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| Herbie |
“Each and every one of these animals is
an individual who suffers pain, who has a family, who has a story.” Since my last post,
I’ve continued to think about that
quote from Mercy for Animals, Nathan Runkle’s
book. How many people ever consider whether
animals of any sort, including those heading for slaughter, have their own families,
their own stories?
they have lived, however long, and with luck, experienced pleasure. We have to hope their lives included pleasure
because so many of them end their days in a industrial farm setting like the factory
farm for egg-laying chickens that Runkle describes here.
crammed with egg-laying chickens. Overhead, hens are crowded inside cages, each
the size of a file-cabinet drawer, . . .
confining 7 to 10 adult birds. [They]
are unable to fully spread their wings, let alone walk, perch, roost, dust
bathe or experience the most basic freedom of movement. The wire cage floors are slanted, meaning the
birds can never stand upright . . . the eggs they lay will immediately roll
away from them. . . [to be] carefully cleaned to remove blood and feces and
then placed in happily decorated cartons proudly declaring “Farm Fresh Eggs.” .
. . The endless row of cages are stacked like stairs, allowing the birds’ feces
to fall into the manure pit in which we now stand.” –pp. xii, xiii, Mercy for Animals: One Man’s Quest to Inspire Compassion and Improve
the Lives of Farm Animals.
what? Return to beef-eating? Not so fast: Citing our “collective love affair with beef,
dating back more than 10,000 years,” Richard Conniff reluctantly admits it’s “time to break it off.”
startling, making it much easier to understand French scientists’ proposal to
put a carbon tax on beef to help meet European Union climate change targets. That won’t happen, but here are some of the
reasons for it:
emissions to livestock – “more than the emissions from powering all the world’s
road vehicles, trains, ships and airplanes combined.”
livestock
consume the yield from a quarter of all cropland worldwide.
grazing added, the business of making meat occupies about three-quarters of the
agricultural land on the planet.
ruminant
digestion causes cattle to belch and otherwise emit huge quantities of methane.
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| Beef cattle shed |
It begins to seem as if all food roads lead to . . . “clean meat ” – real meat grown from
animal cells, with no need to raise
and slaughter entire creatures. Biotechnology
could be used to make this happen, producing “the meat so many humans crave
without taking such an enormous toll on the planet, since growing meat is much
more efficient than raising animals to later turn into that same meat.”
That concept is introduced in the foreword to Paul Shapiro’s Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals
Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World. “Judged by the amount of suffering it causes,
industrial farming of animals is arguably one of the worst crimes in history,”
the writer says.