enforcement.

Please educate yourself into this problem. This blog follows with a list of links and book titles that can get you started. Then educate family, friends, and others you come in contact with in person and through the internet. Share the information, cut back on your own meat intake, and encourage others to follow suit.

Please, please Pass the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act,  and share this link on your Facebook and Twitter pages.

I led a discussion in Second Life earlier today in the Secular Community, and in addition to some sources I had, others provided some very good ones. Here is the list we came up with:

• Animal Welfare Approved
• Peta:   Please also join their Facebook page
• Animal Rights and Protection Agencies that are organized by state.  Please go through these lists and check out the ones that you can.
• ASPCA
• Farm Animals Protection Project
• Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production
• Standards Booklet (PDF)
• Protecting Animals
• Certified Humane
• Local Harvest
• The Human Society, Farm Animals
• Animal Voice

Books recommended in the talk today. Some of these are available for Kindle as well, so you can spare trees:-)

• Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
• In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave by Peter Singer
• The Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old Macdonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat by Catherine Friend
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

Video

• Earthlings, Part 1
• Food, Inc. Trailer
• Farm Animal Abuse
• The Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty

Please sure this blog and all of it’s sources to help raise awareness about this insipid problem that is getting worse as all the time.

Tags: animals, diet, farming, food, humanely, meat industry, Regulation, vegetarian

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2010 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Causes, Ecology, Facebook, farming, Humane animal treatment, Politics, Regulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.