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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike McFarland who wrote (96246)	2/21/2005 11:58:47 AM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 108807

"You have just dined, and howver scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." Ralph Waldo Emerson "Fate." The Conduct of Life, 1860 Imagine you just landed on planet Earth and want to find out more about the diet of the human race. You know that people who eat animals run a much greater risk of dying from heart disease or cancer. They are more likely to suffer from gallstones, obesity, diet-related diabetes, kidney stones, food poisoning and constipation! You also know that livestock farming is a hopelessly inefficient way of feeding people and that it causes pollution on a staggering scale. On top of that, you have discovered that incarcerating and killing animals causes great pain and suffering. Coming from an advanced planet which encourages compassion and wisdom, you obviously expect to find that most people on Earth will be vegetarians and vegans. Instead you discover that the average person in the U.S. subsidizes the abuse and killing of animals by eating more than 35 animals a year or 2,600 over a 75 year lifetime, shown in table 1, left. You find it impossible to believe that over 9 billion animals are slaughtered in the U.S. every year, shown in table 2, right. But how are these animals raised and killed? Surely humankind must show some compassion and respect for our fellow creatures with which we share the Earth? This Little Piggy went to Market Pigs are highly intelligent, social animals capable of living up to 20 years. Today, over 95 percent of pigs are raised in automated confinement buildings spending their entire lives indoors. They are slaughtered at only six months of age. Their short lives are filled with misery. The 'breeding stock' - female pigs kept to produce the piglets who are killed for meat - are kept in gestation crates while they are pregnant. Here they are unable to walk or turn around. Some of the larger sows barely fit in the crate. They are forced to live on cold, bare cement floors in their own excrement during their 4 month pregnancy. The European Commission’s Scientific Veterinary Committee condemned gestation crates in a 1997 report because of the serious health and welfare problems. It stated sows in stalls have weaker bones and muscles, heart problems and more urinary tract infections. Crating pigs can also send them mad. Many pigs show 'stereotyped behavior', moving their heads backwards and forwards in an exact and constantly repeated motion, gnawing on their bars with the precision of a metronome. It is the same syndrome which causes zoo animals to pace relentlesssly, and as the UK government supported research states: 'this behavior resembles in many respects the development in humans of chronic psychiatric disorders'. Sow stalls have been banned in the UK and Sweden. Finland and the Netherlands have bans that will come into effect by 2008. The rest of the European Union has banned sows in stalls after the first four weeks of pregnancy and this will be implemented by 2013. They are still legal in the USA and are used by almost all producers. About a week before she is due to give birth, the sow is moved to another type of crate - a farrowing crate - with a concrete or metal floor. Pigs are devoted mothers and would normally spend days building a nest of leaves or straw. In a crate they cannot do this and so lapse into stereotyped behavior where they repeatedly try to build a nest in their barren cell. The bars on the crates stop the mother pigs from being able to move. This causes the pregnant animals to ache all over and many have back and leg problems. The bars also stop them from reaching their babies when they give birth, although the babies can reach their mother’s teats to suckle. Short chains or rubber straps are used to immobilize the mother to give the piglets easy access to her udders. This type of tethering causes her udders to develop lacerations and infections due to her inability to get away from her suckling babies. Five days after her piglets are taken away, the sow is made pregnant again and the whole misery-go-round continues. Normally, piglets would stay with their mother for about 15 weeks. However, on factory farms, they are taken away from their mother at 2 to 3 weeks, weighing only about 15 pounds, and crowded into small ‘nursery’ pens surrounded by metal bars and concrete. By this time approximately 15% have died. Surviving piglets are placed in crowded, filthy pens in a confinement building to be ‘fattened’ and ‘finished’. How crowded? Industry personnel are typically advised to allow a little more than one square yard of floor space for each animal. Crowding, and the boredom of confinement produces behaviors such as fighting and tail-biting. To prevent damage to the ‘product’, the industry castrates the piglets, cuts off their tails, and clips their teeth – all without anesthesia. Overcrowding also causes disease to run rampant causing further suffering for the pigs. Pork ‘95, a trade journal, reported that, ‘A Minnesota slaughter check survey found that every participating herd had pneumonia. And, on average, 70% of each herd’s animals showed symptoms.’ Another examination of 6,000 slaughtered pigs revealed that 71% suffered from pneumonia. Nevertheless, one in every four commercial pig operations went the entire year without requesting the services of a veterinarian. The reason for such cruel overcrowding? As the meat industry journal, National Hog Farmer succinctly put it, ‘Crowding pigs pays.’ Once the young pigs reach approximately 250 pounds (about six months old), they are crammed into trucks for transport to the slaughterhouse. Many will not survive the horribly cruel transport conditions. According to the Livestock Conservation Institute, ‘Each year, 80,000 hogs leave the farm but never reach the market.’ vivausa.org