Meat : A Euphemism of Murder

Animal flesh comes to us in a nice neat package we call meat without the face attached, but each piece of flesh an individual consumes represents the death and misery of another animal. Their stomach essentially becomes the final resting place for a decaying corpse... a once living, feeling, being.

Every year, countless farm animals are murdered in the United States, usually in modern day factory farms, where the animals are treated like disposable machines. Like any other factory, factory farms are geared for mass production and use machinery and assembly line-type techniques to achieve it. This means disregarding any of the animals natural needs and tendencies, including genetics, diet, digestion, sexual behavior, and their ability to move about. In this system, animals have been reduced to tools, slaves, and commodities, that can be bought, sold, and simply tossed aside to rot when not profitable.

A LIFE SENTENCE BEGINS

On todays modern farms, death begins at birth for the majority of animals. The day after calfs are born, they are separated from their mothers so that they will not drink the precious milk nature intended for them and are instead shipped off to veal farms where they will spend their premature lives in crates too small to turn around in or they will face the same fate as their parents: the horrific dairy farm or the feedlot where they will be raised in misery only to be murdered.

In egg factory farms, so-called useless male chicks are literally weeded out and are thrown in plastic bags, as though they were garbage, and either die from suffocation or starvation. Then the useless chicks are ground-up dead or alive, decapitated, or put in a machine which causes the bodies of the baby chicks to explode. They are then used for fertilizer or feed. The female chicks have their sensitive beaks cut off without any anesthesia and are transported to a cage, slightly larger than a folded newspaper with four other egg-laying hens for the rest of their lives. After the chickens become useless, they are taken to the slaughter house where they are hung by their feet on a conveyor belt and await their fate as they systematically have their throats slit.

A large majority of the pigs born in the United States will spend their entire lives in cramped factory conditions from day one of life, never seeing the sun, until they finally meet their bloody death. Sows are forced into small slated stalls where they are injected with progesterones or steroids to increase the number of piglets in their litter. As soon as they are born, newborn pigs receive injections, their teeth are clipped, their tails are cut off, and their ears are notched, all without anesthetics, causing excruciating pain for the newborns. After the sows are no longer useful, they join their male counterparts in the slaughterhouse where they are either stunned with an electric rod or knocked unconscious with a hydraulic sledgehammer. They are then hung by their feet and have their throats slit to drain the life out of them.

Other species of animals are also meeting this fate. Sheep, rabbits, emu, turkeys, alligators, and even green sea turtles are raised in intensive conditions similar to these where the main goal is to make more money from more animals with less labor, time, and money spent. This is just where the misery begins for these animals.

These animals, living, feeling, breathing like people, are born with a natural need and instinct for companionship with other animals. But, in the industry where money is more important than life, and butchering innocent beings and then consuming their decomposing carcasses is the norm, these animals lives are completely regulated and destroyed. Their food, laced with antibiotics, is formulated to make them grow as quickly as possibly. Animals are artificially inseminated (RAPED, often mechanically) and fed chemicals to make them produce more offspring more often so that those babies may too be killed. All instinctive desires and needs are ignored, and the entire life of these animals is determined by machines controlled by the callous human who is claiming power over their lives.

Factory farmers simply call this management or maintenance, as if they are overseeing the production of machinery. The animals are kept in conditions so crowded and confined that the entire living space reeks of ammonia and other gases from the animals wastes. The animals are treated as a collective whole, not as individual lives that need specialized attention. Despite the fact that crowding the animals induces problems such as fighting amongst the animals and increased death rates, the profits still rise and the animals that arent profitable are simply sold to stockyard auctions, where their almost lifeless bodies are sold for a mere dollar. And the animals who remain unwanted are discarded and left to die.


After a short miserable life of crowding, physical abuse and deformation, and deprivation of natural instincts, farm animals are forced onto trucks via beatings, electric shocks, prodding, kicking, and dragging to be transported in extremely overcrowded conditions to a building where they will be hoisted upside down on meat hooks connected to conveyor belts and have their throats slit while fully conscious. Even if the animals are stunned (which is extremely painful) before they are slaughtered, they often remain conscious and are thus slaughtered as they scream and struggle in terror for their lives. Often times animals do not die for several minutes after they meet the knife wielding murderers and are often boiled or skinned alive or left to die in a pool of their own blood.

The entire slaughterhouse is filled with the stench of blood and death and the screams of animals struggling in vein for their lives echoes throughout. But the producers keep raising these animals in the same miserable conditions, the butchers keep murdering the animals, and the consumers continue to purchase and gorge themselves with the decomposing corpses of innocent animals despite the cries.

How can anyone justify reducing animals to mere commodities that we can simply force into miserable conditions and murder to satisfy the appetites of selfish human beings? How can we call this society and its inhabitants humane or civilized when we are engaged in so much misery and killing? Animals are not simply things or food. They can feel pain, stress, and fear.

The choice of consuming animals is of consequence: a miserable life and terrifying death for animals, poisoning of the Earth and her inhabitants (including you, the consumer), and the continuation of world hunger. Consuming meat is condoning the death of an innocent life for which there is no excuse.

The meat industry thrives off the worlds hunger for a bloody, cruel diet while 90 percent oats, 85 percent corn, and 80 percent soybeans grown in the U.S. are fed to livestock. Lets not forget about all the grains that are imported from poor and starving third world nations, grains that could have been used to feed the starving children of those poor nations. If everyone consumed plant foods instead of animals, there would be enough food to feed the entire world several times over.

Raising animals for food: consumes one-third of all raw materials, causes more water pollution in the U.S. than any other industry, consumes more than half of all water used for all purposes in the U.S., and consumes 87 percent agricultural land. Not only is an animal-based diet bad for the animals and the environment, it is harmful for people. The animals are pumped with antibiotics, hormones, and medication. And so as you consume their flesh, those chemicals go right into your system. We are pushed by the meat and dairy industries to believe that flesh is a natural and necessary part of our diet. These ideas are pushed on us by groups such as McDonalds, which thrives off the dairy and meat industries.


Ask yourself: when you are hungry, do you have the urge to, using your bare hands, kill and rip apart another animal? Does your mouth water at the sight of a screaming, struggling, animal being slaughtered? Eating meat is not natural or healthy for the human body. In fact, those who do choose a non-animal based diet have a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, some cancers, osteoporosis, obesity, and many other diseases.

When you consume the flesh of an animal carcass, you are consuming the drugs and hormones fed to the animal during its miserable life, as well as the adrenaline that surged through the body of the animal in its last moments of life before the slaughter.

In school and at home, we are socialized to believe that animals are a commodity, easily grown and harvested, just like the corn we grow and eat. But how many times have you heard a vegetable scream in pain? How many times have you seen a vegetable try, with all its strength, to escape a knife wielding murderer?

Animals in slaughterhouses can hear the screams, smell the stench, and often see those ahead of them being murdered. All of these animals fight for their lives and struggle to get away. But to no avail: societies bloodlust keeps the slaughterhouses thriving on death.

When you pick up a package of meat, think of the cruelty and suffering that comes along with it. That steak is not just another piece of food-it is a chunk of bloody flesh and muscle. It is edible suffering, pain, struggle, and misery of another being. We each have the capability to choose a vegan (animal free) diet and life-style and end the misery and suffering of countless animal beings raised in a miserable environment only to be ultimately murdered.

Meet Your  Meat

Vivisection - The Bad "Science"

VIVISECTION

Vivisection is bad for animals and is poor science. Animals will never be human because their metabolism and physiology differs greatly from ours. Many studies have shown that animals predict correctly for humans only 5-25% of the time: far worse than tossing a coin! That's not science, that's gambling. An animal dies in an EU laboratory every three seconds. In the laboratory an animal may be poisoned; deprived of food, water or sleep; applied with skin and eye irritants; subjected to psychological stress; deliberately infected with disease; brain damaged; paralysed; surgically mutilated; irradiated; burned; gassed; force fed; electrocuted and killed. Animal testing has delayed medical progress and even dangerously mislead our understanding of disease. Our understanding of polio transmission, heart disease and diabetes, for example, was delayed because we studied them in another species. 92% of new drugs fail in clinical trials, after they have passed all the safety tests in animals. More than 10,000 people are killed every year in the UK by side effects of prescription medicines - now the fourth biggest killer in the western world. The US figure is over 100,000. Animal testing failed to predict these tragedies. This is a serious wake up call that we need to look at animal testing critically, and not just blindly accept what people who make money off animal testing tell us. It is time to switch to humane, modern, non-animal methods that are available and that predict accurately for humans, not rats.

TACTICS

The animal rights movement is based on non-violence; non-violence to all beings, whether they stand on two legs or four. The blanket labelling of animal rights protesters as anything other than peaceful in order to deflect attention away from the real issue of cruelty to animals in the lab, and to use this labelling as an excuse to hide the facts from the public, is totally unacceptable. Casually throwing around serious words like "violence" by vivisectors is ironic, considering the real violence that is happening behind the closed doors of laboratories. It is the fundamental right of any person to express their views on any particular subject. Attempts to silence legitimate protest will do nothing but strengthen the resolve of compassionate and concerned people everywhere. Campaigns will increase in their intensity to bring to light the wasteful, outdated and hideously cruel methods of torture currently being employed by the vivisectors.

ALTERNATIVES

Animal testing is cruel and fatally misleading. The word 'alternative' implies that there is some positive merit to animal tests and there is not. Computer modelling is now very sophisticated, with virtual human organs and virtual metabolism programmes which predict drug effects in humans far more accurately than animals can. Researchers can study human neurology in an ethical manner. Many clinical centers use imaging and neurophysiologic tools to map and monitor the human and other neurological systems. Centers such as Princeton University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Minnesota State University use functional MRIs, PET scans, and evoked potentials (which record the brain's electrical patterns) to collect relevant data on human neural processing and anatomy. With these and many more wonderful tools available for non-invasive study of the human brain, we can most effectively help patients who suffer from neurological diseases. The government puts about 1-2% of funding into development of non-animal test methods than the cost of building one new animal lab.

STRINGENT ANIMAL WELFARE LEGISLATION?

The government always points to the UK as having the most stringent animal welfare legislation in the world. Yet in the UK there are only 28 Home Office inspectors employed to supposedly enforce legislation - that is one inspector for every 103,435 procedures!

PUBLIC OPPOSITION

In a 2003 poll, 86% of the public were against primate experiments that caused them pain, distress or lasting harm.

A recent survey done by Newsnight saw that 57% of people surveyed believed that taxpayer's money should not be used to help build more laboratories to carry out tests on animals for medical research and 58% of people surveyed wanted their tax money being spent on alternative viable ways of testing.

MEDICAL OPPOSITION

82% of general practitioners are concerned that animal data can be misleading when applied to humans and that 83% would support an independent scientific evaluation of the clinical relevance of animal experimentation. A paper published in 2004 in the British Medical Journal asked, "Where is the evidence that animal research benefits humans?" Speaking of which, shockingly and disturbingly, the government has never actually commissioned or evaluated any formal research on the efficacy of animal experiments, and has no plans to do so. Through an EDM currently in parliament, over 200 MPs are calling upon the government to facilitate an independent and transparent scientific evaluation of the use of animals as surrogate humans in drug safety testing and medical research. This EDM comes about after news of one drug disaster after another, all of which were deemed safe from animal tests.

POLITICAL OPPOSTION

An Early Day Motion in parliament calling on an independent scientific evaluation into the validity of animal testing has gained the support of over 200 MPs and countless GPs. People want modern medicine, NOT irresponsible and outdated animal testing methods.

WHY DOES IT STILL HAPPEN?

The biggest reason is money. Animal breeders and cage and equipmant manufacturers are multi-billion £ industries, but the biggest beneficiary is the pharmaceutical industry. Animal tests help them speed new drugs onto the market and, most significantly, give them a legal defence against public allegations of inadequate safety testing. Pharmaceutical companies use animal tests to provide liability protection when ther drugs kill or injure people. Juries are easily swayed by volumes of safety data from rats, mice, dogs and monkeys - even though it is meaningless for humans.

Attempts to silence protesters or 'blanket label' legitimate animal rights protests as anything otherwise does absolutley nothing to address the root of the issue which is unnacceptable torture of animals in the laboratory and a real need to move toward modern, non-animal methods. Until the government and industry gets to the root of the issue, the resolve of concerned people will only be strengthened.

Overwhelming evidence shows that most animal experiments have nothing to do with curing diseases - and they certainly don't help in unlocking the causes and cures of a uniquely human phenomenon like drug abuse. We don't need more animal experiments, we need to switch to humane, modern, non-animal methods that are available and that predict accurately for humans, not animals.

Click the following link for more sources of information:
ANIMAL TESTS / VIVISECTION LINKS