Animal Matters

This weekend was the PETA - Helping Animals 101 conference for Houston and ran 8 - 6 Saturday and Sunday. I kind of knew what to expect, I hoped to meet people in the surrounding areas, with any luck alleviating, even if temporarily, my feelings of being isolated. I expected a lot of information that would help me in my efforts to step up my knowledge and awareness in order to be a better witness to others for the animals. I expected great food - all of which I can eat - a true halleluja moment. But I can't really say that I expected to be shocked. My first exposure to animal rights was in England, where I watched an animal rights movie narrated by Julie Christie. I have always been a very empathetic person, but the quaint image of farmer Brown and his happy farm were dashed forever on the jagged rocks of reality known as factory farms. I became vegetarian immediately. Almost twenty years later, I finally made the connection between dairy and veal and that was the end of my consuming anything related to animals. A personal choice that I could live with, and made a real effort not to inflict my choices on others.
But today I think I might be again, changing.
I think it is in the human chemical makeup to turn from anything horrorific. There is also that primitive instinct thing going on that makes us turn back to look with curiosity....that is, as long as it is nothing related to us or ours. A car crash, a terrible malformity, a tower on fire. If its relativity can be distanced, a disaster can be fascinating. But if its proximity is close to one's own, then it becomes something from which we avert our eyes. That is why, I believe, people can walk into a grocery store, a fast food chain, or restaurant, order animal products without any attachment whatsoever to that item, except the positive experienced gained from its consumption. It tastes good. I believe that if every single person saw how this "product" is treated from birth to death, that person would not only not ever consume that product but he would do everything in his power to shut down the operation that produced this product. What are the arguments? God put animals on this earth for our consumption. This might be true, but there is nothing even remotely godly about the way we are treating these creatures. They are removed from all things natural to them. They are warehoused in deplorable conditions. Diseased. Disfigured. Malnourished. Drug addicted. Tortured. Abcessing. Tumored. God did not put animals on this earth for us to torture. There is no excuse for this type of treatment.

We love our dogs. We adore our cats. Yet we eat animals with higher cognitive ability and that every scientific community on the planet acknowledge have central nervous systems and therefore have the same capacity for pain that we do. Yet we brand. We experiment. We castrate. We anally electricute. We hobble. We inject. We scald. We burn. We apply caustic substances to shaved flesh. We amputate. And we remove the actual skin from alive fully conscious cows. All without any pain medication whatsoever. It makes no sense to me that there are no restrictions, no controls of any kind when it comes to the treatment of animals on factory farms. Does that make sense? Products that we actually ingest have less controls and regulation than the products we put in and on our car? Did you know that every single piece of chicken in the US has arsenic in it? Did you know that becoming a vegan essentially removes all risk of your getting any kind of heart disease - the number one killer in the US? Not only does it remove your risk, the change will eradicate damage that has already been done.

I feel so overwhelmed by this industry. There is such an incredible network of money and power that control business of animals. Lobbyists, heads of important agencies, that are from the very industry they are in charge of the industries that they are meant to ovesee, special interest groups with unbelievably deep pockets keep powerful legislation off the table. If something does make it though, it is killed in committee. As a compassionate person I could not kill an animal to eat so therefore I will not pay someone else to do it for me. It's personal integrity. I would not stand by and watch as someone bull hooked, hit with a metal pipe, burn or otherwise torture an animal, and I will not pay someone to do it.

There is also the appalling practice of using animals for entertainment. Have we not grown as a society past the senseless incarceration of magestic animals like elephants and tigers, who are spending 95% of their miserable lives chained for circuses? 50 weeks out of 52 in boxcars traveling from city to city. And the training. People really want to take their kids to see animals who are performing unnatural acts because of sheer terror? This is entertainment? Tigers' front paws are burned, in order to keep them on the back legs. They are punched in the face, whipped, beaten with bats. I saw a video of a head elephant trainer for one of these abominations known as the circus, his direction to his staff in the secrecy of the "barn", was to hit them, hit them hard, make them scream. Make them scream. Baby elephants, mother elephants. Skin pierced repeatedly with bullhooks in the most sensitive areas to make them do what is unnatural for them to do. It's the little man's power trip. The little human being with the whip and the mind for torture that allows circuses to exist. What incredible shame this brings on us as a people.

It is so past the time that we take a very real look at the many ways we have imprisoned living beings and tortured massive numbers of them in the name of entertainment, medical research, food, etc. There are very real very good alternatives out there - human only entertainment acts, wonderful companies offering alternatives to live animal testing, and the alternatives to meat-eating are getting more diverse and digestable by the minute. It is time to take the blinders off, TAKE THEM OFF, and look at what is happening to these defenseless beings in our care. We cannot call ourselves a compassionate society, ever, until ALL these practices are extinguished. No more factory farms! No more animal research! No more circuses! No more rodeos! No more pet stores! No more zoos! The last slaves must be set free. If we truly are an honorable and thoughtful society.