Proper pig slaughter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYHc3A7VF0g

If you can’t watch, please just listen.

My parents were both raised on farms.  As a child, I remembered going to my uncle’s farm and we would gather as an extended family and butcher a bunch of chickens and then take some home with us.  I am pretty sure money changed hands but not sure.  They created a mini-assembly line.  My mom’s job was scooping partially formed eggs out of the oviducts.  I remembers chickens getting their heads chopped off, the smell of burnt feathers (they singed off recalcitrant pin feathers) and interested but unwelcome cats.  (The work was done in the wash house.)

My mom and dad intimately knew what it took to raise chickens and beef and wheat.  They knew about sweating.  Getting up in freezing weather to feed livestock because they depended on you.  In a way not true for many of us, they understood the costs of having food to eat.  My mom named her calves and then mourned them when they “left”.

I buy free range chickens from a local producer.  People say all of the time, “How can you _afford_ that?”  Well, I actually have more trouble with the morality costs of those factory raised chickens.  Serendipitously, I’ve seen one of those, too.

My parents were one of those parents that said, “Finish your food.  There is starving children in…”  The humor of that never struck me until I heard the line recycled in comedy skits.  They were saluting the actual costs of raising food and the sacred sacrifice of the animal.  They were saying, “Honor this sacrifice.”  And my father had known hunger during the depression.

So it is incumbent on us to face and acknowledge the costs of our way of life.  Just like (as a former drug prevention educator) I’m aware of the limitations of scary videos about kids dying in alcohol related crashed, I think slaughter house videos will have limitations.  The gross out is not the point.

My DH is a fan of Joseph Campbell.  and he says that Campbell often said, “Life feeds on life.”  He said it as a fact, which it is. 

anything that can make us aware of our profound interdependence on each other needs to be engaged.

My answer is 10 to 1, YES. Of course with the caveat that there was nothing else to eat but meat. Give every American a day’s work in that Fallujah hospital, and it would go a long way to selling peace. A week, and we might even get understanding in the bargain. Take away all bloody news reports and movies, all gross economic inequalities, all hate-preaching and fear-mongering—and we’d be on the road to a better world.
  Trouble is, the Big Guys aren’t up for it.  No money grabbing. No power grabbing. Only the sun on the water and the wind in the trees.  Only a child’s voice saying “Thank You” in 147 languages.

What is needed is transparency at the government level - government sites (or maybe someone should start one up) should publish the salaries, perks and benefits (including ‘socialist’ healthcare the Senators and govt officials enjoy but not average Americans) of all Senators, Members, high govt officials.  Transparency gets things out into the open, where secrecy is not tolerated. An informed public makes for a better democracy.

freeze—- first they come for the placenta…....

heterochromatic -

“Sirota echoes an argument from the anti-abortion folks.”

Only if the mothers eat the fetuses.

true: out of sight, out of mind. and not just killing animals but also people at home and abroad.
DR lists some factors: such as globalization and narcissism for our [panhuman, really] willful or manufactured ignorance
of what goes on, but i suggest these two phenomena are mere effects of an underlying cause.
and narcissism or self-love, self-respect, if one wld thusly define that label, is actually a virtue.
in my experience, it is clear to me that if i or anyone else does not love-respect self, one cannot respect-love anyone else
nor any animal.
let me point out, please, that DS may be confusing supremacism [me-better-than-anyone-else] with selflove or
narcissism with.
and it is the supremacist ideology which causes globalization, pollution, death, expulsion of people from their habitat,
lust for power, uncaring, hatred, discrimination [and its twin duaghters: racism or racial divide and meritocracy],
bellicosity, never =ending thisrts fro more gadgets, machines, etc.
to recap:
1)SELFLOVE IS VERY DESIRABLE. and question arises, can today anyone have enough of it or like the one nature or god
intended for us?   
2)THE FIRST CAUSE is not our panhuman carelessness, ignorance, uncaring, lustfulness, division, rage, etc.—-
supremacism is.

haha very true hetero, although I will say that I have trouble ordering lobster because of the fact that they dunk those guys in boiling water, so there might be some value to the argument.  Like wtf, can’t you just stab it through the head and then dump it in boiling water?? Messed up man.

Sirota echoes an argument from the anti-abortion folks.

Did you know that it is illegal to videotape inside a slaughterhouse?  New rules after PETA expose.  This question: Whether Americans would eat less meat if they were exposed to the cruelty of the system touches on a basic problem in American society.  Is it that we cannot deal with reality, or are we purposefully kept from confronting reality by political and corporate forces?

Case in point: Time magazine runs different covers of the magazine in different countries.  A few months ago, in Europe, they ran a cover depicting an Afghan mother cradling a dead and bloody child from a drone strike with mayhem in the background.  In the US, that same issue, had a little cartoon guy on the cover that was entwined with a string.  The headline was: “Is Stress Good For You?’

So, is it a willful ignorance on the part of Americans or something more sinister?