Category: animal rights

Food Chain Toppers

Fifty years ago I taught climatology labs for first-year geography students. The department was fortunate enough to have a $1,000 Monroe electronic calculator that featured the same functionality as those in The Dollar Tree’s Electronics Department now. The Monroe couldn’t even calculate square roots. Fortunately, my slide rule could. Plate tectonics was still an outlier. On the other hand, science was not despised and broadly distrusted. 

But we’re living in more modern times, are we not? There were gullible people in 1969, Nixon moved into the White House. There are gullible people in 2018, Trump is still occupying the White House. Israel is still occupying Palestine. Racism is still alive and fell, still socially sanctioned.  

The Windshield Effect. Why are there no dead bugs on my windshield?

In 1969 your car windshield got badly bugged on the highway. If you did not regularly scrub the car’s grill, headlamps and radiator blades you would eventually regret it. Now I don’t even hear crickets when I enter a room.

“Entomologists also knew that climate change and the eventual destruction of global habitat are bad news for biodiversity in general and that insects are dealing with the particular challenges posed by herbicides and pesticides, along with the effects of losing meadows, forests and even weedy patches to the relentless expansion of human spaces.”

The Insect Apocalypse

Ecosystems are resilient, but so is that proverbial camel with one straw too many on her back.

Anthropocentrism threatens Planet Earth with an extinction event, appropriately known as the Anthropocene. Anthropospherians consider themselves above the brutish razor-thin line that evolution enforces effectively. A breakthrough a day keeps crises at bay.


“I saw something somewhere or other about how we might have to eat insects to get our protein. I don’t think I could do that myself, you know? Effing weird. Yuck”

Yuck, as in finding a hair in your food.

BizarroComics.Com


Meat is a socially sanctified addiction, but its addicts do not recognize the addictive aspect enough to go into detox. Animal husbandry is socially sanctified torture of live stock, performed by proxy at a supermarket.

Some Carnivoreseurs will eat animals that haven’t even died yet. Adventuresome Carnivoreseurs beam proudly at their adventuresome palates. Food Network stalwarts they are.

Serving twitching fish to patrons

Of course, it will bother you if you keep thinking about it. But is it enough to give thanks to the animal for donating their mortal souls to those with (presumably) eternal souls? In other words, it’s no big deal to kill for dietary purposes or because the animal simply tastes good.

Extreme eating is so cool, isn’t it? You’ve got to give it to them. Now, watch them closely as they wash down that writhing catch with some Effen Vodka. The fish will probably like the vodka too. Ha Ha. Very funny, Edgar.

The proper study of mankind I shall leave to possible extraterrestrial research teams. Science aficionados perhaps. 

Thanks for reading.

A World Without Borders, Slaughterhouses or Pyromaniacs

Property is Theft

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of animals
Imagine all the animals
Sharing all the world…

—  veganarchistic rendering of  the original Lennon, no rights reserved

Put down that knife

Don’t eat a cow. She is a fellow mammal. She produces milk designed by evolution, design, evolutionary design… designed evolution… for her calves. Milk is theft.

The proper study of mankind is nonanimal-kind. Centering your attention on the primacy of mankind yields skewed results. Similarly, the proper study of White mankind is not White mankind. Racism is theft.

What is a human?

  1. an Earthling with a somewhat larger brain, proportional to body weight, than other Earthlings.
  2. an Earthling with four fingers and an opposing thumb projecting from right-and-left opposing hands.
  3. vocal cords that flex in certain ways as to produce sounds that present as speech patterns.

All humans are mammals.

See “They Might Be Giants” for more on this.

might.be.giants

The eyes have it.

Borders are artificial constructs created by human empires to contain and to control their fellow animals — human and nonhuman. Look at a world map and you will see that empires do not view borders as arbitrary; borders serve interests, interests enforce political borders, interests fuel politics. Factory farms are death camps. Slavery is theft.

Humans build slaughterhouses to process nonhumans in order to sate human appetite, for human fashion, for human folly. Humans eat ten-times their number in nonhumans per year (70 billion), one-hundred times their number in maritime creatures per year (multiple trillions). Nonhumans do not no such thing. Use of an animal for monetary gain is theft.

Humans ravage their fellow humans as well as their fellow nonhumans. Take another look at that world map, consider who authored those borders. What role do colonial powers play in carving every continent, every speck of space on the planet? Does White Supremacism rear its ugly countenance on this planet? White Supremacism is theft.

sinclair.dino

Humans using fossil fuels pyro their own funeral pyres. Humans are the only animals that burn fossilized remains of previous lifeforms that, ironically, perished in a previous extinction event. A ferocious fossil fuel consumption is relying on the limited biomass of one extinction to fuel an extinction event. Clogging the atmosphere with the carbon dioxide of that limited biomass is generational theft.

Perhaps the sorcerer/creator will return to see how well we are faring with its nonhuman land, air, and sea animals.

zachary-kanin-god-is-sitting-on-a-chair-in-heaven-reading-the-bible-thinking-oh-shoo-new-yorker-cartoon_a-l-9186125-8419447

Are humans going the way of the Sinclair Dino?

Pyromania is also theft.

Thanks for reading.

 

Talking Turkey About Climate

Let’s talk turkey…

For 245 million turkeys, a lifespan averages 4 months — 3 generations per year. A wild turkey can live up to 10 years, fly 55 miles an hour, and run 35 miles an hour.

…climate change does change everything. Adopting a vegan diet is powerful enough to slow the course, to stem a looming mega threat to the only planet we have. She has already shaken off five extinction events, a sixth won’t stop her. When climate goes rogue, the planet does not die. She’ll have to wait for the sun to extinguish under the weight of depleted helium atoms. She will still revolve around the sun and still rotate on her axis daily. The beings she nourished from Extinction Event 1 through Event 5 lived under the same star,  the Sun.

Once a rolling stone starts rolling downhill, you can’t stop it, unless:

  1. a miracle happens

OK, short list.

Humankind always abides every threat, doesn’t it? Where was humankind during the previous five extinction events? Not around, Ken Ham, of AnswersInGenesis notwithstanding. Scripture is not science.

Unpaid Political Announcement

What a terrible time to suffer a ne’er-do-well in the Oval Office. We’ve set a boulder atop Sysiphus’ boulder. Full speed aHell.

The Art of the Devil: A Memoir by D. Trump, forward by Alistair Crowley.

Become a vegan and take the single most effective step for stemming global warming. But that’s a non-starter, isn’t it?

There’s no way, man.

Get real, Bill. Who made you boss?

Yeah, I’m like, right.

My eyes roll in your general direction.

Nobody really knows.

A fable

A mythical Sysiphus rolls a mythical boulder up a mountain. Sisyphus’ twin meets his brother at the mountain’s peak. I’ll call him Sysiphus B. He accepts the boulder from Sysiphus. The twin’s task: keep the orb from rolling any farther downhill. His feet are slipping on some moss. He can’t push the boulder upwards, he can only slow its progress. Somewhere between marker 1.5 and marker 2.0, Sysiphus B has to stop the boulder, else:

#SR15

Game Over.

Replay? No replay option. We’re toast.

Editors note:

Dear Meat Eater, I used to be among the crowd you’re in with. A body gets very weary during detox. The more meat you eat, the more toxins you must excrete. I’ve had to detox from alcohol. In my experience, detox from animal cells takes longer, you get tired and feel depleted, but don’t blame a plant-based diet. Cold, dead turkey, sorry for piling my plate with your white and dark. I don’t expect an apology, cold dead turkey. I did the crime and served the time, but the animals I have consumed are still dead meat.

There is nothing great about being a mega-greedy species (the crowd I’m in with), one that drains the lifeblood of trillions of fish, billions of birds, billions of land creatures 24/7/365 (366 on leap years). It’s not a thing to be proud of. Karma presents as arterial plaque, over-burdened heart, stroke to the brain, diabetes. Statistically speaking. Who knows?

You may say I’m dreaming, but I’m not the only one.

Let’s talk some more turkey:

  • 245 million turkeys raised and killed every year in the U.S.
  • More than 46 million of them are killed each year at Thanksgiving alone,
  • more than 22 million die at Christmas.

Source

T’day is six weeks away, today is a good day to start a detox.

“We’ll see” means “never.”

Thanks for reading.

Who Made You the Boss of Ewe?

Imagine a legal system that recognizes animal rights as inalienable, slaughterhouses closed because they deny life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Impossible.

Imagine a planet made uninhabitable by a singularly rapacious species.

A near certainty.

Can the impossible and the near-certain be reconciled?

 

once.you.eliminate

Why do we never refer to “farmed” animals as cadavers or corpses?

Carcasses get hung by hooks that slide along ceiling rails and transport them into a sequence of production stations. We don’t do such things to human beings because we value life. Where did you go to school anyway, Bill?

By the sixth day, the Bible identifies certain animals as livestock (alive, caged, enslaved, dispatched). Sentient beings with a central nervous system — one that transmits data from brain to spleen — are complex emotional bemichael-maslin-which-came-first-mom-the-chicken-mcnugget-or-the-egg-mcmuffin-new-yorker-cartoon_a-l-9179842-8419447ings. Pet “owners” know this, but they also “know” that a meal without meat is an oxymoron.

Apples and oranges, Bill. Pets are lovable family members. Meat is matter that doesn’t matter. Just don’t think about it and we’ll all be better for it. You’re obsessed with animal so-called rights. You need help. I hope you get the help you need. Pets are simply lovable. They are not dead meat. But why do they eat pets in Korea? That’s just wrong.

Apples and oranges are both fruits. Piglets and human children are both mammals.

No animal wishes to suffer lifelong torture, brutal death, family separation, mechanized dissection, mechanical separation, supermarket aisles with nutrition labels. A dead food-animal isn’t even graced with the nicer post-life identity of cadaver or corpse.

What you shun enduring yourself, attempt not to impose on others. You shun slavery—beware of enslaving others! If you can endure to do that, one would think you had been once upon a time a slave yourself. For Vice has nothing in common with virtue, nor Freedom with slavery. (41).

— Epictetus “Golden Saying of Epictetus” (as translated by Hastings Crossley)

us our they

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over

  1. the fish in the sea and
  2. the birds in the sky,
  3. over livestock and
  4. all the wild animals, and
  5. over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

“so that“???

Did a God create mankind in his own image or was it the other way around?

  1. in the image of God he created them; 
  2. male and female he created them.”

Again, who made us the boss of them? Why is an animal killed by homo sapiens called a meat carcass, not a cadaver or a corpse?

Bill, did you know that Mannwich® is a meal? It’s not annimal fodder.

culture.mother.child

Control the narrative and own the outcome. The cadaver/corpse you ate yesterday, the corpse/cadaver you’ll eat today, the cadaver/corpse you plan to eat tomorrow. Eat all your fodder, son.

Animals don’t feel pain the way that WE do. Hunters know this. You should try hunting and you’ll know too, Bill

Certain faiths grant animals mortal souls. They grant themselves immortal souls.

Bill, do you recognize the difference between cannibals and meat-eaters?

Use them, consume them, tan their hides, chew their jerky. Search for even more markets that promise additional markets for each cadaver part, create a demand for a wide range of corpse parts.

Bill, you should read Rhys Southan’s blog “Let Them Eat Meat,”  a restful place for former vegans:

“As a meat-eater-to-be, however, this was more of an issue, because I would presumably need to stop caring about animals. How does one stop caring?

The answer to that question in my case was severe depression. I had always been prone to depression, and still am, but as a vegan I finally became so utterly indifferent to my own life that it led to this epiphany of sorts: “If my life doesn’t matter,” I thought, “a cow’s life definitely doesn’t matter.” Eating meat no longer seemed impossible to justify. If it had to be me or the cow… it might as well be the cow.”

Animals do not wish to be husbanded.  They do not enjoy a caged or crated existence. Freedom for me, but not for thee? Gaze into an animal’s eyes and see what those eyes scream back at you. Or don’t.

Why don’t “meat processing facilities” provide tours? Advertisers proclaim their thorough quality control, cleanliness and wholesome products. A family business for family folks.

From lip to anus He/we created them; male and female we/He created them.

A male calf cannot produce breast milk. Cow milk is calf nourishment.  A mother cow is a fellow mammal. She produces breast milk for her young in the same way that all mammal mothers do. She wouldn’t seek to divert her breast milk to supermarkets. Veal is a tender flesh that draws ever fewer consumers, and not because it’s illegal. A proxy agent crates them, force-feeds them, kills them, sells them. A product code triggers a beep.

A male chick does not lay eggs. This severely limits his value in a poultry processing facility. It yields marginal protein content and cannot be inventoried. If management doesn’t do something about animals who cannot produce eggs they get stuck with useless inventory. Fortunately, there is customer demand for pet food and school cafeteria fare. Male chicks serve this market. Once you have separated the egg-layers from the useless-as-bull-teat chicks you need to send them down a chute, pump the protein-rich slurry into tankers and truck them to rendering facilities.

Thanks for reading.