Exposing the Big Game

Forget Hunters' Feeble Rationalizations and Trust Your Gut Feelings: Making Sport of Killing Is Not Healthy Human Behavior

Exposing the Big Game

Tag Archives: animal-rights

“Humane Meat” Legitimizes Factory Farming

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Somewhere out there someone must be raising ‘food’ animals ‘humanely,’ therefore I’m justified in eating this steak, chicken, egg, pig part, turkey leg, hamburger, sausage, etc., etc., without feeling guilty–there’s always a chance that meat meal was humanely raised and compassionately killed, right?

Wrong!

It’s amazing how many people use some version of this feeble argument in rationalizing their culpability to cruelty, as if ‘humane’ animal farming gives them a license to ‘kill’ (so to speak).

I understand there are some who think the ‘humane meat’ movement will lead to a more compassionate future for factory farmed animals. But the fact is, advocating any form of animal agriculture that results in the breeding and premature death of an animal just legitimizes factory farming to the masses who may not see the subtle difference between a hot dog made with body parts scraped off Farmer John’s bloody-red kill floor or off Farmer Joe’s slightly greener kill floor. Yes, Farmer Joe may be able to keep his slaughterhouse a little tidier, but that’s only because he may ‘process’ fewer animals at a time, not because he truly thinks he’s being ‘compassionate.’

What would it take to provide ‘humane meat’ to everyone who won’t consider giving up their flesh? Robert Grillo answers that question, in this quote from an article entitled, Pasture Raised Eggs: The Humane, Sustainable Fiction:

“As for the scale of such an operation, where does all the land needed to give animals a “natural” farm life come from?, asks author and program director of United Poultry Concerns, Hope Bohanec. “At any given time, there are 100 million head of cattle and 70 million pigs alive in the U.S. Currently, only about 9 percent of all livestock is pasture raised. How would we ever have the land to pasture raise them all? To give all farmed animals the space they need to have even a semblance of a natural life, we would have to destroy millions more acres of wild areas, forests, prairies, and wetlands to accommodate them.”

[This mirrors the situation with open range cattle grazing. Although less than 5% of cows raised and killed for meat are put on the open range, when people see cows out there on National Forest or DNR land, they think their hamburger must have led a nice life out on the range somewhere. Truth is, most cows are raised in overcrowded feed lots.]
“There is not enough land on the planet, or even two planets, to free-range all the billions of pigs, sheep, turkeys, ducks, and chickens. We would need closer to five planet Earths. It simply cannot be done. Free-ranging animals for food can never be more than a specialty market for a few elite buyers.”
And United Poultry Concerns’ president Karen Davis PhD addresses the notion of Hurting Animals Humanely in her article featured in the Dodo:

“No one who truly respects animals, respects their dignity, feels with and for them, and wishes them joy in life supports “farming” them, because animal farming is about degrading animals meanly to the level of their genitals and their genes, mutilating their body parts, destroying their family life, controlling every aspect of their lives including culling (killing) them as one pleases when they are deemed not “productive” enough to keep feeding, and ultimately murdering them. 

“How can anyone claiming to respect animals promote a view of them as ‘dinner’?”

 

This quote from a Facebook friend sums the situation up succinctly: “‘Humane’ animal farming is nothing more than the devil putting on a fancy suit. Vegan is the only way”

And, PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk put out a U-tube on the folly of ‘Humane meat’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfUBMKwVl7Q

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WTF HSUS?

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You could say that I am more than a bit peeved at the HSUS these days. Their shameless promotion of meat-eating—especially their sponsoring the hedonistic “Hoofin’ It” event—has me downright pissed off. 

I have to wonder if they can even see above the bullshit they’ve sunk into this time. 

For years I was an ardent supporter of their policies—until they went out of their way to join Whole Foods in perpetuating the myth of “humane” meat. Instead of sticking to their guns and helping to usher in an era of evolution that takes us beyond animal agriculture, they’re bent on reviving the “Old McDonald’s Farm” fantasy.

I live next door to Old McDonald, and I’ve seen how he treats his farm animals. It isn’t pretty.

One of the flesh food purveyors featured in the “Hoofin’ It” event (the ranch that raises bison) waxes poetic about their “product” as though it were a hand-crafted ale or fine wine: “Our bulls are…finished with a natural diet of whole corn, sunflower pellets…” and “are harvested and processed at the prime age of 24-30 months, weighing approximately 1,100 pounds.” 

 

Photo Copyright Jim Robertson

Photo Copyright Jim Robertson

Prime age for whom? Certainly not for the Bison! Bison don’t even reach maturity until 3 years of age and can live well over 30 years in the wild when allowed to. The bison whose flesh they’re selling are still babies. In the wild, male bison remain with their mothers for at least 3 years before joining in with groups of other bulls. It’s like eating a lamb who is never allowed to grow up to be a sheep. And who the fuck eats a lamb anyway, HSUS? 

The big question is, how does one “humanely” kill (“harvest” or “process”) a 1000 pound, gregarious, empathetic herd animal who relates enough to others to make a habit of mourning over their dead? “Processing” day must be a real sad, morbid, not to mention horrifying day for those waiting in line for their turn to get slaughtered. 

This whole alternative “humane” meat issue reminds me of the popular new micro-brewery that cropped up in the small town of Twisp, WA, where I used to live. Their menu featured grass-fed, organic beef from a local rancher who turned out to be none other than wolf-hater/poacher Bill White. White, along with his son, was responsible for baiting and killing off most of Washington State’s first wolves, the Lookout Pack. (Yes, they’re the same folks who got caught trying to send a bloody wolf hide through the mail to Canada.) 

Is the HSUS being led down the garden path by other (possibly wolf-hater/poacher) ranchers who are eager to sell a higher-priced product to a new generation of starry-eyed foodies who think the sentient animals they’re eating were happy to know they were “sustainably” harvested? 

It was partly because of the wisdom of a few friends working for the HSUS on wildlife issues that my wife and I went vegan 16 years ago. Those friends are still as dedicated to the animal rights cause as ever, but somehow the HSUS as a group must have lost its nerve, its soul and now, its ever-loving mind.

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“Get To Hoofin It”: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

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“Get To Hoofin It”: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Sponsored by The Humane Society of the United States

www.gettohoofinit.com/home/tickets

By Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns

Probably everyone reading this knows the feeling of going to the computer each day, clicking on email, and experiencing that knot of dread as the messages unfold with their sad and terrible stories about animals, the horrible and endlessly ingenious ways and reasons that our species has for making animals suffer and die, which includes stripping them of their dignity.

If it’s bad enough knowing what the institutions and entities that we expect to hurt animals are doing to them, there is added despair involved in knowing what is being done to animals by organizations calling themselves “humane,” “anticruelty” and the like. It is monstrous seeing our language of care and respect degraded into completely opposite meanings. A perfect example is this:

 Get to Hoofin it: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

“We support farmers and ranchers who give proper care to their animals, and act in accordance with the basic ethic of compassion to sentient creatures.”
– The Humane Society of the United States

Most people know enough by now about the realities of animal farming, regardless of scale or label, to envision at least some of the details of what farmers and ranchers actually do to animals, versus verbalizations about “proper care” and “basic ethic of compassion.”

What these abstractions express and perpetuate in this context is alienation from actual animals. What they demonstrate is lack of respect for animals, indeed mockery of the very idea of “respecting” them. No one who truly respects animals, respects their dignity, feels with and for them, and wishes them joy in life supports “farming” them, because animal farming is about degrading animals meanly to the level of their genitals and their genes, mutilating their body parts, destroying their family life, controlling every aspect of their lives including culling (killing) them as one pleases when they are deemed not “productive” enough to keep feeding, and ultimately murdering them.

How can anyone claiming to respect animals promote a view of them as “dinner”?

Will a call to “Respect Your Dinner” advance your empathy and respect for animals as they lie slaughtered on your plate in barbecue sauce? Maybe the code word here is “basic.” Basic ethic of compassion = lowest possible level. In any case, compassion has nothing to do with the business and consumption of animal products. Its purpose is to gain customers and subvert consciences, to the extent that a conscience exists toward animals made into meals and blessed over in this condition even by their, uh, advocates. Like “humane,” the word compassion in this context is a mockery of both the animals and the meaning of words, including the word advocacy. It is the final gut punch to those we’re supposed to be advocating for.

Click on each animal photograph in this link for more information:
www.gettohoofinit.com

For more commentary, see pattrice jones here:
blog.bravebirds.org

Peaceful Prairie here:
www.peacefulprairie.org

James McWilliams here:
www.all-creatures.org

 Hen being slaughtered Basic ethic of compassion in action.

Dr. Steve Best on animal RIGHTS at AR2014‏

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it’s 25 minutes long………..and well worth your time

Steve Best at AR2014
http://arzone.ning.com/video/dr-steven-best-at-ar2014

Dr. Steven Best gave this talk in the opening plenary panel at the US National Animal Rights Conference, on July 10, 2014. Dr. Best spoke on the meaning of animal rights, and he contrasted it to animal welfare, contextualized both in the setting of modern capitalism, and underscored the subversive and revolutionary nature of animal rights.

Please forward the link.cow-and-calf-love_w520

Animal Rights, Steven Wise, and Steven Colbert

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This five and half minute interview filled with humor is really a very good one

Published on July 18, 2014 by Marc Bekoff, Ph.D. in Animal Emotions
For many years, Steven Wise, lawyer and President of the Nonhuman Rights Project, the only organization currently fighting to give some nonhuman (“animals”) legal rights such as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and his co-workers, have worked almost 24/7 to achieve this goal. In a recent interview with Steven Colbert called “Colbert Talks Legal Rights for Animals with Steven Wise” all of the pertinent issues including autonomy, personhood, justice, and rights are raised in just over five minutes, in a way that even non-experts will be able to grasp why Mr. Wise and others are working so hard on this project. For example, autonomy means that an individual is able to think about the past, think about the future, think about she or he wants to live their life, and display self-determination.

Animals are not things

The mission of the Nonhuman Rights Project is “through education and litigation, to change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere ‘things,’ which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to ‘persons,’ who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and those other legal rights to which evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them.” You can read more about this work (and also a historical perspective) in a recent essay by Charles Siebert in the New York Times called “Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?” and also in the summary of this interview with Mr. Colbert.

In an email to me on 13 December, 2013, Mr. Wise provided more of the details of his seminal work: The first week of December, 2013 saw the Nonhuman Rights Project file three New York lawsuits that demanded judges issue common law writs of habeas corpus on behalf of four chimpanzees imprisoned in the state of New York. Kiko and Tommy are being held on private property, while Leo and Hercules are held at Stony Brook University, where they are forced to participate in locomotion research.

These three suits are the first salvos in the Nonhuman Rights Project’s open-ended strategic litigation campaign to persuade common law high courts to recognize that such nonhuman animals as chimpanzees should not longer be treated as “legal things” that lack the capacity for any legal right. Instead the Nonhuman Rights Project demands that high courts recognize the chimpanzees as “legal persons” with the capacity for one or more legal rights and that these legal rights should include the common law right to bodily liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus.

In support of their argument, the Nonhuman Rights Project submitted 150 pages of Affidavits by nine of the finest working primatologists in the world, including Tetsuro Matsuzawa from Japan, William McGrew from England, Christophe Boesche from Germany, and Mathias Osvald from Sweden. These affidavits detail that chimpanzees are autonomous beings who possess such complex cognitive abilities as an autobiographical self, episodic memory, self-determination, self-consciousness, self-knowingness, self-agency, referential and intentional communication, empathy, a working memory, language, metacognition, numerosity, and material, social, and symbolic culture, an ability to plan, engage in mental time-travel, intentional action, sequential learning, mediational learning, mental state modeling, visual perspective-taking, cross-modal perception, an ability to understand cause-and-effect, the experiences of others, and an ability to imagine, imitate, engage in deferred imitation, emulate, innovate and use and make tools. All documents filed in each court, and any decisions, may be found at www.nonhumanrights.org.

It is essential to note that Mr. Wise is not concerned with all nonhuman animals, and while that irks some people, I think that just as The Great Ape Project had to begin somewhere, with the nonhuman beings who have the best chance of being granted legal rights, if successful, this work can set a precedent for extending rights to other animals. In my essay in the book titled The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity I argued that in some ways this project is speciesistic, but understandably so, and I later wrote an essay called “Deep Ethology, Animal Rights, and the Great Ape/Animal Project: Resisting Speciesism and Expanding the Community of Equals“. One of my major goals in this essay was to make the case that the time has come to expand The Great Ape Project (GAP) to The Great Ape/Animal Project (GA/AP) and to take seriously the moral status and rights of all animals by presupposing that all individuals should be admitted into the Community of Equals. University of Tennessee psychologist Gordon Burghardt also makes the same point in his review of The Great Ape Project published in the journal Society and Animals (1997, volume 5, pages 83-86). 

We human animals don’t have to worry if nonhuman animals are granted legal rights 

 

I was thrilled to see that Mr. Colbert wanted to talk with — actually he often talks at — Mr. Wise. However, the humor and sarcasm were catalysts for what I think is an excellent discussion of the nonhuman rights project and why it deserves global support. Indeed, Mr. Wise held his ground and by playing along with Mr. Colbert a lot of information was discussed.  I hope it this brief interview will be widely viewed, discussed, and shared. The lives of far too many sentient beings who care about themselves, their family, and their friends are on the line. And, human animals do not have to feel threatened by Mr. Wise’s work. Indeed, we too will benefit by expanding the circle of rights, and a goal of justice for all is a difficult one to dismiss. What a great lesson for youngsters.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201407/animal-rights-steven-wise-and-steven-colbert

 

We Must Preserve the Earth’s Dwindling Resources for My Five Children

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As many of you know, this site has a policy against approving comments from hunters and trappers or their apologists. Nothing personal; if this was a blog against child molesting, I wouldn’t approve comments from pedophiles either. Contrary to popular notion, there are a few moral absolutes in this universe, and the absolute truth is, killing other beings for sport is dead wrong—simple as that.

But some hunters are pretty slick when it comes to arguing their case, even going so far as to bring up issues we all agree on, such as overpopulation of humans or the deleterious effects monoculture crops have on wildlife and their habitat. Here’s a comment that nearly gained approval, had it not been for the implication at the end that plant eaters were responsible for more wildlife loss than hunters…

Submitted by William on 2014/07/05 at 5:57 pm

The WWF promotes and supports sustainable use of wildlife and natural resources. “Sports” hunting conducted under the auspices of a competent management authority is in fact a sustainable practice. This is in especially true when alternative uses for land include, mining, clearing and monoculture. There are many issues on our relationship with animals that will devide us. Eating and killing animals for our pleasure is one of the more pertinent ones (and yes, human beings can live a healthy life on a vegan diet it follows logically that meat is a purely sensory demand on our plates) . It is unreasonable to expect that the WWF prescribe personal ethics, be that meat eating, sports hunting , fishing or driving your 4*4 around . As an organization they have to work with a wide variety of stakeholders and inspite of personal beliefs and ethics they always have a sustainable future for wildlife as a goal. Just a quick personal note. The farm where i hunted as a youngster was recently converted to a maize farm. There are no more kudu, impala , lynx, jackal , owl, pangolin, owls, on the property

Of course, most monoculture crops are grown for the sole purpose of feeding farmed animals—a truth that many meat-eaters willfully overlook. And I don’t know of too many vegans who aren’t also advocates for curtailing or gradually reducing the burgeoning human population. There are a number of safe birth control methods, for those willing to use them.

And yes, it’s not just the sheer number of humans; the problem also has to do with the self-serving, unsustainable attitudes of some, as the following Onion article points out:

We Must Preserve The Earth’s Dwindling Resources For My Five Children

Jun 28, 2006

By Brenda Melford

As we move into the 21st century, it is our responsibility to think of the future of the earth—not for ourselves, but for those who will inherit what my husband and I leave behind when we’re gone. If we do not join together and do what’s best for this, our only planet, there may not be an environment left in which my five children, and their 25 children’s 125 children, can grow up and raise large upper-middle-class families of their own.

Nothing less than the preservation of my descendents’ lifestyle itself is at stake.

Imagine a world devoid of pristine wilderness for my progeny to explore on the weekends in the sport-utility-vehicles of the future, leaving my youngest son, Dylan, with nowhere to blow off steam on off-road adventures. Imagine a world in which my beautiful middle son, Connor, is denied his twice-daily half-hour hot showers because of water shortages. Picture what it would be like for my oldest boy Asher, preparing to start his first semester at Stanford, to have to go without basic amenities such as cable television, satellite radio, central air, or massage chairs, all because of the shortsighted squandering by his parents’ generation of our non-renewable energy sources today.

Though it seems like a far-off nightmare, this terrible vision is all too possible. Would you want to live in a world where my five children had to endure such horrible deprivations? I know I wouldn’t.

If we don’t take action now, my daughters Kimmy and Jenna may not be able to blow-dry their hair for 45 minutes to an hour each morning, nor may my future sons-in-law cut their grass atop enormous, diesel-powered riding mowers. In fact, they may not even have lawns—at least not the lush, verdant kind that requires constant watering and pesticide treatment. It’s conceivable that one day my five children’s spacious yards may be entirely composed of synthetic Astroturf, or—God forbid—those tacky wood chips my sister in Arizona uses.

In a cruel irony, those wood chippings will get more expensive as the world’s timber supply continues to shrink.

Encroaching urban sprawl has already begun to spoil the view from the porch of our beautiful new summer home on Lake Wakenaka. Sadly, the view from the bay windows of our first summer home, the one we built at our Woodland Acres property six years earlier, has already been ruined by such unchecked development. Must my children grow up in a world where only one of their parents’ summer homes is surrounded by the beauty of nature? It’s unthinkable, I know, but we must face facts.

This is to say nothing of the deleterious impact the destruction of our global ecosystems will have on the wildlife my family enjoys hunting. Biodiversity is crucial to another 100 years of deer-, quail-, duck-, bear-, moose-, bobcat-, and bison-shooting summer recreation for my descendents.

We must take steps immediately to devise safe, alternative energy sources that my future offspring can safely consume. If we don’t develop new fuels now, there will be none left for those who issue from my loins to burn and continue to burn for all time. I don’t want my 625-odd great-grandchildren to have to wait 20 or 30 precious seconds for their toilets to flush. I don’t want their 3,125 children to live in a hellish society where they cannot own their own snowmobiles. And I shudder to think that my 15,625 great-great-great-grandchildren may not be able to have TVs in every room that they can leave on all day and all night. Is it our right to deny my progeny of their gargantuan RVs and motorboats, as well? Of course not.

We cannot, in good conscience, lay such a burden on tomorrow’s generations of Melfords. My children are the future. And at the end of the day, isn’t it family—my family—that truly matters?

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“Feminist Hunter” Just another Oxymoron

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Completely by accident, I happened upon on another site and found an angry comment to my recent post entitled, “Kendall Jones, Just another Pretty Psychopath.” The female commenter claimed to be upset by the use of the word “males” as though it were an insult to people of the male persuasion. A great book by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Roots of Human Violence (which I included on my recommended reading list at the back of my book), would not have a title if it were taboo to use the M-word.

But it turns out the reason for her comment was that she was offended as a “feminist hunter.” My grandmother’s two older sisters were suffragettes who marched on Washington D.C. and got themselves arrested for the cause of furthering women’s rights. If it hadn’t been for them and women like them, this commenter still might not have the right to vote. But one thing they didn’t do was hunt.

Although it’s a sure-fire way to get attention, it makes no sense to objectify and exploit one group of oppressed (non-human animals) while championing one’s own cause (feminism). It flies in the face of those who actually do fight for the rights of others. I imagine most animal rights activists, like Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, would agree—the term “feminist hunter” is just another oxymoron.

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