No More Bacon!

 

No More Bacon

How could something so popular be so evil?

It starts with the treatment of the pigs – one of the most intelligent and affectionate animals on earth.  Undercover investigations reveal that when these docile, loving creatures are raised for food they are subjected to the most egregious abuses imaginable.  For example, semen is collected from the boars (male pigs).  Outside of a factory farm this would be called the crime of beastiality. 

The sows (female pigs) are locked in cages so small that they cannot stand or turn around.  They are immobilized like this for their entire short lives.  Even in prison solitary confinement, prisoners can stand and walk.  And the sows have done nothing wrong to deserve this!  Under other circumstances, this would be called cruel and unusual punishment.

In this vulnerable position, from which there is no escape, the docile, intelligent, sentient girls are artificially inseminated by workers.  They manipulate the sows’ vaginas to insert the semen.  Sometimes a male pig, a boar, is dragged around by a robot in the hope that this poor unfortunate’s smell will facilitate the heinous procedure.  Under other circumstances this would be called rape.

When the innocent baby pigs are born, they nurse from their incarcerated, pinned down Mothers briefly before being removed by workers.  The Mother’s and Babies’ screams are heartbreaking.  Under other circumstances this would be called kidnap.

The baby boy pigs have their testicles removed without anesthesia.  Their high-pitched screams are heart breaking.  They also have their tails removed to prevent the natural act of sucking by their companions looking for mother’s milk.  Their teeth are filed down to prevent ‘financial loss’ from cannibalism caused by the unbearable circumstances of their short lives.  Under other circumstances, this mutilation would be called torture.

Slaughter/murder comes for the Mothers when they are no longer able to produce babies either because their reproductive organs have been expelled from their bodies, or they have become so hopeless that they stop eating.  The babies are killed after they have gained weight.  This qualifies not only as murder, but since literally billions of pigs are killed annually, it is more accurately called genocide.

The only reason crimes committed against these individuals do not qualify to be called beastiality, rape, torture, kidnap, murder and genocide is their species.  It is the same reason that black individuals were forced into slavery, that a nuclear bomb was dropped on the already decimated Asian Japanese, and not the European Nazis.  It is because they do not look like the rich and powerful.

This evil will only stop when consumers gain some perspective and empathy, and stop eating bacon, sausage, ham, etc.  There are plenty of delicious plant based substitutes available. 

No more bacon!!!  

From Livestock's Long Shadow

From Livestock’s Long Shadow

According to this United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report, the livestock sector generates the most greenhouse gas emissions and is a major source of land and water degradation.  With increased prosperity, people are consuming more meat and dairy products.  The global livestock sector is growing faster than any other agriculture sub-sector

Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture and land used to producing feed for livestock.  Forests are cleared to create new pastures causing deforestation, especially in Latin America where 70 percent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.  Herds cause wide-scale land degradation through overgrazing, compaction and erosion. 

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources.  The major polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray crops. 

Meat and dairy animals now account for about 20 percent of all terrestrial animal biomass.  Livestock’s presence contributes to biodiversity loss; 15 out of 24 important ecosystem services are assessed as in decline, with livestock the culprit.

This does not take into consideration the immense suffering of these innocent individuals who are exploited to provide their bodies for human consumption.  This then causes heart disease, diabetes and cancer in the humans who eat them and drink their milk.

Covid-19 Was Preventable!

 

Zoonotic diseases, the cause of most epidemics and pandemics, including Covid-19, are caused by human – animal interaction.  The most serious infectious diseases are zoonotic, causing an estimated 3 million human deaths per year even before the current Covid-19 pandemic.  Zoonotic disease is caused by a pathogen that “spills over”, from animals to humans.  Infections are then transmitted directly among humans.

Emerging diseases are almost invariably zoonotic.  An estimated 60% of all viruses that infect humans came from animals, and 75% of all new infectious diseases in the past decade are zoonotic.  Examples include Covid-19, Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), Ebola virus, SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, and Avian Flu, and many others including the deadliest pandemics in history: Black Death, Spanish Flu, HIV, and now Covid-19. 

The global rate of zoonotic disease is increasing.  Without understanding the creation of zoonoses - abuse and exploitation of the non-human species buy the human speciesism, including eating them, wearing them, using them for entertainment, and unnecessary tests, or Speciesism, and rectifying these issues, it is impossible to prevent the next pandemic. 

 

Starvation of the Vulnerable Linked To Diet of the Affluent

 

Of planet Earth’s nearly 7 billion humans, roughly 1 billion people are malnourished and 6 million children starve to death annually as a result of the meat and dairy based diet of the affluent.

Farming individuals is notoriously wasteful when compared to growing plants to feed humans directly.  “Livestock” animals, individuals raised for meat and dairy, take drastically more food from the global food supply than they provide.

Crops necessary to feed individuals raised for human food are vastly more crops than it would take to feed humans directly.  It takes thirteen pounds of grain to yield just one pound of beef.  Crops such as soy and lentils produce, pound for pound, as much protein as beef, and sometimes more.

Feeding half the world’s edible grain crop to farmed individuals is a grossly inefficient use of protein and a waste of natural resources.  It requires far more land, water and energy than cultivating plant foods for direct human consumption.

One acre of land can yield between twelve and twenty times more plant food than animal-based foods.  This is also true of water usages.  Pollution of water, air and land, human mortality and morbidity, as well as starvation of the world’s most vulnerable people also result from the affluent’s meat and dairy based diet.

 

 

Animal Sacrifice in the Himalayas

In Bangladesh, Nepal, and other parts of the Himalaya region, religious animal sacrifices take place on a regular basis.  This is the part of the world that not too long ago would burn girls, as young as ten years old, in oil soaked wedding dresses, as ‘brides’ if the man they had been arranged to marry died in Nepal.

 “I’ve seen these kinds of horrors before, but the torture that I have witnessed during Eid al-Adha scarred me for the rest of my life.”  Animal Rescue Mission (ARM)  undercover investigator.

 The Eid al-Adha animal sacrifice festival is horrendous.  Millions of cows, goats, sheep, and even camels travel in a mass caravan by boats, trucks, and ‘death trains’. They are crammed into unhygienic and unsafe transport units.  They suffer in the unforgiving sun, often succumbing to severe dehydration and exhaustion.  Restrained by tight ropes. Swarmed by zealous mobs. Executed with machetes. 

Not even pregnant and newborn animals are safe during Eid al-Adha.  Their final destination is Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, and the epicenter of an animal sacrifice that will leave blood flooding the streets.  Despite the current restrictions of the pandemic, nothing is standing in the way of slaughtering these animals.  The festival will proceed.

 

An Inside Look at Dairy - Beastiality

An Inside Look at Dairy - Beastiality

This is where milk comes from and how it is produced.  Semen is collected from bulls by forcing them to ejaculate using either an artificial vagina or an instrument called an electroejaculator.  With the first method, a steer (castrated male) is restrained with a nose ring and used as a ‘teaser’ animal to be mounted. The bull is also tethered and controlled with a nose ring. After the male bull mounts the male steer and attempts penetration, his exposed penis is grabbed by a worker. It is then diverted to a long plastic sleeve or ‘artificial vagina’ held in the worker’s other hand.  Both male animals are tethered by a harsh metal nose rings as their sexual organs are manipulated by humans.  Nose ringing is a very distressing and painful process for the animals.  With electroejaculation, an anal probe is inserted into the bull’s rectum and electric shock applied to the muscles that control ejaculation.

Nearly 80% of dairy cows in the U.S. are forcibly inseminated once a year.  This is a crude procedure that involves a farmer inserting one arm up to his elbow inside the cow’s rectum.  Then the farmer optimally positions her cervix, and uses his other hand to insert an ‘artificial insemination gun’.  Semen is shot into her vagina.  Rectal violation plays no part in natural bovine copulation.  This brutal procedure commonly results in the cow violently and painfully defecating. 

Do not support this.  Drink plant milk and eat plant based cheese and ice cream.  Thanks.

From 'Livestock's Long Shadow'

Animal exploitation is not only the cause of zoonotic disease, such as covid-19, HIV, SARS, MERS, and the historic Spanish Flu and Black Death, but is destroying the planet.

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources, contributing to water pollution, euthropication and the degeneration of coral reefs.  The major polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray crops.  Widespread overgrazing disturbs water cycles, reducing replenishment of above and below ground water resources.  Significant amounts of water are withdrawn for the production of feed.

Meat and dairy animals now account for about 20 percent of all terrestrial animal biomass.  Livestock’s presence in vast tracts of land and its demand for feed crops also contribute to biodiversity loss; 15 out of 24 important ecosystem services are assessed as in decline, with livestock identified as a culprit.

Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of the global arable land used to producing feed for livestock.  Forests are cleared to create new pastures causing deforestation, especially in Latin America where 70 percent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.

It is time to stop exploiting innocent, defenseless individuals, and begin to recognize their value as individuals, and in the process save them, ourselves, and the planet.