What we don’t see doesn’t hurt . . . animals

For animals, the basis of “animal welfare” is simply staying alive. But for countless animals, simply staying alive is difficult to impossible to do.

Only consider the billions of animals – you read it right, billions of them – killed every year to be eaten by humans. For them, NYTimes columnist Mark Bittman argues that “animal welfare” means we should be aware of the “torture” animals go through on the way to being slaughtered.

Because people eat animals, and some are erroneously convinced they must eat meat, innumerable animals must die. And in the process, they suffer unimaginably.

Bittman, with whom I’ve had issues earlier in this blog, seems slowly to be gaining awareness of just how horrific the system of meat production is – initially horrific for the animals involved, of course, and then for the people involved, who are isolated from what happens to the animals.

In a column last month titled “The Human Cost of Animal Suffering,” he wrote about a book whose author was exploring “the normalization of violence.” Not only do most people not know how animals are “processed” into food, but many of the workers involved are also isolated from those horrors.

Not seeing the “process” – which presumably would horrify them and prompt them to protest – helps people tolerate its continuation. And not seeing it, they continue to eat “meat” – i.e., dead animal tissue, which resulted from animal suffering.

“Distancing and concealment” in imprisonment, war, torture, deployment of drones and other sophisticated weapons allow “impersonal killing” to take place over and over again. Bittman says “we should look more carefully at how we raise and kill animals” because “when we all know the system, we’ll be even more eager to change it.”

This whole problem would disappear if people stopped eating animals. But Bittman’s not going there. For now anyway, he’s proposing only to raise and kill them in more humane ways – as if that’s not a contradiction in terms.
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(http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/the-human-cost-of-animal-suffering/?emc=eta1)

Good news, please!

A reader’s comment reacting to a recent post here exclaimed at how welcome the good news (about two former service dogs) was. This also happened a few months ago, when a reader wrote some good animal news – about the resurgence of wild turkeys in the area.

It’s true: most of the posts here are in fact warnings or bad news. In part, I think, that reflects what’s actually happening to animals. I only wish it were like most news in the media -- dealing with the exceptions, not the rules. But I don’t think so.

Even so . . . here’s my invitation to any readers with good news about animals: please tell me about it! Then, if at all possible, I’ll post it.

We’d all like to think life is better for animals than it so often seems. But then, all it takes to suggest the real way of the world is a thought about factory farming or the fur industry or zoos and circuses or even the people who leave dogs tied up outside 24/7. . . or those who think the way to celebrate a holiday is to eat an animal.

Calling all good news!
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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+.)

Walk for farm animals

An uplifting event took place yesterday afternoon in Princeton. At least 70 people walked along a four mile route, carrying signs and giving out flyers, to show their compasssion for farm animals. Literally billions of land animals are slaughtered each year in the US for food; untold additional billions of fish meet the same fate.

And how these creatures "meet their fate" is almost worse than the fact that they do. It's all about factory farming and how that heinous system causes animals to be treated.

The walk was an annual event sponsored by Farm Sanctuary, one of 66 such walks taking place this fall across the US and in Canada for the same cause. I walked and took pictures and talked with other participants -- a very diverse mix yet all quietly committed. Afterwards, I was glad to have the chance to write about the walk, twice, for publication.

Now, if some of the bystanders and drivers who saw the walk underway would only feel/act more open to the horrific information that Farm Sanctuary exists to provide. (http://farmsanctuary.org/issues/factoryfarming/) Not that they should become vegetarians or vegans on the spot; their merely cutting down on flesh consumption would be a good start. Positive reactions can start small -- then build. It all begins with willingness to listen, read, think. #