What About the Animals

My plan to blog about social justice issues hasn't really left the United States.  Although I plan to continue to research and write about social injustices around the world, I'm going to do at least one more post on the US.  

This post isn't about people; it's about animals, livestock animals, in the US.  Although there are strict rules to protect pets from abuse, there are different rules for livestock.  The animals that are raised to become a hamburger, chicken salad, or a sausage biscuit are probably the most tortured creatures on the planet.  Why?  Because they are raised on enormous factory farms.  Contrary to the idyllic farm scenes placed on the packaging for dairy and meat products, animals whose products end up in grocery stores were not raised on family farms.

Rather than go into the details of the cruelty involved in factory farming of animals (and the associated health risks to both animals and people), I'll just share these short clips:



Although I'm a vegetarian, my husband isn't - but he refuses to eat any meat that he didn't raise or hunt himself.  When people tell him, "Oh, I could never eat an animal I knew," they don't realize what they are really saying.  What it sounds like to us is, "I would rather eat an animal that has been abused for its entire life (and pretend it's not happening) than one that has been raised under healthy and humane conditions."  I don't see how one can purport to be an animal lover yet choose to support the meat and poultry industries by buying their products.  Choosing to not know about the horrors of the meat and poultry industries doesn't make it go away.  Choosing to eat factory meat is choosing to be complicit in the torture and abuse of those animals.