Meet Your Meat 1

MEET YOUR MEAT 1 Meet Your Meat July 25, 2014, Carlo Alvaro “Recognize meat for what it really is: the antibiotic- and pesticide-laden corpse of a tortured animal.” ~ Ingrid Newkirk Our treatment of animals is morally appalling! We ought to change radically the way we live and our attitude toward animals. But what am I precisely talking about here? Considering our stage of intellectual and technological development, we could carry on with our lives without having to exploit and kill other beings. And yet, we shoot animals for fun, raise them in cages, crack their skulls, cut their bodies into pieces, boil them alive, drain their blood, package their body parts, ship the packages to supermarkets where they are sold and labeled with hypocritical euphemisms such as beef, pork, drumsticks, eggs, and so on. The reality is that people buy the mutilated body parts of cows, the cut up flesh of pigs, the cut-off legs of chickens, and the unfertilized reproductive cycles of chickens. These animal parts are fried, broiled, roasted and eaten—coagulated blood, skin, veins, nerves, and all, nothing gets wasted. Animal females, cows for example, are forced to become pregnant. Hormones and other chemical supplements are injected into their bodies. Their babies are taken away from them and killed; their cut-up bodies are labeled and sold as veal. Chefs make a dish called “veal scaloppini” and not “thin slices of baby cow flesh,” which is really what it is. The cows, now engorged with milk that will never be given to their babies since they were killed and sold as “veal,” are hooked up to machines that squeeze their breasts and steal their milk. When the cows are completely drained and no longer produce milk, they are sent to be slaughtered. Their milk, which by the way contains pus and blood, is drunk straight up or used in recipes, pus, blood and all. But if you think about it, the milk produced by a human mother is meant for her baby; similarly, the milk produced by a cow is meant for cow babies, not for humans, and certainly not for human adults. At any rate, this is the kind of cruelty behind your glass of milk. Also milk is turned into cheese. The way this works is to add to the milk an enzyme contained in animal intestines (rennet) to turn the milk into a firm glob of fat that we call “cheese,” the same fat, by the way, responsible for atherosclerosis, diabetes, and obesity. Many people like to have breakfast with unfertilized reproductive cycles of chickens (eggs) fried in animal lard or in the hardened artery-clogging fat of breast-squeezed animal milk, which we call butter, with a side of fried slices of swine abdomen fat. But have you ever asked yourself what really happens in egg farms? Since male chicks are not profitable to the industry because they cannot lay eggs, every year, 200 million baby chicks are ground up alive. Workers separate male chicks from females and toss the males into a chute where they are ground up alive in a meat grinder into a bloody pulp that is fed back to chickens. The industry calls this practice “instantaneous euthanasia.” MEET YOUR MEAT 2 For Thanksgiving dinner, millions of Americans have turkey. But are these people aware of how they are able to have such a large number of turkeys? Turkeys naturally do not reproduce that quickly. This means that they are artificially inseminated. By “artificially” I mean that there are people whose job is to masturbate turkeys, collect the semen, and then inject it into female turkeys (Try bringing up this as a topic next Thanksgiving dinner.). But, as if this were not enough, animals and insects are used not only as food. Animals are used for every single purpose of our bodies and, sadly, for every aspect of our lives. We cover car seats with the skin of killed animals. We wash our bodies with products containing animal parts or by-products. We even use animal skin strips around our waists as belts and around our wrists as bracelets, or animal skin to make shoes or purses or wallets. We kill birds and use their feathers to fill up pillows and winter coats when it is absolutely unnecessary since we can use synthetic material instead. We use animal fur to make brushes and clothes, their boiled bones to make Jell-O or soap, their fat to make lotions, glue, paint, or to put on our skin as lotion. Vanilla, raspberry and strawberry ice cream flavors are enhanced by castoreum. Castoreum is the anal secretions of beavers! And the chewing gum you are chewing right now may contain lanolin, an oily, sweaty secretion found on the outside of sheep’s wool. Lanolin is also used in skin lotions. Insects are eaten straight up by many cultures or utilized in many foods people consume daily. Candies are colored using the secretions of various insect or crushed bugs. Another insect product that many people consume daily without giving it any thought is insect vomit. Commercially, the acidic vomit of bees is known as “honey.” But think about this: honey is bees’ food. Humans steal it from the bees. Obviously, the stolen honey, which is stolen food, must be replaced. It is, therefore, replaced with high fructose corn syrup. However, since corn syrup is not the bee’s natural food, the consumption of the same is believed to be the cause of the death of millions of colonies worldwide. Just think about it. There are animal parts and animal by-products everywhere—in your toothpaste, in your breakfast, in your pockets, around your necks, in your cars, animals, animals, and more animals. In other words, one day does not go by without humans using the dead bodies of animals and their by- products. But animals are not only killed, eaten, and used, but also tortured while alive. Every minute, every day, hundreds of animals are killed in laboratories in the United States. Millions of animals are used in experiments and die every year. Many animals die after being administered drugs or cosmetics. The government requires testing on animals before products are sold to people. But consider that many natural cosmetic products on the market are not required to be tested on animals. Ask yourself, why do we need to test toothpaste or mascara on animals when we can produce and use only natural cosmetics that do not require animal testing at all? And since humans “need” these products, why don’t they test them on humans? There is more: In a recent experiment, baboons were strapped down and had special helmets cemented to their skulls. Then, a pneumatic device delivered calibrated blows to determine the strength of the helmet. The blows continued until the skull of the baboons were fractured, resulting in the death of the baboons. Dogs are driven to the point of insanity by electric shocks so that scientists can study the effect of insanity. Cats are deprived of sleep until they die to study sleep deprivation. Elephants were given LSD to study its effects. Mice had their legs cut off to study how they walk on their stumps. Polar bears were drowned in vats filled with oil to study the effects of oil spills in Polar Regions. Cats were blinded, castrated, and MEET YOUR MEAT 3 rendered deaf to study their sexual developments under these incapacities. Other cats are placed in small rooms heated up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit and left there until they die. This process produces a musk in the cats’ genitals, which is scraped off and used in the production of perfume, making the scent last longer. To return to the question of eating meat, if asked “Why do you eat meat?” most people would not even consider it as an intelligible question. It is a complicated question. One’s diet, like many other aspects of life, traditions, beliefs, and customs, is normally embraced or not embraced—but seldom considered or questioned. So, the first reason people eat meat is simply that people were taught to do so by their parents, their parents were taught by their parents, and so on. Some may say that they really enjoy eating meat. But, I often wonder whether people really enjoy eating meat. I am convinced that not too many people would really eat a slab of animal flesh unless it has been coated in spices and sauces and then cooked. What people really like when they eat a piece of animal flesh is mostly spices. I am willing to bet that most people would not “enjoy” the taste of raw flesh—that’s what meat is. However, people enjoy all sorts of things, but the question is whether they enjoy them because it is written in their DNA, so to speak, or because they have learned and adapted to enjoying certain things. For example, humans enjoy sweet food because every single cell in the human body runs on sugar. It does not seem to me that people enjoy smoking, drinking alcohol, or eating meat because the human body requires them. On the contrary, I think that many people passively embrace the commodities offered by today’s society with open arms just because they are offered to them. If we consider smoking as an example, is it really enjoyable to breathe smoke and nicotine into one’s lungs? Perhaps I fail to get the virtue of smoking, but that seems to me a clear indication that some people are told what to enjoy, and then they tell themselves they should enjoy certain things, and eventually become accustomed to those things.

Load more