Dogs and cats luckier than turkeys and pigs

Let’s not think about turkeys right now. Nothing to be thankful for there – just a hope that the poor, deformed, purpose-bred creatures died fast without any foreshadowing of doom.

Same with pigs. Talk about purpose-bred. The New Yorker cartoon showed a pig sitting on an examining table as his doctor said, “The problem with you is that your ribs are delicious,” or something like that. Close enough. Does anyone in the world raise pigs for the pleasure of having pigs, or to give pigs a nice life?

Ha.

Good things happened in the last week for dogs and cats, though. At least a dozen were adopted at the Easel-sponsored event last Saturday at the Trenton Farmers Market. Everything seemed to work right, starting with the weather, and moving on to the numbers of volunteers involved and people who came out.

Eight cats are in new homes right now, as are at least four dogs. (A couple additional adoptions were iffy and may have taken place this week at the Ewing shelter.)

Thanks to everyone who spread the word, who helped with the event, who adopted and/or donated to Easel. This major effort to lessen the number of animals in the shelter got a big, emphatic push last Saturday.

And for those who still want to adopt a pet, Easel resumes its “regular” adoption days Saturday, December 3. Details at www.easelnj.org.* There’s still time before the winter holidays to change the world for a homeless animal.
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* sorry, but technical difficulties precluded a link here.

Happy Thanksgiving

. . . "And that Thanksgiving turkey? Even if it is raised “free range,” it still lives a life of pain and confinement that ends with the butcher’s knife.

“How can intelligent people who purport to be deeply concerned with animal welfare and respectful of life turn a blind eye to such practices? And how can people continue to eat meat when they become aware that nearly 53 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption? The simple answer is that most people just don’t care about the lives or fortunes of animals. If they did care, they would learn as much as possible about the ways in which our society systematically abuses animals, and they would make what is at once a very simple and a very difficult choice: to forswear the consumption of animal products of all kinds. . . . ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22steiner.html

Factory farming's negative reach

The following few paragraphs need no editorial comment:

. . . “According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN and others, factory farming has made animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming (it is significantly more destructive than transportation alone), and one of the Top 2 or 3 causes of all of the most serious environmental problems, both global and local: air and water pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity . . . Eating factory-farmed animals – which is to say virtually every piece of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants – is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the environment.

“Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat. Turkeys have been so genetically modified they are incapable of natural reproduction. To acknowledge that these things matter is not sentimental. It is a confrontation with the facts about animals and ourselves. We know these things matter.

“Meat and seafood are in no way necessary for my family. . . . And we are healthier without it. . . . ”

(from “Against Meat: Or at least 99 percent of it” by Jonathan Safran Foer, The New York Times Magazine (The Food Issue), October 11, 2009, pp. 68+.)