xVx

vegangirls:

michaeljohnphillips:

vegangirls:

michaeljohnphillips:

vegangirls:

Eggs.

• Chickens are sorted at birth to collect the females. Male chicks are considered useless since they cannot produce eggs themselves, but were also bred to be a part of the egg-laying strain of chickens which are not suitable for meat. Just hours after hatching they are either thrown alive into plastic bags, dumpsters, or into a chute which leads to a grinder. The female chickens are debeaked to prevent pecking one another from the stress of being locked in confined spaces with so many others. The majority of egg-laying hens are put into “battery cages” which usually contain up to five hens that have to share an 18 by 20 inch cage for their entire laying cycle, which under the stressful living conditions usually lasts only 1-2 years, compared to their natural 15-20 years of life. When they stop producing eggs they are either killed or “force molted”, which is a process where they are locked in a dark room without food or water for several days to shock their bodies into another egg laying cycle.

Dairy.

• Cows are forcibly impregnated once every year so that they continually produce milk. Sometimes this procedure is done on a device known to the dairy industry as a “rape-rack.” The artificial insemination process involves a farmer inserting the entire length of his arm into the cow’s rectum to position its uterus, while they force an instrument into its vagina to inject the semen.

  Their male newborns are usually taken away at birth and hastily castrated. They spend the remainder of their lives locked in a space barely bigger than their body while remaining tied down to prevent any new muscle growth. They are never allowed to walk or move freely and are fed an artificial liquid diet to produce the pale colored flesh sold as veal. The newborn females are taken and raised with surrogate mothers to become dairy cattle themselves when they are of age. When the adult cows stop producing milk or become “spent” they are usually sold to slaughterhouses. Less than fifty percent of dairy cows live past seven years of age, with twenty-five percent being slaughtered before the age of three. The natural lifespan of a cow is twenty to twenty-five years.

Meat.

• Cows raised for beef are usually kept in unsafe and unsanitary living conditions where injury and disease are prevalent. To combat this, they are given a long list of antibiotics. To ensure they produce a large quantity of meat they are given artificial growth hormones and fed a diet of mostly corn and soy, which makes them fattier but also very unhealthy as their normal diet is mostly grass and other ground covering plants. They are branded for identification purposes, either with a combination of ear tag and tattoo, or with a branding iron. When they are slaughtered they are knocked unconscious with a device which drives a steel bolt into their skull. It is designed to make them black out but also keep their heart pumping, so they drain more blood when their throats are slit. It has a high failure rate and they are sometimes still conscious while they are painfully bleeding to death.

Dumbasses. Chickens? It’s called free range chickens, just the way nature intended. 

Milk? Same thing. Go to your grocery store. Look at the organic milk. Notice how the expiration date is a lot further off than traditional hormone filled milk? Enough said.

Beef… hmm… ever heard of grass fed beef? To me, it tastes a million times better and you don’t feel like poop when you eat it.

Viable options that aren’t considered inhumane to some are there. They’re natural and work just the way nature intended, but unfortunately as a society, we’ve bought into the cheapest route that we can take. No one cares what’s in their burgers, and we buy it. The problem isn’t the actual animals in our diets, it’s how they’re raised. 

You’re wrong if you think “cage free” “grass fed” “humane” “free range” “organic” or “hormone free” means anything. I’m too exhausted to spell it out for you “Dag” but if you would educate yourself here’s a pretty good first step.

http://www.humanemyth.org/cagefree.htm

http://www.humanemyth.org/happycows.htm

I’m not even talking about just the commercial options per say. We buy our milk from a farm down the street, not on the other side of the country. I’ve seen the cows that produce our milk. They’re pretty damn happy to my eyes and everyone else I know that’s seen them. Same deal with the chickens, they’re free range and not fed a SINGLE thing they wouldn’t find in nature. The options are there, that’s my point. When my father and I used to cook fish, we wouldn’t go to the store. We’d go catch it ourselves. We would eat what we caught, hunted, and we appreciated every bit of it. It’s all about utilizing the resources nature has, not manipulating them.

Don’t mistake me, I’m completely against caged animals, commercial farms, all of that. It’s disgusting, inhumane and just sickens me. That being said, I’ve tried being vegan. It just feels unnatural to me, but each their own. I know the literature, trust me, my mom’s a huge organic health nut and could talk you to death on the hormones and antibiotics that are there.

Now the reason I’m talking about the commercial options is because you have to start somewhere. A cow that’s raised in a pasture lives a much healthier one than one raised in a slaughterhouse, and it’s not hard to find ethical alternatives to traditional beef. People just don’t look.

I get what you’re saying. I do. And it may seem like they enjoy their time on the farm, and they may even enjoy it themselves sometimes. But nothing wants to be used. Animals are not property. They are not machines. They feel, they think, and like all things living they want to be free. Am I saying no one should care for animals? No. I feel just the opposite. Domesticated animals are so far removed from the natural world that it’s our responsibility to take care of them. That being said, there’s a line between being a caretaker and just taking. I’m not saying the people who own the farm down the road are bad, and I’m not saying the people who consume the dairy and eggs from that farm are bad either. What I am saying is people need to understand that animals are not here to make food for us. They aren’t here to be our slaves, and we have no more right to take from them than they do from us. A cow makes milk to feed her child. Not for us, not for anyone but her child. It’s an intimate gift of life giving nourishment that she delivers out of love. We step in and hijack it from her, from her calf. It was never ours. And that’s what’s wrong. Chickens don’t lay eggs so we may eat them, they lay them so that they may reproduce. And most of all we have no right to kill an animal and eat their flesh. They have just as much right to live their lives as we do ours. When you take something’s life away, it is murder, plain and simple. When an animal dies for us it wasn’t a sacrifice so that we made feed, but a cruel and unnecessary act out of greed and selfishness on the part of man.

Animals value their lives as much as you value yours. You know that. If you didn’t you wouldn’t have tried veganism. I’m not going to tell you what to do with your life, but don’t close your eyes to something that’s wrong.

(via xvxavier)