Farm animals face a cruel, short life
Like many others, I always thought of farm animals as “food on the hoof.” But, after watching the deeply moving feature film “Okja” on Netflix, I realized that a farm animal is much like our family dog, fully deserving of compassion and respect.
Theologians have long debated whether there is life after death, but for farmed animals, there is no life before death.
Recent undercover investigations showed male baby chicks suffocated in plastic garbage bags or ground to death in large macerators, pigs clobbered by metal pipes and hung to die, and cows skinned and dismembered while still conscious.
Last week, I read of an international observance of World Day for Farmed Animals on Oct. 2 (Gandhi’s birthday), to expose and memorialize the global abuse and slaughter of billions of animals for food. The website at www.wfad.org offers a number of ways to participate and affirms the need to go vegan.
World Day for Farm Animals (www.WFAD.org), on Oct. 2, is perhaps the most dramatic of these. It celebrates the lives, exposes the abuses, and memorializes the slaughter of billions of sentient animals raised for food.
Recent undercover investigations showed male baby chicks suffocated in plastic garbage bags or ground to death, pigs clobbered with metal pipes, and cows skinned and dismembered while still conscious.
An internet search revealed that farm animal get neither on today’s factory farms. Male baby chicks are suffocated in plastic garbage bags or ground up alive. Laying hens are crowded into small wire cages that tear out their feathers. Breeding sows spend their lives pregnant in metal cages. Dairy cow babies are snatched from their mothers upon birth, so we can drink their milk.
The cruelties inherent in factory faming drove me to replace animal products in my diet with a rich variety of plant-based meats and dairy items offered by my supermarket. I have since learned that my cruelty-free diet is also great for my health and for the health of our planet.
Leo Gushiken, Lihue
Family Dog,now for Dinner?
‘plant based ‘meat and dairy’ products? This has me scratching my head…processed foods made to seem like the real thing, yuk! Better just enjoy simple proteins from legumes, grains , nuts and seeds. ..particularly if they are recognizable!
They keep the hens. Then they destroy the baby chicken roosters or male. By the loads, they throw the male in a bin that has spinning blades to destroy the male chicken.
Mr, Gushiken writes a very heartfelt letter decrying animal cruelty and that’s admirable, but not all animals raised for food are treated thus. Just as some people will only eat organic plant products, a person can also buy meats from local animal producers who treat the animals in a better manner.
Aloha Kakou,
Switching from farm animals that are routinely drugged with growth medicines and numerous antibiotics by giving these drugs to the animals routinely in their food and water, and instead eating synthetic meats or meats chemicalized to look, smell, and taste like meat is definitely jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Read the labels on foods you consider buying…laboratory and factory chemicals were never meant for humans and until the last 100 or so years were never taken by humans in all of history.
When humans eat the growth inducing chemicals fed to the animals, the humans ingest those same drugs and the human growth boosted by those chemicals may cause increased tumor growth in humans, besides animals get tumors as well for the same reasons humans do, and then humans eat the animals’ tumors. It’s a bad deal all the way around. It’s s important to know in detail where your food is from and what is in it.
The overuse of the antibiotics in animals kills their own gastrointestinal bacteria that should be helping to digest their food…and that continues on into the humans that eat those animals. The humans are killing off their own natural necessary gut bacteria by eating the animals’ and medically prescribed antibiotics, by disrupting human internal function when it comes to digesting food and appears to be a cause of swollen distended fat big guts in people…these big gut people just can’t complete the digestion of their food properly with all the antibiotics they are eating in the animals they eat, and as well also the antibiotics that are medically prescribed often for the side effects of eating the animals’ containing too many antibiotics.
That’s a crazy vicious cycle of what could be avoided if there ever was one.
And when the bad bacteria in your body becomes resistant to the over use of antibiotics you eat from animals, and the antibiotics you get from the pharmacy, then your infection from common or deadly bacteria can not be stopped and you can worsen, or not get well, and and in some cases die.
Here are some of the diseases and sicknesses that the eating of antibiotics from animals, and medically prescribed, makes the bacteria in humans resistant to antibiotics, that is makes the antibiotic ineffective, so that when you contract diseases the overuse use and ingestion makes it so you cannot shut down diseases such as pneumonia and other infections of the respiratory tract (like those horrible sore throats), urinary tract, intestines; and also gonorrhea, Chlamydia, syphilis, typhus and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme Disease, smallpox, anthrax, plague, and malaria, bronchitis, and other lung infections; diphtheria; Legionnaires’ disease; whooping cough; rheumatic fever; venereal disease; ulcers; and ear, lung, and skin infections, meaning the eating of antibiotic fed animals, and medically prescribed antibiotics taken by you personally accumulate over time and allow bacteria to become resistant or ineffective to kill off invasive bacteria in our bodies, but also at the same time those antibiotics kill off our good bacteria necessary in our body that do an incredible amount of things to maintain our health naturally. It’s like killing off your own soldiers before they get to the battlefield.
Here are some of the antibiotics we take ourselves and we also get from the animals you eat: Tetracycline, Chlortetracycline, Tylosin, Erythromycine, Azithromycine, Bacitracin, Doxycycline, Oxytetracycline, and Penicillin. There are probably others.
Antibiotics can be incredibly beneficial to people with severe bacterial or painful conditions, but the regular use or ingestion of antibiotics, such as in routinely eating animals that are fed these antibiotics, this frequent use can render the antibiotics ineffective and the bacteria resistant, and you suffer without relief.
Of course it’s best to save the need for antibiotics when you really need them and not when you just routinely eat them.
The downside to synthetic meats is the chemical additives…so Read the Labels.