CYRANO'S JOURNAL®

ANNALS OF HUMAN CHAUVINISM (SPECIESISM)

Factory Farming: The Industrialization of Cruelty for Profit

"No progressive can ignore the mind-boggling suffering we humans inflict on billions of helpless animals EVERY SINGLE DAY on this earth...To recognize this fact...and to be moved to action is a matter of simple decency and moral consistency ..."

BROADBAND RECOMMENDED. WAIT A FEW MOMENTS FOR THE FILES TO DOWNLOAD.

MEET YOUR MEAT: Narrated by Alec Baldwin for PETA.ORG Placing the cursor inside the image frame will allow you to access controls.

IF YOU ARE A DECENT PERSON, the video on this page describing the inherent cruelty involved in factory farming should provide ALL the reasons you need to oppose a meat-based diet in all its variations. But there's plenty more. There is the question of health (which may be of interest to some, as meat-based diets contribute to cardiovascular illness and cancer, not to mention obesity) and also of environmental protection, as animal factories contribute a huge amount of pollution to the planet. Lastly, for those who are only motivated to political action on the basis of "human" issues, there is the unavoidable fact that in a world accursed with food scarcities, meat-based diets depend on the most inefficient use of agricultural resources. It's a "rich man's diet." In the last few years, there is also mounting evidence that factory farming, and animal husbandry in general, may pose the biggest danger of all, the possibility of new viral diseases capable of pandemic morbidity.

If you need more facts to construct your own arguments and to help educate others, please visit PETA's special page devoted to animal rights television: http://www.petatv.com/veg.html . Our fraternal site, ANIMAL PEOPLE MAGAZINE, with thousands of articles online, is also a recommended resource on this subject.

POSSIBLE ARTICLES OF INTEREST

0. THE STORY OF BEEF Learn what's behind that juicy steak being advertised to you on TV or that fancy menu. It may perturb your appetite enough to save you from perpetuating a hidden holocaust. [READ MORE]

0,1 PORK ON YOUR PLATE With corporate hog factories replacing traditional hog farms, pigs raised for food are being treated more as inanimate tools of production than as living, feeling animals. Approximately 100 million pigs are raised and slaughtered in the U.S. every year. As babies, they are subjected to painful mutilations without anesthesia or pain relievers. Their tails are cut off to minimize tail biting, an aberrant behavior that occurs when these highly-intelligent animals are kept in deprived factory farm environments [READ MORE]

0,2 FACTORY MILK PRODUCTION Traditional small dairies, located primarily in the Northeast and Midwest, are going out of business. They are being replaced by intensive 'dry lot' dairies, which are typically located in the Southwest U.S. [READ MORE]

0,3 EATING CHICKEN IS NOT ALL RIGHT Record numbers of chickens and turkeys are being raised and killed for meat in the U.S. every year. Nearly ten billion chickens and half a billion turkeys are hatched in the U.S. annually. These birds are typically crowded by the thousands into huge, factory-like warehouses where they can barely move.

1. NEW KILLER DISEASES: NATURE STRIKES BACK AGAINST FACTORY FARMING Guang-dong province, China-- Representing the unholy marriage of wildlife consumption with factory farming, an estimated 10,000 masked palm civets, tanukis, (also called raccoon dogs), and hog badgers were sacrificed in the first 10 days of January 2004 for the sins of the meat industry. [READ MORE]

2. Germany Adopts A Pro-Animal Constitutional Amendment BONN-- The Bundesrat, the upper house of the German legislature, on June 21 ratified an amendment to the national Basic Law which adds the words "and animals" to a phrase establishing environmental rights. As amended, the phrase now reads, "The state takes responsibility for protecting the natural foundations of life and animals in the interest of future generations." Kate Connolly, Berlin correspondent for The Guardian, of Britain, compared the amendment to a 1992 Swiss constitutional amendment which redefined animals as "beings" rather than objects. "It means that the rights of animals will in theory be viewed more stringently in every area of life," Connolly wrote. "Previous [animal protection] laws, recognized in 11 of the 16 German states, governed only the conditions in which animals are held. The new legislation extends coverage to every type of animal, from household pets to those held in zoos." [READ MORE]

3. ROBERT KENNEDY JR. ATTACKS HOG PRODUCERS Said Kennedy, "I wonder what Jesus would have thought about the inside of one of these hog factories."[READ MORE]

4. NO EASY ANSWERS: THE VEGETARIANISM OF NAZIS Many in the top echelons of the Nazi hierarchy were ethical vegetarians, but does that taint this moral position? Author Boria Sax explores what has been to this day one of the most vexing conundrums concerning Hitler and his clique. Sax investigates the paradox that Hitler et al developed scruples about killing nonhumans, yet seemingly had none about killing the human animal; opposed vivisection of nonhumans yet vivisected humans by the tens of thousands; supposedly disagreed with the premise of factory farming yet helped to introduce it; and showed none of the concern for compassion on the one hand and moral consistency on the other that has historically characterized authentic animal rights advocacy. In recent years the Holocaust metaphor has been advanced by PETA vegetarian campaigners, who have been predictably counter-attacked with allegations of anti-Semitism and assertions of Hitler's quasi-vegetarianism, but the PETA use of Holocaust imagery to describe animal slaughter was at least 40 years behind Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer. [READ MORE]

5. Million hens killed in Ohio--twister hits like forced molt COLUMBUS, Ohio--An estimated one million battery-caged laying hens died slowly from thirst, exposure, and starvation or were reportedly crushed by bulldozers on October 2 and 3 after two weeks of suffering, following a September 20 tornado which destroyed the water-and-feed systems serving twelve 85,000-hen barns at the Buckeye Egg Farm complex in Croton, Ohio. [READ MORE]