Eating Animals

Do you agree with this statement? “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment.”

I read a book a couple of months ago that really inspired me and made me think about something most people do every day – “Eating Animals.” Jonathan Safran Foer, the author, discusses many topics surrounding eating animals and really makes his readers think about the decision to eat meat.

I am not sure if any of you are aware, but I was a vegetarian for about six years from age 17 – 23. I decided to eat meat again after marrying Scott (who was and is a meat eater). I didn’t want to cook two meals every night and genuinely started liking the taste of meat again. Recently, after reading the above book, I became a vegetarian again for various reasons that I will describe in my summary of the book below.

Since most of us have a dog that we adore… I think Foer makes a good point in his opening chapter. Foer starts the book by talking about his relationship with his dog. He admits that he doesn’t know what goes on in his dog’s [George’s] head and that he is “surprised by her lack of intelligence as often as [he is] surprised by her intelligence. The differences between [them] are always more present than the similarities.” But he recognizes that although “the list of differences [between them] could fill a book, George fears pain, seeks pleasure and craves not just food and play, but companionship.” Based on this, he asks various ethical questions such as “should we not eat companion animals”? “should we not eat animals with significant mental capacities”? “if we should not eat animals with significant mental capacities then wouldn’t that include the pig, cow, chicken, many species of sea animals and severely impaired human beings”?

“With all the factory farmers that are profiting from meat eaters around the country – ‘is it even possible to eat meat without ‘causing pain to one of Gods living creatures.’? I seriously want to know your answer to this question and think these are all good questions that we should ask ourselves. Controversial? Yes. Questions that might alter your life and the food you eat? Yes. Questions we may not be able to ignore, but out of laziness decide to ignore anyway? Yes. But hear me out anyway…

“On average, American’s eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime – one animal for every letter on the last five pages.”

I know there are a million things to stand up for in our country so you are probably wondering why I chose to blog about animals. Well – to put it shortly – this book inspired me to be a better person and I learned something that I wanted to share with others. “If I misuse a corporation’s logo, I could potentially be put in jail; if a corporation abuses a billion birds, the law will protect no the birds, but the corporation’s right to do what it wants.” Is this right?

Do we really even know what we are eating anymore? “Not a single turkey you can buy in a supermarket could walk normally, much less jump or fly normally before they slaughtered it for you to eat? Not the antibiotic-free, or organic, or free range or anything. They all have the same foolish genetics, and their bodies won’t allow for it anymore. Every turkey sold in every store and served in every restaurant was the product of artificial insemination. If it were only for efficiency that would be one thing, but these animals literally can’t reproduce naturally. What the industry figured out – and this was the real revolution – is that you don’t need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable. The animals have paid the price for our desire to have everything available at all times for very little money.”

Remember that bird flu and swine flu outbreak we had last year? “Scientists at Columbia and Princeton Universities have actually been able to trace six of the eight genetic segments of the (currently) most feared virus in the world directly to US factory farms.”

Also - “Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria. Of course consumers might notice that their chickens don’t taste quite right – how good could a drug-stuffed, disease ridden, contaminated animal possibly taste?”

“Chickens are laying ‘two or even three times as many [eggs] as in nature’” because farmers are changing the food and light deprivation of animals. Is this healthy for our animals? Is this healthy for us?

Now to discuss the environment… Is being a vegetarian better for the environment? The meat industry handles “so much [waste], [that is] so poorly managed, that it seeps into rivers, lakes, and oceans – killing wildlife and polluting air, water, and land in ways devastating to human health. Today a typical pig factory farm will produce 7.2 million pounds of manure annually, a typical broiler facility will produce 6.6 million pounds, and a typical cattle feedlot 344 million pounds. The General Account Office (GAO) reports that individual farms ‘can generate more raw waste than the populations of some U.S. cities.’ All told, farmed animals in the Unites States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population – roughly 87,000 pounds of [waste] per second. The polluting strength of this [waste] is 160 times greater than a raw municipal sewage.”

“John Tietz compiled a useful list of [stuff] typically found in the [waste] of factory farmed-hogs: ‘ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorus, nitrates, and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can make humans sick, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptococci and giardia’ (thus children raised on the grounds of a typical hog factory farm have asthma rates exceeding 50 percent and children raised near factory farms are twice as likely to develop asthma).”

So since the meat industry is polluting the environment so much, you would think that they would be fined accordingly right? ”A few years after this deregulation in 1995, Smithfield spilled more than twenty million gallons of lagoon waste into the New River in North Carolina. The spill remains the largest environmental disaster of its kind and is twice as big as the iconic Exxon Valdez spill six years earlier. The spill released enough liquid manur to fill 250 Olympic-sized swimming pools. In 1997, as reported by the Sierra Club in their daming “RapSheet on Animal Factories,” Smithfield was penalized for a mind-blowing seven thousand violations of the Clean Water Act – that’s about twenty violations a day.”

“One violation might be an accident. Even ten violations might. Seven thousand violations is a plan. Smithfield was fined $12.6 million, which at first sounds like a victory against the factory farm. At the time, $12.6 million was the largest civil-penalty pollution fine in US history, but this is a pathetically small amount to a company that now grosses $12.6 million every ten hours. Smithfield’s former CEO Joseph Luter III received $12.6 million in stock options in 2001.”

“Conservative estimates by the EPA indicate that chicken, hog, and cattle excrement has already polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in twenty-two states (for reference the circumference of the earth is roughly 25,000 miles). In only three years, two hundred fish kills – incidents where the entire fish population in a given area is killed at once – have resulted from factory farms’ failures to keep their shit out of waterways. In these documented kills along, thirteen million fish were literally poisoned by shit – if set head to tail fin, these vitims would stretch the length of the entire Pacific coast from Seattle to the Mexican border.”

And you thought the Homer Simpson story about the pollution of the lake in “The Simpson’s Movie” was a made up story (remember when he had the pet pig and didn’t know how to dispose of the waste so he dumped it in the lake?) Hopefully the EPA won’t put a dome over the USA like they did with Springfield.

So, you all know how much I LOVE sushi… I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it… but after reading these stats… I realize how everyone in the world loves sushi and that it is taking a toll on our oceans – “One study found that roughly 4.5 million sea animals are killed as bycatch in longline fishing every year, including roughly 3.3 million sharks, 1 million marlins, 60,000 sea turtles, 75,000 albatross, and 20,000 dolphins and whales.”

Did you know that “thirty five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed “unintentionally” in seafood production? (shrimp trawling devastates sea horse populations more than any other activity).”

So why do we continue to eat meat? Is it because we are scared to be an “unhealthy” vegetarian? Because it’s so much “healthier” to eat meat? Well, according to Foer, “Data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked to osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores.”

Also, “Vegetarian diets are often associated with a number of health advantages, including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease [which alone accounts for more than 25 percent of all annual deaths in the nation], lower blood pressure levels, and lower risk of hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Vegetarians tent to have lower body mass index (BMI) [that is, they are not as fat] and lower overall cancer rates [cancers account for nearly another 25 percent of all annual deaths in the nation].”

Do you think being a vegetarian is radical? According to Foer, “Our situation is an on odd one. Virtually all of us agree that it matters how we treat animals and the environment, and yet few of us give much through to our most important relationship to animals and the environment. Odder still, those who do choose to act in accordance with these uncontroversial values by refusing to eat animals (which everyone agrees can reduce both the number of abused animals and one’s ecological footprint) are often considered marginal or even radical.”

Why are vegetarians constantly being questioned about their behaviors, but meat eaters aren’t?

“We have let the factory farm replace farming for the same reasons our cultures have relegated minorities to being second-class members of society and kept women under the power of men. We treat animals as we do because we want to and can. (Does anyone really wish to deny this anymore?) The myth of consent is perhaps the story of meat, and much comes down to whether this story, when we are realistic, is plausible. But compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.”

“Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local community, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can. One of the greatest opportunities to live our values – or betray them – lies in the food we put on our plates.”

“Martin Luther Ling Jr. wrote passionately about the time when ‘one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular.’ Sometimes we simply have to make a decision because ‘one’s conscience tells on that it is right.”

For all of you critics out there, and I know there are and will be critics because almost everyone I talked to about this said “this book isn’t researched and I am still going to eat meat to matter what I read or hear or learn about” – check out the 60 page works cited/sources at the end of the book. Trust me, this is a WELL researched book. But, if you want to continue to live in denial/ignorance – to each his own : ).