tagged w/ Farmed Animals Sanctuaries
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Mercy For Animals presents Farm to Fridge. Narrated by Oscar-nominee James Cromwell, this powerful film takes viewers on an eye-opening exploration behind the closed doors of the nation's largest industrial farms, hatcheries, and slaughter plants -- revealing the often-unseen journey that animals make from Farm to FridgeMercy For Animals presents Farm to Fridge. Narrated by Oscar-nominee James Cromwell,... more
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| November 17, 2010
Just in time for Thanksgiving - For everyone who loves TURKEYS, here is a "recipe" for success when planning your Thanksgiving dinner.
Created by Ciddy Fonteboa and Gabriel Sabloff| November 17, 2010
Just in time for Thanksgiving - For everyone who loves TURKEYS,... more
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Petting Dogs, Eating Pigs | By Tim Gier
Posted on November 10, 2010 by timgier
Nicolette Hahn Niman published a piece at The Atlantic titled “Dogs Aren’t Dinner: The Flaws in an Argument for Veganism”. In it, she opines that the argument “we ought not to eat pigs because we don’t eat dogs” doesn’t hold water. What she’s arguing against are the ideas that we value our dogs (and other “pets”) more than farm animals and that we value them for themselves. That is, she argues against the idea that we don’t eat dogs (in most western societies anyway) because they have moral value to us.
What she contends is that, rather than placing any moral value on our “pets”, we don’t eat dogs because we use dogs in a different way that doesn’t involve eating them. We couldn’t use dogs as we do if we ate them too. In the same way, we can’t generally use pigs in the same ways we use dogs because we eat pigs. It isn’t a moral calculation that we make when we decide to not eat dogs, it is an instrumental one. Since our preferred use of dogs is as playmates, companions, helpers, etc., eating them would be at cross-purposes to those uses. Since our preferred use of pigs is as food, keeping pigs as “pets” would be generally at cross-purposes to that use.
So, there isn’t any “moral schizophrenia” at work here. For there to be moral schizophrenia at work, we would have to assign moral value to our dogs, such that the moral value would be the operative fact preventing our use of them as food. But, Niman says that isn’t the case. She notes that whether a society treats a particular nonhuman species as a “pet” or as food, it has nothing to do with the animals themselves, but only with local tastes and customs. It’s the same as one culture eating dandelion greens and another throwing them away as weeds.
Niman also notes the long shared history between human and canine animals, over tens of thousands of years, which has resulted in our unique relationship. She doesn’t explain why some cultures choose to eat dogs nevertheless, but in any case she doesn’t describe this relationship in moral terms. Dogs are part of our family, but not part of our moral universe.
Unfortunately, Niman is right.
One need only read about how families in the Gulf Region of the United States, in the midst of the BP Oil Spill crisis in the summer of 2010, abandoned their dogs and cats in reaction to economic hardship. Most people living in modern western societies wouldn’t abandon an actual family member in times of strife; it is deemed unconscionable. But “pets”? When times are tough, all bets are off when it comes to “pets”.
I know of a family who, when they realized that they could no longer care for the Capuchin monkey they had lived with for 19 years, abandoned their “pet” to the care of a sanctuary. Even though they had raised the primate from infancy and had treated him as family, when he later became ill they couldn’t be bothered to visit him. Later still, as he lay dying in the middle of the night, the only people to comfort him were the loving strangers who took him in. His real family just couldn’t be bothered.
There is no moral schizophrenia at work in out relationships with nonhuman animals. We treat them all as things, every last one, dog, pig, cat, monkey, fish, it matters not. It isn’t moral schizophrenia at all, it is moral bankruptcy.
So Niman is right, but in winning this point, she shows why she must lose the larger argument in the end. The real question that needs to be answered isn’t why we treat dogs differently than pigs, but what gives us the right to treat them both merely as things? Whether it the use of a dog as a convenient playmate for our children, who will be discarded when he becomes no longer convenient, or whether it is the use of pigs as food we buy in convenient plastic wrapped packages, all uses of other animals as things is wrong.
Nonhuman animals are here on this planet for one reason, and one reason only. Just as is the case with you and me, they are here to give their own lives meaning, and not to serve as the means for the satisfaction of others. Niman misses this basic point, and mistakenly thinks that because we can control the lives of others, because we can decide who to pet and who to slaughter, that it gives us the right to. She’s wrong, we have no such right.
Go vegan.Petting Dogs, Eating Pigs | By Tim Gier
Posted on November 10, 2010 by timgier... more
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Lovely video and tune to share amongst your friends, especially the younger ones...
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Adopting a vegetarian diet based around meat substitutes such as tofu can cause more damage to the environment, according to a new study
It has often been claimed that avoiding red meat is beneficial to the environment, because it lowers emissions and less land is used to produce alternatives.
But a study by Cranfield University, commissioned by WWF, the environmental group, found a substantial number of meat substitutes – such as soy, chickpeas and lentils – were more harmful to the environment because they were imported into Britain from overseas.
The study concluded: "A switch from beef and milk to highly refined livestock product analogues such as tofu could actually increase the quantity of arable land needed to supply the UK."
The results showed that the amount of foreign land required to produce the substitute products – and the potential destruction of forests to make way for farmland – outweighed the negatives of rearing beef and lamb in the UK.
An increase in vegetarianism could result in the collapse of British farming, the study warned, causing meat production to move overseas where there may be less legal protection of forests and uncultivated land.
Meat substitutes were also found to be highly processed, often requiring large amounts of energy to produce. The study recognised that the environmental merits of vegetarianism depended largely on which types of foods were consumed as an alternative to meat.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7219223/Becoming-vegetarian-can-harm-the-environment.htmlAdopting a vegetarian diet based around meat substitutes such as tofu can cause more... more
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Starting in June 2010 the USDA will set in place mandates that give livestock more grazing time and require that 30% of their diet come from grazing.
Obama has been cracking down on livestock producers claiming to be organic.
The Obama Administration recently suspended Promiseland Livestock, the nation's largest organic livestock producers with over 22,000 head of cattle, for not allowing the USDA to inspect financial and organic records.
More at Link...Starting in June 2010 the USDA will set in place mandates that give livestock more... more
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aid616
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added this
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2 years ago
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What would you do if you found chickens near your home? This is what we did.
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