Barnyard-Animal Values

Humans are not the only Earth residents born with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Homo sapiens are not the only Earthly beings born to thrive, to live long and prosper, to experience joie de vivre. They do not show up at your door intending to be killed and dissected for humane consumption. More likely, they will run as soon as you open the door.

comparative anatomy

Running for your life: is it instinctual?

Vegan humans reject a conventional “wisdom” that deems beasts naturally occurring resources, food options, and fashion statements. NonVegan humans devise clever ways to subdue and conquer, to enslave, to transport “livestock” to butcheries, tanneries, renderers. Dominion (dominance) over animals is an arbitrary human conceit.

How many animals can you name that have intensely complex central nervous systems? Highly developed processes relay sensory and autonomic information to the brain. Gaze into a pig’s eye and know how much you share, how much you communicate, how much information transfers in the blink of each eye. Is it comparable to looking into a child’s eyes? That’s a loaded question. A barnyard animal’s heart was already beating prenatally inside her mother’s womb. Her fate was already decided, but not by her mother.

Does a pregnant cow know that her calves will disappear immediately upon departing the womb? Is she relieved at having her children separated from her teat so that bovine milk might be redirected into ice cream and casein? Is her boy prepared for a vealy good future?

Where are the bovine fathers? Insemination is artificial, so the point is moot. Long ago sets of bovine ancestors lived as nuclear families. Is this irrelevant information?

Does a sow wish her piglet a brutish life, an incarcerated existence and an early death?

plants.feel.pain

Anthropomorphism does not explain the enormous emotional and physical characteristics that humans share with barnyard animals. I envisage a book about such animals as a sanctuary that offers a refuge from the colossal carnage that occurs every second of every day.

Veganism is the only conceivable way to counter global warming. Many nonvegans recognize that reality but consider it unrealistic, unfortunately, the reality is as realistic as real can possibly get.

Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?

A. To get hit by the truck that conveyed her family to death camps: meat-processing facilities, if you will.

Please consider reading my earlier posts on vegan alternatives

Thanks for reading.

 

Anthony Bourdain: “Vegans Should Kill Themselves”

Gratefully reblogged from Amanda’s think&thrive blog. Worth your moment, I believe.

I was not a Bourdain follower and did not know how viscerally vegans repulsed him, but it should come as no surprise whatever. Sideshow geeks draw paying customers and repeat business.
Endless memorials and testimonials celebrate a life well lived if decadently conducted.  His views were highly respected and acknowledged, they have been immortalized. This video is the first negative review I’ve seen published, but vegan tails do not generally wag the dog, do they?

Dominion and Domestication News

Breaking news from our time-traveling reporters, recently returned from a special assignment for The Genesis Tattler and World Report:

The 26th verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis (NIV) declares animal rights alienable, subservient to the inalienable rights of mankind (the ones created in His image and likeness). In a single sentence, a sentencing I say, the English translation describes

  1. the creation of mankind,
  2. the wild creatures in the sea,
  3. in the sky,
  4. on the land,
  5. and the livestock.

So farmed animals get exiled from wild animals in one fell swath.

genesis.1.26

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

How about this logical leap: encaging every living being from tapeworm to giraffe between two commas — declaring the deed done in fewer than seven words. …Let us make mankind in our image

,in our likeness,

so that they may rule over…

I’m assigning another time-traveling team to the gates of Eden to report on the couple caught trafficking forbidden fruit: advice of a snake-oil-sales demon guised as a serpent, possibly a slitherer subservient (subserpient?) to the inalienably privileged pair. The devil is in the details.

Bill, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all. 

It’s not really what I say that counts, it’s what I do. I DO VEGAN.

Speaking of saying something good, is it even possible to be a good person, to eat peas, live long and prosper? Not only to prosper, but to thrive without executing the calf and hardening the arteries, those tubes hat flow lifeblood into and out of your heart, possibly to head off an extinction event named after its instigator. While researching this article I happened upon a quite fascinating site that speaks to a potential extinction event : Misanthropocene

misanthropocene

A few thoughts for future posts:

The hegemony of man as misogynist.

Where do humans fit on the scale running from sadism to masochism?

Are humans a selfish specie?

One self-adoring philosopher, Ayn Rand,  is my choice for single most influential human responsible for stoking the boilers of the Anthropocene Express. Git ‘er done, Ayn. Here is a Rand quote from 1974:

They (Native Americans) didn’t have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their ‘right’ to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.

— Q and A session following her address to the graduating class of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974 – found in Endgame: Resistance, by Derrick Jensen, Seven Stories Press, 2006, pg 220

I sign off with the words of Anthony Douglas Williams:

When I look into the eyes of an animal, I do not see an animal, I see a living being, I see a friend, I feel a Soul.

The eyes have it.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

Two Words for Two Worlds

There is a thick line between veganism and the celebration of violence. The chasm between the desperately impoverished and the decadently entitled widens by the hour.  We witness the disparity at broadband speed and with the suddenness of a tsunami.

Africa is an enormous continent that gets depicted as approximately the size of Greenland on the very faulty default Mercator projection, used to depict everything from an extraordinarily specious perspective — one where the North Pole and the South Pole are infinitely large. This is to say that a single point with no dimension gets presented as limited only by infinity. Altogether all you need to know about the specie that finds Mercator’s single-purpose map indispensable to everything.

WorldMapper, it is scaled according to meat consumption.

meat.production.world

“Meat, as shown here, refers to all animal products that are consumed by people. Meat consumption per person is highest in Western European territories. Nine of the top ten meat consuming populations live in Western Europe. The anomaly in this ranking is New Zealand, a territory that is famous for its high ratio of sheep to people and the production of lamb. The most meat is consumed in China, a quarter of the world total. A fifth of the world population lives in China, eating on average 510 calories of meat per person, which is above the world average of 432 calories of meat per person.”

— WorldMapper

pangea_supercontinent_map

Two very different journalists on Korea.

First the vegan, Charles Newkey-Burden, author and journalist. He also writes for Shortlist, the Daily Telegraph and Four Four Two.

Offended by Koreans eating dog? I trust you’ve never had a bacon butty

“Yes, dogs are smart and friendly – but so are pigs. Researchers from Cambridge University found pigs are as smart as three-year-old humans. They can play computer games and recognise people they met several years ago. They develop trust and empathy like we, and dogs, do. Few people relish the thought of any animals being slaughtered so it’s normal for those who eat meat to try to justify it. Just as westerners get angry about people in Asia eating dogs and cats, many Indians get outraged by westerners eating cows. People shake their heads in disbelief at guinea pigs and alpacas being served up in South America.” — Source

How much is your approach to meat a reflection of inculturation? Whom does the culture incarcerate and whom does it traffic?

The next article is by the non-vegan Andrew Keh, an international correspondent, covering sports from Berlin. He has previously covered Major League Baseball and the N.B.A. and has reported from the World Cup and the Olympics.

An Olympic Challenge: Eat All the Korean Food That Visitors Won’t

At a restaurant near Gangneung Olympic Park, a colleague and I slipped on plastic gloves and each grabbed scissors. (When I’m president, scissors will replace knives on everybody’s dinner tables.) We pulled crab parts from a bubbling pot as deep and wide as a witch’s caldron. We broke our busy silence only to marvel at the ribbons of red and white meat dangling between our fingertips: They were feathery soft and, yes, so sweet. When all the legs were gone, we asked for a couple packs of instant noodles to repurpose the cloudy russet broth. The place also serves sannakji, raw octopus so fresh that the slices quiver on the plate. For non-Korean visitors, the dish exists almost exclusively as a dare. — Sourcehttps://static01.nyt.com/video/players/offsite/index.html?videoId=unknown

If you have the stomach click on I have the stomach to eat menudo.
Is it ethical to eat an animal that is still alive when it arrives at your plate. Could you eat live octupus? Andrew Keh celebrates it. It’s not something that I can un-see, but as a vegan I must bear witness to the banal.

 

Thanks for reading.