Do you really know what's for dinner tonight?

Okay my fellow humans. I'm going to continue my focus this week on the Animals Right's issue. I think what I'll do going forward is spend a week or a good part of the week highlighting a specific issue. that way we can really go into detail.

Before I start though I just want to give major props to Rose for posting a comment. What about the rest of you? My profile has received 39 views over the last 2 weeks so I know you are all reading. SO POST! Bogdan? What's up big head? I wanna hear from you!LOL.

Okay. Moving on.....

BELOW: A downed cow is left to suffer and die at an Oklahoma stockyard as her frightened young calf looks on.

Factory Farming

I want to make sure all of you really understand what's behind the choice of what you eat. Now, I'm not going to give you some sermon about adopting a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. I know the reality is that most of you just don't care enough (yet) to really make that major shift in your lifestyle. Don't get me wrong. I understand that a seismic shift in someones life like adopting a vegetarian lifestyle requires an equally seismic event to trigger it such as a heart attack or stroke. Maybe even bearing witness to the brutal reality of what's behind your dinner will effect some people to make that choice. However, most of you won't experience those things for quite some time and then for most of you it will be too late to matter. So, if your going to eat meat there are some ways you can minimize the suffering of the animals and help your health out along with it.

Factory Farming is a term that describes the wholesale, mass slaughter of animals for food. It basically takes any caring or compassion for the animal out of the picture. We're talking about companies such as Tyson foods, Con-Agra and Purdue. There are many more but those are the three that pop up in my mind. You see, at these many places spread out around the country animals are being kept in horrendous conditions while waiting for their more horrendous death. People who work at these places are no better than hunters, or people like Michael Vick. They are psycho's that are killing and torturing living beings for what amounts to pleasure for most of them. See the videos I've posted after this blog as proof of what I'm talking about. It's disgusting, and every time you go to McDonald's, Burger King, or where ever and buy meat that's mass processed you're contributing to it.

As with most things there is also a bigger underlying issue with factory farming. Actually there are several....

• Inevitably, intensive animal agriculture depletes valuable natural resources. Instead of being eaten by people, the vast majority of grain harvested in the U.S. is fed to farm animals. This wasteful and inefficient practice has forced agribusiness to exploit vast stretches of land. Forests, wetlands, and other natural ecosystems and wildlife habitats have been decimated and turned into crop and grazing land. Scarce fossil fuels, groundwater, and topsoil resources which took millennium to develop are now disappearing.


• Runoff from factory farms is polluting rivers, streams and other sources of clean drinking water as well as killing off the supply of fish, oysters, and crabs. One food source depleting another. Here's an example from my neck of the woods....

- More than 600 million chickens a year are raised on the Delmarva Peninsula. Those chickens produce more manure than a city of four million people, and instead of it getting processed like human waste, chicken manure is spread on fields. But the Delmarva can't support that much nitrogen and phosphorous-which as you all know is is a bi product of waste. Up to half of the nutrients in the excess manure washes off into the rivers and streams, or gets into the groundwater. A third of the drinking water for the Delmarva has unsafe levels of these chemicals in them, some as high as 100 times the legal federal limit. In the rivers and the bays these nutrients spur algae growth. The algae decomposes and sucks the oxygen out of the water killing fish and crabs. The Delmarva (and the Chesapeake) all have "dead zones" marked where there is no life at all in the waters. In 2003 a dead zone stretched for more than 100 miles! Ask anyone in this area how the crabbing is and they'll ask you "what crabbing"?

Here are some other facts to chew on...

• In the United States every year 20-40 millions animals are killed for research (Medical, Military, Cosmetic etc.). However if you think that's alot - think again. On a normal DAY in this country 25 million animals are killed in slaughterhouses. That's about 10 BILLION each year-just in this country!

Industrialized farms are threatening the well being of rural communities throughout the U.S., and citizens are increasingly working to block their construction in order to prevent pollution and protect the quality of life.

Various studies have shown the benefits of traditional farm economies and the negative consequences of factory farming. Among the first to study this problem as it emerged in the 1940s was social scientist Walter Goldschmidt, who found that "Communities with absentee-owned industrial farms are less developed economically and socially than similar communities composed mainly of family farms." Goldschmidt's findings have since been replicated by others.
Family farms have been the core of agrarian culture for thousands of years, providing the opportunity to connect with the land and to live in tune with the seasons and the weather. Traditional farmers don't produce more than the carrying capacity of the land. They understand the condition of the soil and its ability to sustain various crops from season to season. They commonly produce and save their own seeds, a practice that has helped small farms maintain the integrity of crops, and allow hardier, diverse strains of plants to prosper. Contrasting this, industrial farms use a few strains of high yielding crops, an approach that threatens genetic diversity and often leads to chemical dependency.

Small farms help to create close-knit communities and thriving local economies. Various rural institutions, ranging from banks to equipment and feed suppliers, are created to support farming, and family farmers support the local community by hiring and buying inputs locally rather than contracting to an outside supplier. Family farm dollars paid to equipment dealers, grocery stores, and gas stations re-circulate throughout the local economy, strengthening it.
Large scale factory farms tend to bypass the local economy, buying their inputs and marketing their products largely outside of the community. Industrialized farming also negates the traditional sense of community - a place where people share values, interests and work. Rather than creating healthy, sustainable employment, these operations tend to create dangerous, low-paying jobs. The rise of factory farms, along with the decline of family farms, often signals the degradation of rural communities.

Short term efficiency and profitability, rather than long term sustainability drives the factory farming model. It externalizes costs, such as pollution clean up and health care services, onto others in the community. Neighbors of industrial operations have experienced health problems ranging from chronic asthma to neurological damage, and they have watched property values plummet

You all really need to understand what is going on in the world around. There are no more excuses. The truth is out there, and if you choose to ignore it and look the other way than you are no good than the people you're looking away from. Confront it! Expose it!

If you must eat meat, go to Trader Joes or Whole Foods. They sell free range, organic meat plus a lot of other great stuff to discover.

LUAP :)