Down with Meat

Sunday I was watching my beloved CBS Sunday Morning and they were discussing summer movies, one of which is a modern day Noah's ark complete with animals. Being a tree hugger and animal hugger it bothers me when God's majestic creatures are in film. Elephants should be in Africa or Asia, not schilling for Hollywood. So in my attempt to look into the matter I went to the horse's mouth (no pun intended). I made the very bad mistake of going to the PETA website. I know they get a bad rap sometimes, but I really give them props for trying to defend the defenseless. I very much support their anti-fur message (though not neccesarily how they go about it) and am very much against most testing of anything on animals.

I visit their website from time to time, mostly when I'm disheartened at the world and want to be reassured that yes, there are others out there who do care about these beautiful, defenseless creatures. This time I ventured on to their videos of just about all animals us Westerners eat as food. I watched video after video of things I can't even begin to describe. It showed conditions in the barns (for lack of a better word) where they're raised, being transported, and finally the slaughterhouse (see posts below). Much of it was outright torture in the form of physical abuse, but much of it results from genetic manipulation to produce fast-growing animals.

I watched every video they had. I sat there for a half hour with this horrible tortured look on my face. I hearkened back to a few weeks ago when Ira Glass was on Letterman. He talked about learning of chickens' individual personalities and how they really are unique beings, not just mindless, souless creatures. After that he became vegetarian. Well, folks, I'm definitely headed down that path. What I saw was so horrific I may be turned off meat. I am not doing this out of a "it's wrong to eat meat" mentality. I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with it. However, in this day and age in order to increase profits, companies are doing awful inhumane things to these defenseless animals. They live miserable, crowded lives only to die a horrific death.

I was once vegetarian for a few months back in college. It actually wasn't that hard. And I've gone through spells where I've tried to eat less meat for the environment's sake. To put it briefly, it's much more efficient to eat plants ourselves rather than have a cow eat however much they eat in their lifetime only to produce a few burgers and steaks. Much of our crop production goes right back into feeding animals. When I'd try to explain this to people they usually thought I was insane. I haven't given up meat altogether, but I'm sure I'll be eating much less of it. This fall we're getting a Whole Foods just a couple of minutes from here so I imagine I'll be frequenting them to buy a bit of humanely-raised turkey.