Beyond Cages and Art

I Wish You Torture Free Holidays

2009-02-25T09:36:00.002-05:00

Susan Saladino, The Madonna and Veal Calf, Oil on Canvas

Modern technology has moved us into an age where we have successful and superior alternatives to products and procedures that involve cruelty. Despite these alternatives, laboratories still subject the most sensitive and intelligent animals to brutal atrocities..... Despite the availability of natural plant hormones proven to be safer and equally as effective, some women still choose traditional animal estrogen; even with the understanding that by doing so thousands of adult and infant horses will be tortured and killed.....Synthetic fabrics are readily available as a compassionate alternative, but people still choose to strip the skin off living animals.....Even the circus, a place for innocent entertainment, has a bizarre backdrop of exploitation and cruelty.....For their entire lives, farm animals are contained in severely confined cages or metal crates unable to even turn around, never seeing the sun or breathing fresh air; only the toxic stench of their own excrement. Industrialized farming of today is an exploitation of the innocent. The heartbreaking reality of factory farming is the antithesis of what is projected in countless children's storybooks and toys where we see happy faced farm animals frolicking in sun filled green pastures, well cared for and loved by farmer Brown. Anthropomorphizing animals illustrates to children the similarities between animals and humans with an underlying message encouraging love. The other message given to children is that it is acceptable to exploit and kill those very same creatures. Link

Give Animals a Voice

The great visionaries of the last century all realized that the doctrine of "might makes right" is never acceptable. Animals don't have a voice: This holiday season, give them yours. Link

Smithfield Foods Accident

2009-02-25T09:34:00.000-05:00

"As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right."

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Smithfield Truck Accident Leaves 25 Dead

Processing Pain at Smithfield Foods
By Aaron Sarver

Located in Tar Heel, N.C., the Smithfield Packing pork processing plant is the largest in the country. It employs 6,000 workers who work to slaughter 33 hogs a minute, 24 hours a day. In 2000, Human Rights Watch issued a report that chronicles how Smithfield Packing, Inc. abused workers during union elections held in 1994 and 1997. The report detailed other practices at the plant: Read more...

... AND CLICK ON THIS. I DON'T THINK THAT ANYONE CAN GET MORE OBSCENE THAN THIS, OR PLEASE GO HERE.

Also, please notice how the rights violations and murder of the animal persons, "33 hogs a minute, 24 hours a day," at the Tar Heel, N.C. Smithfield Packing "pork processing" plant are never considered, not even mentioned in the above quoted blog post or on the UFCW website.

Matthew Scully - Former Speechwriter for President George W. Bush - Visiting a Pig Factory Farm

2009-02-25T09:32:00.004-05:00

When Pigs Cry

Matthew Scully is on a tour inside a standard Smithfield pig factory farm owned by Carroll's Foods in a place called Warsaw two hours southeast of Raleigh. He is being led by a woman by the name Gay, an agricultural scientist:

Gay embodies in her ample frame all of humanity's contradictions about animals, capable of touching solicitude one moment and staggering disregard the next. "This'll be your first time farrowing, won't it, baby?" she says to a sow I pose to inspect, identified on a tag above the cage as NPD 88-308.". "Baby" is lying there covered in feces and dried blood, yanking maniacally on chains that have torn her mouth raw as foraging animals will do when caged and denied straw or other roughage to chew. She's hurting herself with the chains, I remark. "Oh, that's normal."

317.1

The answer can be seen in the swollen legs of the sow standing or trying to stand. To lie on their side, a powerful inclination during month of confinement in twenty-two inch of space, they try to put their legs through the bars into a neighboring crate. Fragile from the pigs' abnormally large weight, and from rarely standing or walking, and then only on concrete, their legs get crushed and broken. About half of those pigs whose legs can be seen appear to have sprained or fractured limbs, never examined by a vet, never splinted never even noticed any more.

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We keep walking. Sores, tumors, ulcers pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other "vices", as they're called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical "vacuum" chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And "social defeat." lots of it, in every third or forth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you like poor NPD 50-421, creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the AI rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced. When they have conquered the "stress gene'", maybe the Ph. D.'s and guys in white coats can find us a cure for the despair gene, too.

Meet Your Meat

Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them. It confronts us with the animals equivalent of Abraham Lincoln condemnation of human slavery: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong."

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Take anything else I have described in this book - elephants ambushed at the waterhole, baby monkeys ripped from their mothers and eaten alive, dolphins trapped and clubbed to death - and the reality is that none of it is any worse then anything we tolerate in our corporate farms. Perhaps you share my opinion of people who do those other things. You may call them cruel. You may call them reprehensible. But they all have ready answer: "You eat meat, Don't you?"

Matthew Scully, 'Dominion, The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy', 266-268, 289

Morrissey: Meat is Murder

2009-02-25T09:30:00.000-05:00

Music video from Morrissey of The Smiths

Heifer whines could be human cries
Closer comes the screaming knife
This beautiful creature must die
This beautiful creature must die
A death for no reason
And death for no reason is murder

And the flesh you so fancifully fry
Is not succulent, tasty or kind
It's death for no reason
And death for no reason is murder

And the calf that you carve with a smile
Is murder
And the turkey you festively slice
Is murder

DO YOU KNOW HOW ANIMALS DIE ?

Kitchen aromas aren't very homely
It's not "comforting", cheery or kind
It's sizzling blood and the unholy stench
Of murder

It's not "natural", "normal" or kind
The flesh you so fancifully fry
The meat in your mouth
As you savour the flavour
Of murder

No, no, no, it's murder
No, no, no, it's murder

OH ... AND WHO HEARS WHEN ANIMALS CRY ?

Martin Luther King Had a Dream

2009-02-25T09:28:00.000-05:00

PETATV: Behind The Mask trailer

"Martin Luther King had a dream. He longed for a world where the races of Man could live together in a spirit of brotherhood. I too have a dream. I dream of a world where Man is at peace, not only with himself, but also with all the other creatures of Earth. I long for a day when Man rejects the exploitation of other species for food, clothing, health, entertainment or even companionship - for such a day will mean that cruelty no longer exists and it is cruelty which dominates my every conscious moment."

John Bryant, 'Fettered Kingdoms'

Leonardo Da Vinci: The Time Will Come

2009-02-25T09:25:00.000-05:00

TryVeg.Com

"I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animalas as they now look upon the murder of men."

Leonardo Da Vinci

It is apparent from the works of Leonardo and his early biographers that he was a man of high integrity and very sensitive to moral issues. His respect for life led him to being a vegetarian for at least part of his life. The term "vegan" would fit him well, as he even entertained the notion that taking milk from cows amounts to stealing. Under the heading, "Of the beasts from whom cheese is made," he answers, "the milk will be taken from the tiny children." Vasari reports a story that as a young man in Florence he often bought caged birds just to release them from captivity. He was also a respected judge on matters of beauty and elegance, particularly in the creation of pageants.

It is possible that Leonardo da Vinci embraced vegetarianism at a young age, and unverified claims have been made that he remained so for the entire duration of his life. Link

"God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages."

Jacques Deval, 'Afin de vivre bel et bien'

Non-Speciesist John Lennon

2009-02-25T09:22:00.000-05:00

Animal Rights Activists: There IS hope!

I am going to start this vlog by singing the non-speciesist version of the song "Imagine" by John Lennon:

Imagine there's no vivisection
It's easy if you try
No hell on factory farms
just animals and the sky
Imagine all the creatures
Living cruelty free...

Imagine there's no flesh trade
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or torture for
And no speciesism too
Imagine all the beings
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for animal slaves
A brotherhood with them
Imagine all the beings
Sharing all the world...

DID YOUR FOOD HAVE A FACE?

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

"Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace."

Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization

"Am I saying that a spider has as much right to life as an egret or a human? Yes. I see no logically consistent reason to say otherwise."

Joan Dunayer

All beings that feel pain deserve human rights

Equality of the species is the logical conclusion of post-Darwin morality

Richard Ryder
Saturday August 6, 2005
The Guardian

The word speciesism came to me while I was lying in a bath in Oxford some 35 years ago. It was like racism or sexism - a prejudice based upon morally irrelevant physical differences. Since Darwin we have known we are human animals related to all the other animals through evolution; how, then, can we justify our almost total oppression of all the other species? All animal species can suffer pain and distress. Animals scream and writhe like us; their nervous systems are similar and contain the same biochemicals that we know are associated with the experience of pain in ourselves. Read more...