Category: animal rights

Veganarchism and Crows Head Soup

 

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Source

Peter Schreiner leads Crows Head Soup, a vegan touchstone. Peter brings strong vegan stew to the table  —  you’ll find poetry that skewers the skewering, photographs of hanging carcasses, the blood slurried into storage tanks for unspecified ends. Here is the post that inspired me to write this post: Lamentations of a Veganarchist.

That’s not very nice, Bill. Where are your manners? We don’t talk about hanging cows in polite company.

Sorry. I’ll get my mind right now.

Take the scenic route on your family vacation and remark on those grass-munching cows. Talk about the time a cow escaped from a truck and ended up on the highway. Remind all that it was adopted by a nice local family. Did you know that two turkeys are presidentially pardoned every year — that it adds up to a whole lot of birds over the years. Stop at a Dairy Queen to nod approvingly on its storied history.

Thank you for opting a little common decency, Bill.

Think death camps the size of Mordor behind the hills of rural America.

 

 

Each In-N-Out Burger consumed (or tossed) triggers a supply-chain decision. Breed another cow. How now.

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inventory = inventory minus one. When inventory reaches a certain level a replenishment order is issued.

Folly, arrogance and confusion gone long wrong.

Mr. Bill, do you have any idea how many blessed jobs depend on all those animal molecules you talk so long about? So long.

Do you know how many jobs are lost through extermination events of the planetary kind?

 

Family tours are never offered at “meat=processing facilities” but jobs are offered to the über marginalized in this economy.

The machinery grinds “resources” into hoppers for added value down the line. Marketplaces require workers’ willingness to press each shoulder to each wheel. From hopper to shopper — a lifestyle that assigns each party a horror, the insatiable appetite for more “resources”, more uses for each mighty molecule. 

What is the nature of evolution? Species developed over several billion years result in predators and prey surviving in a delicate balance, absent the actions of a single specie hellbent on tipping the scale. If you are not a human, or not a specie domesticated by humans, you thrive and perish at the razor edge. 

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Direct Subsidies for Animal Products and Feed

Enter the indifferent world of commerce — the scale-tippers. Tippers so cunningly successful that their own numbers increase by the billion and wild species are driven to extinction. Domesticated species are bred for extermination camps — the demands of the most insatiable homo sapiens require that the slaughter houses produce enough turnover in daily carcass units to make them economically viable processing centers in a modern society.

Thanks for reading.

 

Veganism as Enlightenment: What Gives?

Today’s fortune cookie papers:

  1. Choose to eschew animal flesh, choose to chew plant nutrients.
  2. Make good lifestyle choices,
  3. A vegan diet a day keeps an extinction event at bay.

This is another in What Gives? — a series of articles designed to promote intellectual curiosity on a range of healthful topics.

 

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Caution: today’s post may not be suitable for all audiences.

Veganism and enlightenment go together like birds of a feather in a lush wetland — a match made in heaven. Allow me to entertain a wild guess, to estimate a ballpark figure on vegans’ good taste in matters of truth and beauty. In a word — legion.

Lisa informs me that my web search has led to Mark 5:9 — the one in which Jesus exorcises demons from a haunted soul, sending each demon into the souls of unfortunate pigs who drown themselves rather than suffer.

Veganism recognizes the right of all sentient beings to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s not a matter of lions laying with the lambs. No, a lion is a carnivore by nature. Canine teeth not withstanding.

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Veganism argues for the inherent right of animals to live by their own device — not a life ordained and enforced by a single specie, one with a storied history of arrogance. Homo Sapien might look into the eyes of another specie and imagine stretch-wrapped plastic slabs resting on styrofoam tubs in a super-duper market — factory-farm fresh from the slaughter house. Live and let live (in a Tyson death camp perhaps).

OK Bill, you are indeed “one of those vegans.” QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM, ERGO SUM.

Legion — the number saved, not the number served.

Bill, before you go back to your bunny diet, take a goose and a gander at the highlights on Sunday’s grand buffet:

  • foie gras,
  • veal cutlets (let’s cut),
  • bottomless meat bowls

Why do you not slaver?

ex-carnivore

Today’s reading is from Rama Ganesan:

Enlightenment and Speciesism: On the domain-specificity of awakenings

From Rama’s byline:

Vegan and former vivisectionist. BA (Oxon), PhD, MBA, Humane Educator. Mother of four, two humans, one dog and one cat. From Tucson, Cardiff and Chennai.

Highly recommended because it’s well written and inspiring.

Thanks for reading.

Veganism Confronts Alternate Reality

Philip K. Dick has a great definition for reality. Slip into a time machine of some rare device and glide back 39 years to this PKD instruction manual:

“How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978)

Philip K had a way with clever titles too.

From that essay:

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.“

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I’m confident he would be amused to visit this place 39 years after publishing that essay, but consider the depth of his vision — he may have understood the fearsome circumstance of contemporary reality with fierce accuracy. Science fiction is good at that sometimes. 

Alternate histories are the unexpected consequence of historic events preceding the present moment. Charting the present is a matter of connecting historical dots.  The past is fully explicable, though it might have struck you at break-neck speed. Many suffer from whiplash. I am but one.

Days that happened include the 8th of November 2016. Once you regain equilibrium you wake up to a hard (or soft) landing. You realize that “it” happened.

Let’s consider that really real reality — the one that doesn’t go away just because you stop believing in it.

That reality devours every nanoparticle of a belief system that failed you somehow. 

So it seems quite appropriate to preface m wild-eyed views on veganism with article from the another perspective, an opposing viewpoint: veganism is a travesty. Click Not Healthy to weigh a specious argument from the Fruit Doctor.

The truth of veganism doesn’t go away. Animal rights still exist — even when those rights are inexpedient.

Veganism is a truth recognized by the many but practiced by the very few. Still, many non-vegans are aware of a resemblance between the typical factory farm and a death-camp. Well, slaughter does imply imply a certain amount of death.

The specie homo sapiens is capable of much denial and not a small measure of ignorance. You heed a call to close your mind to disagreeable facts, make room for more spectacle — blood and circuses.

Intergenerational theft is a reality. Old thieves like me grasp the spoils of war and limit resources, insisting that future generations fend for themselves. 

There are three-times as many homo sapiens on the same planet as there were in the year of my birth — that’s the 1947 part of my eponym. Human population consumes an equivalent number in the animal husbandry economy each year.

greedhurtingeconomy

The next celebration on the calendar in the US of Us features super-sized bowls of chips, plates with slathered wings mechanically separated from a billion birds. The hearth of America becomes a stadium filled with a 100,000 seats for 200,000 buttocks — attending a “game” that is a metaphor for war. Flaunt, preen and consume so that the economy falters not. An audience slightly larger than 100,000 observe the spectacle from the comfort of a frenetic television screen.

Enormous shopping carts roll forward with product of the grossest national product that end-stage consumerism can muster. Together they supply trillion-dollar industries that provide product for all manner of mastication. Each with a nutrition label. Here is an aphorism that may cheer you  will reading those labels: “Well I’ve got to die of something!“

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Blood and circuses. 

Here’s an alternative to viewing Supper Bowl LI — read something from Phillip K, perhaps “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Better yet, read my other posts on a theme of vegan. 🙂

Happy reading.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

 

Inverting Pig Rectums for a Living

Rated V — Very vegan friendly post. May offend some non-vegan readers

Vegan Sayings and Cute Things

Every molecule of “meat” represents a return on investment in the multiple trillion dollar industry that scavenges the hide and the marrow of our barnyard friends. Meat and meat byproducts, mechanically separated flesh, slime pink, love pink.

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Workers eking out a living in inexpressibly incomprehensible “meat-processing centers” risk emotional evisceration. As a wise man never said: “if you can’t take the PTSD, stay out of the death camp.” 

Did I mention that those rectal returns on investment increase as processing technology drives down production costs? Where do those profits accrue?  To the workers? No. They are funneled elsewhere. Here’s a hint: think financial-market capital traders. New York City?

There are worksites where people invert pork rectums for a living.

boneless-pork-rectums-inverted

Consider spraying compressed air into pig skulls? What? This is done to prevent “resource waste.”   Remove brain before directing the skulls to the bone-crushing mills. 

Remove all brains and keep your brains right. I got my mind right boss. My factory floor poster suggestion. Display at the employee entrance.

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A vegan-friendly alternative. Here they have the run of the island.

Use squeegees to direct blood from the stainless steel cutting stations and slough it into the collection containers provided for that purpose. Remember — blood is the lifeblood of our prosperity.

Waste not — do not waste animal lives.

Go vegan.

Consumers enjoy factory-farm-fresh sausage served with factory-farm-fresh eggs. Healthy profits rely upon advertising campaigns, you don’t want to squander resources by sullying a good name with idle talk of screams, stench and pollution. “Bob Evans — down on the farm.“

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Nine billion animals served annually

 

Take a look at the geography of animal processing. Contrast and compare with the geography of our prison-industrial complex. How are they similar?

See not, hear not, know not. Because complicity sucks — a lot.

Did any Soylent Green consumers know about rectal processing? It’s not just a camp classic.

Thanks for shuddering.