Those crazy cat scientists have only gone and proven the bleedin’ obvious again! Other animals besides us magic-thumbed humans feel empathy. Researchers have proved that when a mother hen sees her chick ruffled by air, her heart rates increases, preening lessens, and clucking goes up. It raises the question of what would happen if she watched her chick being minced alive, or even what the chick itself surrounded by 1000’s of other distressed chicks (at the whole being minced alive thing) might feel.
If anyone was thinking that this is the same video as has been previously featured on this site, that is correct. It is very good at highlighting a point. Here is gassing video from the UK to demonstrate that this mass killing is not some sort of isolated event, but standard practice of the chicken industry.
Voluntarily sold human milk makes the news whilst milk stolen from the mouths of calves is an everyday practice that no one questions. Is it a PR stunt? Who knows, but the newsworthy nature does highlight the weird position that dairy holds in the human world. For details of why vegans don’t consume milk or other dairy produce please see MilkMyths.
Boring vegan friend speaking: Don’t eat red meat it’ll give you bowel cancer. Friend at work: Yeah right, you’re just being a hippy again, Tofu, bleurghh. Boring vegan friend: But even the government advises people to eat less red meat because it gives you bowel cancer…and that is whilst they have to balance economics and Tory voting farmers against health advice. Friend at work: Maybe I should shut up and listen for once. I didn’t realise how easy it would be to help prevent myself from getting a common cause of cancer. Boring vegan friend: Exactly. Now lets play air hockey.
People should cut back on red and processed meat to reduce their risk of getting cancer, the government says. Bowel Cancer is the third most common cancer in the UK - about 36,000 people are diagnosed every year, and 16,500 die.
Cloned Animal Meat is back on the news agenda again (see this Daily Mail article as an example). Seemingly little by little, it is mentioned more and more often so that it becomes background noise and something that may be seen as inevitable.
Allowed in North and South America, and Asia, but essentially prohibited in Europe, cloned meat production keeps making the news.
Studies tend to be heralded discussing the impact to human health with no discussion given over to the consequences to the animals involved - or to food security.
Research shows that cloned animals frequently die from heart failure, respiratory problems, and defective immune systems. Cloning also magnifies the worst selective breeding practices of industrial farming: Animals pushed genetically to unnaturally high yields and rapid growth suffer debilitating physical ailments.
Cloning is likely to be used to produce copies of the highest yielding and fastest growing of these animals, and could escalate factory farming to a new and alarming level.
Well here we go again; anger as one type of meat is consumed whilst other meats are seemingly acceptable. Hypocritical speciesism aside, any increase of available meat products is a blow to human health, animal life and the environment - just see every post on this blog for the detriment of meat to all these things.
Anger over squirrel meat on sale in north London
The north London store owner says he sells about a dozen grey squirrels each week
A north London grocery store is committing “wildlife massacre” by selling squirrel meat, an animal welfare group has claimed.
Vegetarians International Voice for Animals (Viva) accused a
branch of Budgens of supporting a “barbaric and needless cull” of grey
squirrels.
An independently-owned branch in Crouch End has been selling the meat for four months.
Shop owner Andrew Thornton said he sold the meat for “sustainability reasons”.
Mr Thornton, who buys his squirrels from a supplier in north
Essex, said he sold about a dozen squirrels a week at about £3 or £4
each.
An American animal advocacy organization, Mercy For Animals, has been able to gain undercover footage of the practices of commercial chicken hatcheries. Please watch and if you are not yet vegan, think about what your money supports the next time you buy an egg or a product containing egg.
…lovely.
Thrown, dropped, mutilated, and ground-up alive. This is the shocking reality faced by hundreds of thousands of chicks each day at the world’s largest egg-laying breed hatchery – Hy-Line International in Spencer, Iowa.
New hidden camera footage obtained at this facility during a Mercy For Animals undercover investigation gives a disturbing glimpse into the cruel and industrialized reality of modern hatcheries.
The warm, comforting, and protective wings of these newly hatched chicks’ mothers have been replaced with massive machines, quickly moving conveyor belts, harsh handling, and distressing noise. These young animals are sorted, discarded, and handled like mere cogs in a machine.
For the nearly 150,000 male chicks who hatch every 24 hours at this Hy-Line facility, their lives begin and end the same day. Grabbed by their fragile wings by workers known as “sexers,” who separate males from females, these young animals are callously thrown into chutes and hauled away to their deaths. They are destined to die on day one because they cannot produce eggs and do not grow large or fast enough to be raised profitably for meat. Their lives are cut short when they are dropped into a grinding machine – tossed around by a spinning auger before being torn to pieces by a high-pressure macerator.
Over 30 million male chicks meet their fate this way each year at this facility.
For the surviving females, this is the beginning of a life of cruelty and confinement at the hands of the egg industry. Before even leaving the hatchery they will be snapped by their heads into a spinning debeaker – a portion of their sensitive beaks removed by a laser. Workers toss and rummage through them before they are placed 100 per crowded box and shipped across the country.
