Whole Lotta Gobblin' Goin' On (mainly ours): The annual slaughter of turkeys is underway

As I write the annual Christmas Dinner turkey slaughter--a holocaust for those birds--is underway around the Northern Hemisphere.

Here's an article headed "The Shocking Secret That Will Put You Off Your Xmas Dinner" that makes you hope this 'practice' is not too common - but with the millions of turkeys being slaughtered worldwide right now, and in such a short time period too, you have to (sadly) wonder...

And here's an Esquire magazine piece on how to slaughter your own turkey. At least reading this, and looking at its photographs, one can't maintain that conscious denial--the disconnect Jeffrey Masson talks about in The Face on Your Plate--about what really has to occur to get that creature on the table.

Lastly, a little poignant little song my daughter learned in Kindergarten which sums it up from the turkeys' POV but which trivializes the turkey holocaust by trying to make it sound 'cute:'

  I heard Mr. Turkey say
    "Gobble, Gobble, Gobble.
  Soon it will be Christmas Day
     Gobble, Gobble, Gobble.
  People say that it's such fun...  
  But I think that I will run...
  And hide until the day is done
     Gobble! Gobble! Gobble......"

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The Rockin' Vegan

Check out his Egyptian Foul (pronounced "Fool"):

http://therockinvegan.blogspot.com/2010/02/egyptian-foul-sounds-like-fool.html

Cat's milk, mmm-mm

I’ve been reading an argument that goes it’s okay to milk and slaughter cattle because the people who raise them "take care of them all their lives" and that is the cows’ and beef cattles' due -- return payment, for their feed and housing.  And that’s why it’s okay to drink their milk, kill them, and eat them.

Well, I’ve been chewing that one over.  I don’t live on a farm or really anywhere near beef cattle and dairy cows so I don't have any cows that owe me.  But I do live in relationship with a cat and some squirrels.

So my cat owes me, right?  Now, I probably wouldn’t get enough milk from a 12 pound cat for daily requirements, so what about those squirrels?

I live in a really old house with places where they can get in the attic, and they do.  Though I like the squirrels, they can be pretty annoying in the autumn when they're collecting the chestnuts and  between forays also apparently use them in a 10-‘pin’ bowling alley situated in the attic above my bedroom.  They tend to bowl at sunrise before they go to work, just like my neighbours who go to the early bird aerobics class, only thankfully, those people are not 7 ft.  over my bed.

Between my cat (who owes me big time) and the squirrels, I should be able to get a few glasses of milk a day for me and my family, I figure-- -- What?  Why are you recoiling?  You have a problem with cat and squirrel milk?  But you’re udderly okay with cow’s glands?  Hmn.  What is the basis of your revulsion and discrimination amongst the nipple areas of other-than-bovine mammalian species?

Isn’t that a bit like the people who say they “only eat chicken & fish” (I did this for years)? So what are fish & chicken, chopped livah?  What did chicken and fish do to get on our Okay-to-Eat list, that cows, pigs, sheep, bunnies, baby seals, lambs, ducks, geese, shellfish, and horses didn’t do?

How come it’s okay to devour one species but not another?  Not okay to bludgeon baby seals to death, but okay to throw baby chicks, alive, into the grinder?

And I was there.  I was an “only chicken and fish” person for years and years - and my daughter kept asking me that question.  It’s one to think about.

There is a move afoot to take certain parts of  rat and mouse milk to put in human baby formula. Why? Worth thinking about.  What about all the cool stuff for human babies in human breast milk? 

And what about saying sayonara to milk around 2-3 years old anyway?


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Must be nice to be rich: the no-meat mansion

Meat ban by Indian-origin billionaire stirs row
28 Mar 2010

PERTH:  Indian-born billionaire Pankaj Oswal and his wife Radhika have told workers building their $70 million mansion in the Australian city of Perth that they should not consume meat on the site, stirring a controversy with a construction union hitting out at the ban.

The massive mansion, located in the exclusive suburb of Peppermint Grove here, is expected to be finished at the end of next year. It will have a swimming pool 10 times bigger than the average back yard, an observatory, a gymnasium the size of a regular Perth house, a beauty salon as well as parking for 17 cars, Perth Now reported on Sunday.


Rest of story

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Mmmmm, eggs

Quoting Jeffrey Masson from The Face on Your Plate: 

"Almost all hens kept for laying eggs have their beaks trimmed when they are small chicks. It is generally done with an electric machine that uses a hot blade to cut off half the upper beak and about one third of the lower beak of the young chick (how many of them actually die from shock during the operation is not currently known)."  The photo is  from Liberation BC.
And here is how it's done:

I [Masson] have asked farmers who debeak about the procedure and have been told it is like humans cutting their fingernails. But this is manifestly untrue.  There are no nerve endings in my fingernails, while there are many in the beaks of hens. A more accurate comparison would be to liken the procedure to cutting off the tip of my finger. Zoologist F.W. Roger] Brambell said so in no uncertain terms, and as far as I know no scientist has ever contradicted his observation:  'Between the horn and bone [of the beak] is a thin layer of highly sensitive soft tissue, resembling the quick of the human nail. The hot knife blade used in debeaking cuts through this complex horn, bone and sensitive tissue causing severe pain.'

The nerve endings do grow back, but because of the trauma inflicted on them, they grow into what is known as a neuroma--a tangled mass of nerve fibers and surrounding scar tissue that often weeps discharge. Since the tip of the beak is richly innervated and has pain receptors in the same way that our hands do, both acute ad chronic pain is the inevitable result of debeaking."

Will that be sunnyside or easy over?

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A CandyLand Easter

Here is an enormous inflatable Lindt milk chocolate bunny, outside a drugstore. 

This is only one drugstore in Canada, not to mention North America and Europe.

When a little balloon costs two dollars, imagine what this - and its thousands of POS (point-of-sale) clones must have cost -- all folded into the price of the chocolate, of course. I wonder what the homeless guy, who stands outside this store in all weather under his grimy damp  blanket, thinks of this excess?

I drove down the street after gawking at this and saw one of those Smart Cars all painted gold with huge gold bunny ears  -- a Lindt Gold Bunny car.

This is one among presumably thousands of Lindt gold bunny cars out there promoting a CandyLand Easter.

The Smart Car is environmentally worthy...but you have to wonder about the manufacture of those gigantic balloons, both the ingredients  used to manufacture them and the energy used to create them; and then about what inflates them, and the energy used to transport them all over the world. All  all that marketing money for this one promotion for a religious festival that has become more about candy than crucifixion. And all those unhappy cows who lived nasty lives to produce the milk for the chocolate.

I hope Jesus doesn't come back too soon. I don't think He'd be very happy either to see what the festival contemplating the meaning of his life & death has come down to.

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Happy Easter, newborn animals

Look at all these cute little chocolate bunnies. What a sweet sweet image--and not just because of the sugar in them.

Under that non-recyclable gold foil, these bunnies are made of milk chocolate. The milk is obtained from poor innocent cows kept in dark stalls or on ghastly milking carousels all their lives -- pumped and repumped of their milk throughout the day by cold metallic "lips." Artificially inseminated (ouch) to keep them pregnant, birthing, and lactating even after their little calves are ripped, howling, away from their mothers soon after birth.

Those poor benighted creatures provide the milk to make the milk chocolate bunnies that are oh-so-cute, and which help us to ring in the season of Easter - Oestre - Spring........ the season of newborn lambkins and newborn calves. Little lambykins that we imitate for our children with plush toys for Easter baskets, their mammalian counterparts who are destined to  sit on a platter with mint sauce. And sweet almond eyed calves who will be sent off to live a life of unadulterated torture to become plated veal.

Happy Easter newborn animals.

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