On Nonhuman Slavery

An Autistic Activist Responds To Temple Grandin

2012-05-16T15:38:42Z

The following essay was written by autistic author, activist and co-founder of Autism Network International, Jim Sinclair. Sinclair noted that he wrote this in “response to Temple Grandin’s writing about her work in the slaughter industry, especially as described in Thinking In Pictures.”

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If you love something, you don’t kill it[sic]. I didn’t need to spend time in a squeeze box to learn that. Love is not killing.

If you know what another being feels–not just how you feel when you touch it–then you know that living things want to remain alive. It doesn’t matter if they’re not afraid of death before they know what’s going to happen to them. In the moment when the killing happens, they know, and they want to stay alive. I have seen this, and I have felt death happen. I haven’t seen as much of death as someone who is obsessively drawn to slaughter factories, but I’ve seen enough to know. Life does not consent to be killed. I don’t need a Ph.D. in animal science to recognize that.

Dying as a natural process is not the same as killing a healthy living creature. I have witnessed sudden death from injury, and gradual death from aging or disease. They’re not the same. (I have not witnessed deliberately inflicted death, because I will not stand by and allow killing to happen in my presence.) It’s irrelevant if a middle-aged scientist can say that she doesn’t fear death, that she understands it as a natural part of life. Almost all the beings whose lives she helps end are immature or just barely mature. Almost none of them are close to natural death. They’re not ready to die. If someone were to shoot or stab or electrocute the middle-aged scientist today, she might find that she’s not ready to die either.

If you understand life, you know that it wants to continue. If you feel life throbbing under your touch, you know it’s desecration to set your hand to stop that living pulse. If you love something, you don’t kill it [sic].

There’s a special technique involved in tying a hangman’s noose so the victim is killed instantly by a broken neck, rather than slowly by strangulation. I suppose it’s part of a hangman’s professional expertise to learn to tie this knot properly. That expertise doesn’t make the hangman a caring or compassionate person.

The hangman’s knot, the guillotine, the electric chair, the gas chamber, and the lethal injection were all designed to make deliberately inflicted death less painful to the victim. But I’ve never heard the inventors or the users of these technologies hailed as great humanitarians. I’ve never heard them praised for their great empathy toward the lives they’ve ended.

Certainly it takes some ingenuity to invent new equipment. I’m a pretty smart person, but my expertise with knots is limited to being able to tie my shoes, to make a slip knot and a square knot. I tie these knots the way others taught me to tie them; I’ve never invented a new kind of knot by myself. If I were to try to design a knot that could quickly and painlessly kill someone, I’d never be able to figure it out. Whoever invented that knot had a type of mechanical creativity and skill that I don’t have.

But if I did have it, I’d use it for other purposes. I wouldn’t need to invent a way to kill with a knot, because I would never be willing to participate in any way in killing a bound and defenseless person. Skill and ingenuity are not the same as empathy and caring.

And love is not the same thing as killing. If you love something, you don’t kill it. [sic] It’s as simple as that. - Written by Jim Sinclair

Photo: A cow caught in the center track restrainer of a Temple Grandin livestock handling system.

I’m Vegan: Sandy

2012-05-09T02:06:51Z

“I have been vegetarian on and off since I was 15. I always thought ‘oh well you know, I’m not eating meat and that should be enough’…When I first became vegan, I thought, ‘oh wow, I’m going to be label-reading my way through life.’ But the transition has been surprisingly smooth.”

Why It’s Unethical To Eat Meat By Ashley Capps

2012-05-07T21:38:20Z

The following essay by Ashley Capps was chosen as a runner up in the Our Hen House “Why It’s Unethical to Eat Meat” contest.

In any discussion concerning the ethics of eating animals, it feels important to begin by pointing out a frequently overlooked distinction: that harming and killing animals from necessity is not morally equivalent to harming and killing animals for pleasure. Just as shooting someone in self-defense is not commensurate with shooting someone to satisfy a sadistic urge — killing animals for food when we have no other choice for survival, is not morally equivalent to killing animals when we have plentiful alternatives. Violence committed in order to save a life is never analogous to violence committed for pleasure or profit.

This distinction is crucial for several reasons, the first of which is that it clarifies a serious category error, in the thinking of people who insist that meat-eating is “natural”— and therefore morally neutral — because other animals eat animals. It’s important to realize that, with a few exceptions, when humans kill other animals for food, we’re not doing what animals do in nature. When animals kill other animals for food, they do as they must, in order to survive; they have no choice in the matter. Many humans, on the other hand, do have a choice, and when people with access to non-animal food options choose to consume animals anyway, because they can, or because they like the taste, they are not killing from necessity, as animals (and some humans) do. Whether we’re talking about a lion taking down a water buffalo, or a human in some remote or impoverished location forced to hunt in order to feed her family: these are acts of necessity, and do not equate to, nor justify, wholly unnecessary harm to animals. There is no analogy to be found in nature for the massive harm we do to animals for pleasure.

Another reason it’s important to recognize the necessity/pleasure distinction is that harming animals for pleasure goes against core values most of us hold in common — which is why, for example, millions of us were outraged over Michael Vick’s involvement in dog fighting, and why we oppose dog fighting on principle. The notion of deriving pleasure from violence toward animals is repulsive to us; so how can we justify harming animals for the taste of their flesh? How can it be wrong to harm for pleasure in one instance, and not the other? The same reasons that compel us to oppose dog fighting compel us to abstain from killing animals we don’t need to eat: namely, that it is wrong to harm animals for pleasure, and it is wrong to kill animals for pleasure.

Finally, to harm animals for pleasure is also, ultimately, to harm ourselves. Constantly acting in opposition to our own core values deforms our hearts — and it diminishes our integrity, and hinders our emotional and moral growth. Day after day, and year after year, our lives can be seen as the culmination of thousands of instances in which, equally assured of nourishment and pleasure, we had the opportunity to choose kindness and mercy, or to choose violence and selfishness. What can it mean for caring people to regularly reject compassionate choices that cost them next to nothing, and to instead embrace unnecessary violence that costs its victims, literally, everything? To do so is to destroy kindness in our hearts. It’s a simple equation. Every time we put food in our mouths, we reinforce a value. When we choose, over and over, to activate apathy and selfishness in ourselves, we become different people than the people we would have become had we chosen instead to cultivate compassion and mercy. - By Ashley Capps

Photo Source: CCTV for ALL Slaughterhouses

When I Despair

2012-04-29T11:53:05Z

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall.” - Mahatma Gandhi

Rodeo Investigation Photo by SHARK

Humanity Shudders

2012-04-29T11:53:22Z

“Look, for example, at the animal before us, stolen (to begin with) from his master; the poor creature hungry, tied up for days and nights, pining for his home, is at length brought into the theatre. As his crouching and feeble form is strapped upon the table, HE LICKS THE VERY HAND THAT TIES HIM! He struggles, but in vain, and uselessly expresses his fear and suffering until a muzzle is buckled on his jaws to stifle every sound. The scalpel penetrates his quivering flesh. One effort only is now natural until his powers are exhausted—a vain, instinctive resistance to the cruel form that stands over him, the impersonation of Magendie and his class. ‘I recall to mind,’ says Dr. Latour, ‘a poor dog, the roots of whose vertebral nerves Magendie desired to lay bare to demonstrate Bell’s theory, which he claimed for his own. The dog, already mutilated and bleeding, twice escaped from under the implacable knife, and threw his front paws around Magendie’s neck, licking, as if to soften his murderer, and ask for mercy! Vivisectors may laugh, but I confess I was unable to endure that heartrending spectacle.’ But the whole thing is too horrible to dwell upon. Heaven forbid that any description of students in this country should be witness to such deeds as these! We repudiate the whole of this class of procedure. Science will refuse to recognize it as its offspring, and humanity shudders as it gazes on its face.” - From An Ethical Problem – Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals by Albert Leffingwell

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Photo of a beagle used in contemporary vivisection experiments at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Zagreb by Patrik Macek.

Tho’ Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw by Patrick J. Battuello

2012-04-13T12:17:11Z

This essay, written by Patrick J. Battuello, comes from the Albany Animal Rights blog

Overly sentimental, too emotional, naive, given to anthropomorphism, misanthropic, ignorant. This, says the critic, is the animal advocate. The women are simply being women. And the men, well, are simply being women. In a word, we are weak, unwilling to confront nature’s harshness and blind to violent predation. There is a Darwinian imperative governing survival and a natural order, a food chain if you will, to life. And man, as the most intelligent and only rational species, peers down from the top.

But, in truth, we advocates are not unworldly and are very much aware of Charles Darwin. We do not need to be reminded that suffering (injustice, death) is part of the condition, human and animal alike. And rather than offering up our advanced intelligence as justification for subjugating other species, we embrace this distinction (which, in fact, grows less profound with each new ethological study) as a (the) reason why human beings should be held to a higher standard. In other words, unlike true predators, we have a choice.

The vast majority of suffering that we cause is unnecessary: Vegetarians/vegans have flourished long enough to bear this out; we simply do not need their protein. And animal experimentation is unreliable, very often redundant, and increasingly easy to replace. Besides, until we are willing to cut up and psychologically torture nonconsenting human beings, we cannot rationally defend doing the same to the pig and primate subjects who are as intelligent and aware as some of us. It is speciesism defined.

While nature can be cruel, it isn’t always. And animals are not just perpetual foragers consumed with not dying. Like us, they have emotional experiences separate and distinct from a physical will to survive. They love and grieve and hurt and need. They seek comfort and find pleasure. And they care and bond, even across species. They also become friends. That is not anthropomorphism. Although the typical human life may involve greater depth or richness, is this reason alone to enslave others for our ends? Does not the rest of sentient creation share a common ground with us? At the very least, this should give us pause.

British psychologist Richard Ryder writes, “Pain [suffering] is the one and only true evil,” and “pain is pain regardless of its host.” When contemplating animal exploitation, Ryder concludes: “If we are going to care about the suffering of other humans then logically we should care about the suffering of non-humans too.” And, I would add, words and deeds should be aligned.

If Ryder is right, we are compelled, unless we wish to suffocate the better angels of our nature, to minimize suffering, not contribute with impunity. The obligate carnivore, killing (causing suffering) because he must, is excused. We who have options are not. Nature has bestowed upon us the capacity for moral reasoning and, as importantly, the tools to pursue a compassionate course. In the end, is there a more noble purpose than alleviating another being’s pain? Of course, nature will continue to be very often bloody, mean, and unfair. But our nature allows for mercy, and we can show this several times daily. - by Patrick J. Battuello

Why Should I Care? by Tricia Orr

2012-04-16T03:25:05Z

On Facebook, my status is always ecstatic
or at least in keeping with the status quo.
Those who don’t do the same,
I hide from, like this one I hid from
a long time ago.

She’s whacked you see, but now and then
I take a peek. Man. her posts are weak.
all about the animals I eat.
How they “suffer” to become meat.

I mean, do cows really care
when their babies are taken from them?
Ok. so they moo. (I bet just for food).
And so the farmer puts the calves
in narrow crates to live out their days.
I wasn’t happy as a kid, I felt trapped, too.
So why should I care?

And why should I care about bullfights
that aren’t really fights since the bull can only wait
for the swords to be plunged into his back?
I’ve been stabbed in the back with no escape in sight too.

And why should I care about chickens
crammed in cages the size of filing cabinet drawers,
so the weakest ones end up trampled to death,
their bodies mashed against the wire floor?

I’ve been picked on shoved up against walls.
I know what it is to be the weakest,
waiting for someone, anyone to speak up
so why should……

I care.

- By Tricia Orr

Photo credit

The Caged Slavery of Egg Production by Will Tuttle, Ph.D.

2012-05-02T17:29:40Z

The following is an excerpt from The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle, Ph.D.

Like all the animals whose bodies are used to produce food for our dining tables, chickens are seen as mere commodities. Individual chickens in egg-laying operations are so cheap to replace that they are virtually worthless and are treated as such. They spend their lives in battery cages, small wire prisons fourteen to sixteen inches high and eighteen to twenty inches across, each containing four to eight hens packed in so tightly that they can never spread their wings. The wires of the cages chafe most of their feathers away, leaving them naked, wounded, and unprotected. They may get their heads, wings, or legs stuck between the wires and thus starve to death, their rotting corpses endured by the other hens in their cage. Their feet are painfully cut by the wires, which can become embedded in their flesh as their feet grow around them. The battery cages are stacked four or five rows high, with the feces and urine from those above falling on the heads and bodies of the birds beneath them, finally landing in a stinking waste pit into which some chickens who manage somehow to escape their prisons fall and slowly die.

As with the dairy industry, the egg industry is founded upon the total domination of the feminine, and upon the manipulation of female bodies to maximize profits with no regard to the outrageous cruelty involved. And because chickens are smaller and held in even lower esteem than cows, they are brutalized even more blatantly in the quest for cheap eggs. Female chicks are routinely debeaked, an exceedingly traumatic operation in which about half of the beak is chopped off. The hot blade cuts through the most sensitive nerve tissue in their beaks, causing such acute pain that the birds’ heart rate increases by over one hundred beats per minute. Many die on the spot. For those who survive, the chronic pain from this procedure may last their whole lives and interfere with eating. Male chicks are unneeded, so workers mass-annihilate them, either by live suffocation and crushing in large plastic trash bags or by dumping them living into machines with rotating blades like wood chippers that turn them into instant chicken feed or fertilizer. Hens who no longer produce enough eggs have also been disposed of by being thrown living into the spinning blades of wood chipping machines.

…The tens of thousands of chickens crammed into one egg production shed have nowhere to move and no way to nest, establish social order, or in any way express their natural intelligence or purpose. The artificial lighting schedule that keeps them in almost continuous darkness, and the feed and drugs are all designed with only one goal: to cut costs and maximize the number of eggs that drop from the hens’ uteruses and roll down the slanted wire cage bottoms to be whisked away on the conveyor belt.

…All family and social and natural life is destroyed. These hens know neither mothers nor children, neither mates nor earth nor sun. They are born in hatcheries, debeaked and then sentenced to the caged slavery of egg production.

When a population of thousands of hens in an egg operation is at the end of its laying cycle, the hens will either be gassed and killed, since their tortured bodies have so little flesh they aren’t worth the trouble of shipping to slaughter, or they may be slaughtered for the low-grade meat used in chicken soup and pet food. Often, though, the hens are force-molted first, to shock their bodies into another cycle of egg laying. This is done by withholding food and water and administering a combination of drugs, including hormones. The forced starvation may last up to two weeks, typically killing many birds in the process. After they have been force-molted once or twice, soon to be slaughtered for chicken soup, the birds are roughly yanked from their cages, tossed into trucks, and taken away to make room for the next wave of hen slaves. We can perhaps be born into no worse hell in this universe than being a female chicken on an industrial egg farm in the United States.

In so-called free-range egg operations, the hens are all typically debeaked, as in standard egg factories, and males are all brutally killed at birth. The chickens are still treated as objects, pushed to produce, and killed cruelly when they are no longer profitable. The term free-range has surprisingly little legal meaning, and there are thus no rules governing the amount of space a free-range must have, so though their confinement may be less extreme than the usual battery cages, they are nevertheless typically crammed together in enormous, stinking sheds where they never see the light of day. - Excerpted from The World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle, Ph.D.

The Vegan Evolution: A New Era for Humanity by Angel Flinn

2012-04-12T20:14:22Z

The following article written By Angel Flinn comes from the care2 website.

“It often happens that the universal belief of one age, a belief from which no one was free, or could be free, without an extraordinary effort of genius or courage, becomes to a subsequent age, so palpable an absurdity that the only difficulty is to imagine how such an idea could ever have been deemed credible.”
—John Stuart Mill

The vegan ideal embodies the highest of ethical aspirations – non-violence, justice and compassion toward the innocent. Yet this deep and powerful value system continues to be marginalized by society. The example set by those who embrace these principles is too often vehemently opposed, trivialized or simply ignored.

But the effects of this paradigm shift in perception are far-reaching, and the rewards beyond measure.

And yet, it somehow appears that the light of veganism is so bright that people are afraid to open their eyes to it, even individuals whose eyes are open to the truth behind other social causes. What is it that makes us cling so stubbornly to a practice that is clearly unnecessary, devastatingly cruel, and, if left unchecked, will almost certainly end up destroying us?

More and more people are recognizing the prejudice and injustice inherent in enslaving and slaughtering animals in order to feed our appetite for flesh, eggs and milk. It is no secret that animal concentration camps create breeding grounds for all sorts of infectious diseases. It’s also becoming known that animal products are detrimental to human health, and that animal agriculture, including free-range and organic, is implicated in some of the worst crimes against the planet. Even the truth about the animal industry’s role in world hunger and food shortages is starting to come into the open.

With all of the advancements in human “civilization,” our addiction to killing keeps us in the dark ages. It inhibits us from cultivating our capacity for kindness, empathy, and justice; the very qualities we need to develop if we are to move forward into a safe and prosperous future, in which we do not fear one another.

In a world that makes little of preying upon the innocent, showing callous disregard for the pain and suffering of animals is not just accepted, but is frequently promoted in different forms by our society. Why would this be, when so many of us feel such a strong bond and love for animals?

Animals remind us of our own connection with (and separation from) the natural world, a world we once shared with them. Out of our intense desire to leave behind a way of life where we fought for our daily survival, we managed to climb out of the world of nature, leaving behind the terror of the predatory paradigm. Rather than using our position of advantage to help our fellow animals, we have used it to further oppress them, and to push them into lives of even more fear, more pain, and more suffering, this time at the hands of those who claim to have evolved beyond their animal instincts to become creatures of moral conscience. It is for this reason that we feel guilty when we look at animals; something inside us knows that we have betrayed them, and yet we continue to betray them, on a massive scale.

Animals value their lives, and strive to be free from pain. Since the same qualities exist in us, empathizing with them comes naturally. When we suppress that empathy, it makes it impossible for us to look more deeply into the true nature of animals, and the rest of the natural world that they rely on for survival.

Indifference toward the suffering of other creatures is an accepted societal norm. This calls out for us to remember what basic human values are: justice, empathy, compassion and respect; for the natural world, for the other animals, and for our fellow humans. By re-evaluating and renewing our commitment to these fundamental values, and by calling attention to the need for an ethical evolution, we can create new standards of behavior, motivated by our desire to be better people. Only in this way will we become deserving of the position of stewardship that our physical evolution has granted us, but which we have rejected in favor of self-serving domination.

All over the world, animals are imprisoned, enslaved, tortured and violently killed. People around the world, who are otherwise kind, gentle and caring, continue to ignore this unspeakable suffering. And yet we wonder why the human race is plagued by violence on a world-wide scale. We go about our business, acting as though this state of violence does not indicate something terribly disturbing about our psychological state, individually and as a whole. Our lack of concern for innocent beings has caused us to de-sensitize ourselves to suffering, which in turn enables us to inflict pain on each other.

In the words of Russian novelist Count Leo Tolstoy: “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”

The vegan ideal is at the core of the shift from predation to protection and from prejudice to justice; an essential step into a way of living that is more suited to the nature of people who care about the suffering of others, and who can empathize with another’s situation. The vegan solution contains within it the power to solve even the most overwhelming problems we are facing, on every level from personal to planetary.

If we are to have a future, the people who live in that future will not be addicted to products that are a result of exploitation, suffering and environmental devastation. They will not source their food from animal farms or slaughterhouses, but from fertile gardens, vibrant orchards and veganic farms. People will be kind, compassionate, gentle and just.

This quantum leap in perception may seem unlikely from the position we are in today, but it is within this very change that our hope for the future lies. - By Angel Flinn, re-posted from the care2 website.

Photo credit

The Human Slaughterhouse Animal by Melanie Joy, Ph.D.

2012-04-04T20:36:53Z

The following is an excerpt from Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism by Melanie Joy, Ph.D.

“Meat has long stood for the freedom to exploit freely.”
- Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol

Many workers in meatpacking plants are undocumented immigrants from Latin America and Asia who receive little, if any, training. [Eric] Schlosser interviewed a bleeder (slaughterhouse worker) who told him, “Nobody helped train me – no training how to use the knife…So you see how the people on either side of you do the work, and then you do it.” Besides having to perform jobs for which they are wholly unprepared, these employees find themselves in working conditions that are exploitative, hazardous, unsanitary, and violent. They spend hour upon hour in a death-saturated, high-stress environment, and they suffer for it – imagine killing twenty-three chickens per minute, totaling twenty-five thousand a day.

In an interview with Mother Jones magazine, Schlosser comments on the relentless pace of the production line:

The golden rule in meatpacking plants is “The Chain Will Not Stop.”…Nothing stands in the way of production, not mechanical failures, breakdowns, accidents. Forklifts crash, saws overheat, workers drop knives, workers get cut, workers collapse and lie unconscious on the floor, as dripping carcasses sway past them, and the chain keeps going…a…worker told me, “I’ve seen bleeders, and they’re gushing because they got hit right in the vein, and I mean they’re almost passing out, and here comes the supply guy again, with the bleach, to clean the blood off the floor, but the chain never stops, It never stops.”

Not surprisingly, meatpacking is the single most dangerous factory job in the United States, and it is also the most violent. For instance, workers must wear hockey masks to prevent their teeth from getting kicked out by conscious animals being dragged along a conveyor belt. And consider the titles of accident reports issued by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which provide snapshots of the perilous conditions: Employee Hospitalized for Neck Laceration from Flying Blade. Employee’s Eye Injured When Struck by Hanging Hook. Employee’s Arm Amputated When Caught in Meat Tenderizer. Employee Decapitated by Chain of Hide Puller Machine. Employee Killed When Head Crushed in Hide Fleshing Machine. Caught and Killed by Gut-Cooker Machine. In fact, in 2005, for the first time ever, Human Rights Watch issued a report criticizing a single U.S. industry – the meat industry – for working conditions so appalling they violate basic human rights.

- Excerpted from Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism by Melanie Joy, Ph.D.