Food for thought...
I'm writing a story for my journalism course about animal cruelty and vegetarianism. I needed to survey a big group of people but I got laryngitus so my interviewing escapades got cut short...I still need a good 50 responses to the questions I had prepared..If any of you just skim through these questions and answer at least any of them if not all of them, it would really help me out a lot...Thanks RB, I knew I could count on you...
Are you a vegetarian?
IF YES: When and why did you become one?
Have you ever eaten meat?
Were health reasons your main motive for becoming a vegetarian or was it because of moral issues, religious customs, economic reasons ,etc.?
Where do you get your food? Do you find it to be more expensive than non-vegetarian groceries?
IF NO:
Are you aware of the way the animals used for the meat you eat are raised and slaughtered?
If you had to kill the animals yourself, would you still be a meat eater?
Would you say you eat meat on a daily basis? What kinds and how many servings a day?
Please read the following excerpts from Vegan Outreach pamphlet entitled "Even If You Like Meat...You Can Help End This Cruelty" before responding to the next questions.
“In the past half-century, most U.S. livestock production has moved from small family farms to factory farms- huge warehouses where animals are confined in crowded cages or pens or in restrictive stalls. The competition to lower costs has led agricultural businesses to treat animals as mere objects, rather than individuals who can suffer.
Hidden from public view, the cruelty that occurs on factory farms is easy to ignore. But more and more people are taking a look at how farmed animals are treated and deciding that its too cruel to support.”
PIGS
“Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory.”-John Byrnes, Farm Manager
“The movie ‘Babe’ is the way Americans want to think of pigs. Real life ‘Babes’ see no sun in their limited lives, with no hay to lie on, no mud to roll in. The sows live in tiny cages, they can’t even turn around. They live over metal grates, and their waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits.
Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers [2-3 weeks] after birth (compared to 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormone and anti-biotic fortified feed. This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. The USDA’s recommended solution to the problem is called ‘tail docking’: Using a pair of pliers (AND NO ANASTHETIC), most but not all of the tail is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail-biting, so much as to render it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.
Hogs, unlike cattle, are dunked in tanks of hot water after they are stunned to soften their hides for skinning. As a result, a botched slaughter condemns some hogs to being scolded and drowned. Secret video tape from Iowa pork plant shows hogs squealing and kicking as they are being lowered into the water.
In gestation sheds, sows continuously hit their heads against their cage doors as if trying to escape. The pens where pigs are fattened up for slaughter are essentially concrete cells, each holding about a dozen pigs. In one pen, there was a pig missing an ear. Another had a rupture the size of a grapefruit protruding from his stomach. A dead pig was constantly nudged and licked by others. At larger farms in North Carolina, there are thousands of pigs housed in sheds. Dead pigs had been left in the pens with the living, some are belted down to the wires of the floor, other pigs had been tossed in the aisles- barely alive, unable to reach food or water."
BIRDS
“Virtually all birds raised for food in the US are factory farmed. Inside the densely packed buildings- which the birds never leave to go outdoors, except during their trip to slaughter-manure fumes cause eye and respiratory infections.
EGG LAYING HENS
"When a flock’s production declines, the hens are either slaughtered or “force molted”-deprived of food for 5 to 14 days to shock their bodies into another laying cycle.
The American laying hen passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of a magazine could carpet. Overcrowding can cause hens to become stuck in the bars or wire floors of their cages and die of asphyxiation or dehydration. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral vices that can include cannibalizing her cage-mates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until its featherless and bleeding.
Male chicks, of no economic value to the egg industry, are found dead and dying in a dumpster behind a hatchery. Typically they are gassed or ground up alive."
METHODS OF SLAUGHTER
Using a captive bolt gun, a metal rod is thrust into the animal’s brain. Shooting a struggling animal is difficult, and the rod often misses its mark.
Electrical current produces a seizure; then the throat is cut. Insufficient amperage can cause an animal to be paralyzed without losing sensibility.”
Mind you that pigs and chickens have the same intellectual ability and learning capacity as cats or dogs. So why is it that dogs and cats deserve legal protection from animal cruelty laws, while the other group gets virtually no protection at all?"
Photos:
http://www.veganoutreach.org/advocac.../ffpigslrg.jpg
http://www.veganoutreach.org/advocac...ffbirdslrg.jpg
[For further reading, visit www.opposecruelty.org]
After reading about the cruelty, have your opinions about the meat you eat been influenced at all?
Why or why not?
Anyone who takes the time to read or answer any of these gets major cool points...
And in case you didn't know, cool points can be traded in for sex..
Lol...Just kidding. But seriously, please help me out and voice your opinion or any additional comments on the subject if you have a minute...