[GJM] Factory Farming

Fri Feb 23 16:33:21 MST 2007

Hi Everyone,  

For several months now, I have been working to compile "The Story of Beef"
and its relationship to religion, the global monetocracy system, and the
role it plays in being the most deadly thing we do worldwide in creating
environmental devastation, including global climate change.  What this story
reveals is shocking to say the least.  

The most shocking part is the lengths to which the "cattle culture
consciousness" will go to get beef on your plate in order to make a profit. 
While the whole story is too long to post to the Co-learner's list, I do
plan to make it available to you in the very near future on another venue.  

In the meantime, I really want to make you aware of what you are eating when
you eat beef.  And, this article is a good lead-in to that one.  In the next
few days, I will detail for you "the fattening of beef for market".  After
reading it, many of you I feel will never eat beef from a slaughterhouse
again. But there is also no way in which sufficient "free range beef" could
be produced in order to meet demand.   

Also, were true-price costing be put into effect regarding retail beef
prices, it would simply be "unaffordable" and quickly disappear from market
shelves.  

Please save this article for future reference.  Some of you may recall the
legal battle between
OPRAH and the beef industry when she remarked on her show "I will never eat
beef again". And, she won in the suit filed against her.  

marguerite 

From"GlobalCirclenet" <webmaster at globalcircle.net>      
Toglobalnetnews-summary at lists.riseup.net
ReceivedThu, 22 Feb 2007 17:42:05
Subject[globalnetnews-summary] Exposing the Beast: Factory Farming Must be
Called to the Slaughterhouse

(To change your settings or unsubscribe please go to
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/globalnetnews-summary)

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0221-24.htm
Published on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 by the Sydney Morning
Herald (Australia)
Exposing the Beast: Factory Farming Must be Called to the Slaughterhouse
by J.M. Coetzee

To any thinking person, it must be obvious there is something
terribly wrong with relations between human beings and the animals
they rely on for food. It must also be obvious that in the past 100
or 150 years, whatever is wrong has become wrong on a huge scale, as
traditional animal husbandry has been turned into an industry using
industrial methods of production.

There are many other ways in which our relationship with animals is
wrong (to name two: the fur trade and experimentation on animals in
laboratories), but the food industry, which turns living animals into
what it euphemistically calls animal products and by-products, dwarfs
all others in the number of individual animal lives it affects.

The vast majority of the public has an equivocal attitude to the
industrial use of animals: they make use of the products of that
industry, but are nevertheless a little sickened, a little queasy,
when they think of what happens on factory farms and abattoirs.
Therefore they arrange their lives in such a way that they need be
reminded of farms and abattoirs as little as possible, and they do
their best to ensure their children are kept in the dark too, because
children have tender hearts and are easily moved.

The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the
late 19th century, and since that time we have already had one
warning on the grandest scale that there is something deeply,
cosmically wrong with regarding and treating fellow beings as mere
units of any kind.

This warning came so loud and clear that one would have thought it
impossible to ignore. It came when, in the 20th century, a group of
powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting
the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected
in Chicago, to the slaughter - or what they preferred to call the
processing - of human beings.

Of course we cried out in horror when we found out what they had been
up to. What a terrible crime to treat human beings like cattle - if
we had only known beforehand. But our cry should more accurately have
been: what a terrible crime to treat human beings like units in an
industrial process. And that cry should have had a postscript: what a
terrible crime - come to think of it, a crime against nature - to
treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process.

It would be a mistake to idealise traditional animal husbandry as the
standard by which the animal products industry falls short.
Traditional animal husbandry is brutal enough, just on a smaller
scale. A better standard by which to judge both practices would be
the simple standard of humanity: is this truly the best that humans
are capable of?

The efforts of the animal rights movement - the broad movement that
situates itself on the spectrum somewhere between the meliorism of
the animal welfare bodies and the radicalism of animal liberation -
are rightly directed at decent people who both know and don't know
that there is something going on that stinks to high heaven.

These are people who will say: "Yes, it's terrible what lives brood
sows live; it's terrible what lives veal calves live," but who will
add, with a helpless shrug of the shoulders - "what can I do about it?"

The task of the movement is to offer such people imaginative but
practical options for what to do next after they have been revolted
by a glimpse of the lives factory animals live and the deaths they
die. People need to see that there are alternatives to supporting the
animal products industry.

These alternatives need not involve any sacrifice in health or
nutrition, and there is no reason why these alternatives need be
costly. Furthermore, what are commonly called sacrifices are not
sacrifices at all. The only sacrifices in the whole picture, in fact,
are being made by non-human animals.

In this respect, children provide the brightest hope. Children have
tender hearts - that is to say children have hearts that have not yet
been hardened by years of cruel and unnatural battering. Given half a
chance, children see through the lies with which advertisers bombard
them (the happy chicks that are transformed painlessly into succulent
nuggets, the smiling moo-cow that donates to us the bounty of her
milk). It takes but one glance into a slaughterhouse to turn a child
into a lifelong vegetarian.

Factory farming is a new phenomenon - very new indeed in the history
of animal husbandry. The good news is that after a couple of decades
of what the businessmen behind it must have regarded as free and
unlimited expansion, the industry has been forced onto the defensive.

The activities of animals-rights organisations have shifted the onus
onto the industry to justify its practices, and because they are
indefensible and unjustifiable except on the most narrow economic
grounds ("Do you want to pay $1.50 more for a dozen eggs?"), the
industry is battening down hatches and hoping the storm will blow
itself out. Insofar as there was a public relations war, the industry
has already lost that war.

A final note. The campaign of human beings for animal rights is
curious in one respect: the creatures on whose behalf human beings
are acting are unaware of what their benefactors are up to and, if
they succeed, are unlikely to thank them. There is even a sense in
which animals do not know what is wrong - they do certainly not know
what is wrong in the same way that humans do.

Thus, however close the well-meaning benefactor may feel to animals,
the animal rights campaign remains a human project from beginning to
end.
-----------
J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. This is an
edited version of a speech to be given this evening to open the
exhibition Voiceless: I feel therefore I am. It will be at the
Sherman Galleries until March 10.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/discussion_globaljusticemovement.net/attachments/20070223/b922587d/attachment-0001.html 