So, we've been writing a thesis in for English class, as I may or may not have written before. I chose to write about the meat industry, and how freaking horrible it is. The final 3,5 pages almost turned me vegetarian...
Since I know many of my readers care a whole lot about these amazing creatures, I kinda decided, well I did decide(duh?) to publish my work. Also because... I think it's awesome. Kinda. You may or may not agree, but I do think so. Mostly because, at least I'm not able to read it without think "WTF are we doing?", and I know many of my readers will react in a similar way, so...
There isn't really anything more to say... Except that this is really just a bunch of texts, so I hope you'll hold on to the very end... Oh, and leave a comment if you have something to add about how we humans suck!
Enjoy...
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Why eat less meat?
Millions of animals are born every year, but not for the simple reason of living a life on Earth in peace – they are born to get killed, for one reason: to feed the greedy human.There will most certainly always be a craving for meat amongst humans, but the world's population must soon realize that we are exaggerating the amount of meat and fish that we put in our mouths on a daily basis, or it will only get worse. The industry has come to such extremes that it does not only cause damage on the actual animals; our environment is also getting worse and worse for every day that passes by; partly due to us humans consuming too much meat.
Some may think this means that we will have to stop eat meat for good, but this is not the case. All we need to do to make sure the animals get a better life, and the planet's condition improves, is to demand the industry to change, and to eat less meat. This especially applies to the richer parts of the world, that carry a special responsibility to decrease our daily meat consumption.
When a calf or a baby pig is born, it is immediately introduced to a hectic world with new smells, tastes and other impressions. As if this would not be enough for a newborn, it is also welcomed to life by stress – instantly taken away from its mother. This is because there is no value to the breeder in letting the baby adapt to its new environment with a mother by its side; it will not have to learn anything about how to live a life as a normal cow, or pig, since it will never get the chance to. It is simply born for the reason of existing, not living.
Male baby pigs get their testicles cut off as soon as they are “ready” for it. The procedure is quite simple; the testicles are merely cut off. No anaesthetics, just a quick snip with a pair of scissors, or whatever the human may be using.
Calves and baby pigs do not get divided by gender, unless the cow calves are supposed to give milk, since they can all give meat. It is a bit different when it comes to chickens, which are in fact divided into two groups from the very beginning. This is because they are valued differently. Since there is no real value in keeping the male chickens, due to them not laying any eggs, they are killed immediately after they are born. Gassed to death to be more precise; in view of this being the fastest and least painful way of killing them. When they have stopped breathing, passed out and finally died they are sent to zoos as reptile, snake or bird food, or they get blended into pet food.
The female chickens on the other hand, get into narrow cages to spend a life in a minimum space with several other chickens. Which fate is to be preferred, could be further discussed...
After a time they are all fed with food that will make them grow fast; fast enough for their legs to break by the their own weight, as a result of their legs not growing fast enough to be able to handle the suddenly added weight. The chickens' weight increases very fast due to their muscles growing four times as fast as they would have done a hundred years ago. They weigh about 1,4 kg after a month, and get slaughtered when they reach 1,7 kg. This is a consequence of farmers wanting the animals to get ready for slaughter faster, so that they can sell the animals and earn more money.
The animals are put in either tiny boxes with several other animals, or placed in enormous barns – collecting hundreds of them – where they are exposed to extreme stress. Most animals in the meat industry are never let outside, and all they do is wandering around; eating, sleeping, growing.
They are given growth hormones, both before and after the slaughter – everything is being done for the animals to get as big as possible, so that they will contain as much meat as possible. Bigger animals result in the breeder not having to feed as many animals, and therefore making it cheaper to keep them; plus, the income will not change since it is the same amount of meat being produced.
In England, there is a law saying that pigs should have something to play with, something that lets them behave like pigs should. Whether it's just simple straw, they need something to rout around and build nests in, which is what a normal pig wants and ought to be capable of doing. This law was mainly invented because only having a stone floor and no straw is a very poor life for a pig, though also because boar pigs can get aggressive amongst each other when they have nothing to do; it sometimes goes as far as to pigs getting killed. This, of course, is not only bad for the pigs, but also for the farmer, since he or she will lose pigs due to not treating them like he or she should, and therefore the owner will lose “meat money”. There are therefore no real advantages in keeping pigs on a simple stone floor, since both the pigs and the farmer will only lose by doing so. The only reason for one to do this would probably be that it is cheaper to not buy straw and have a single boar getting killed every now and then, than to bye straw all year around, and save a few boars.
Some pigs do not even get a real floor, but have to live on metal slats; which can only be described as a metal floor with holes, so that whatever comes out of the pigs does not really need to be cleaned up for the pigs home to be “clean”.
What is even worse is that some pigs are not even aloud to move. They live in small cages where they can only stand, sit and lie down - they cannot turn around, nor scratch themselves. They get no social experiences whatsoever, and are simply just standing there growing bigger and bigger as each day goes by. These cages are banned in Britain, and are planned to be banned in the EU in 2013.
Mankind has tried for centuries to make their animals bigger and better, hybridizing the biggest cow with the biggest bull to get a bigger calf. Some decades ago, we started to experiment with the genes of animals, wondering how to make their growth speed increase. We have now come so far that some animals grow so fast, the rest of their bodies can not catch up with the speed. Their muscles grow so fast they can barely do anything but stand still and eat, not being able to move due to the unnaturally big muscles.
The gene technology has of course also made things better; genes that were sources to several diseases have for example been removed. The question is to whom this is an improvement, since if the animals do not get these diseases, they will only live a longer life, suffering – unless they are animals living happy lives of course.
What most people do not think about when it comes to the meat industry is that it does not only affect the animals, but the environment and us humans as well.
It takes ten times as much farming land to produce animals as it takes to grow vegetables. An area located in for example Brazil, that could have been used to feed the people, is instead used to grow seeds and vegetables, which will later be sent to the western world. You may think that this food is for us humans, but no, it is for our animals. The animals that we ourselves breed for the reason of later killing and eating.
It is shown that 90% of the nutritive value is lost when the seed goes through the animal and then later to us. Therefore we could also save food if we begun to eat less meat; which would give the Brazilians more land to grow there own food on.
These arguments show that the whole meat industry is about morals – if one is willing to make the animals suffer for one's own success, or not. I am guessing that if you are willing to let them suffer, it is because you feel nothing for them; they really are just animals, and it does not really matter what happens to them, as long as you are happy yourself.
I believe that the biggest problem when it comes to the average people's thoughts about the meat industry is that they cannot relate to the animals. Not many people live their daily lives with pigs, hens, chickens or cows, so their compassion gets lower than if they would have. It would be a lot more simple if it would have concerned cats or dogs, because we live with those animals; keep them as pets, best friends, family members. We simply have feelings for them that we do not feel for any of the animals that suffers for the sake of us getting food on our tables.
This is also a matter of a lack of education. People do not want to know how their food is treated before they eat it; mostly because of how pictures or documentaries about reality's cruelty would make them feel. I would guess something close to murderers, which is of course what we are. Even if it would be me shooting the elk, or slaughtering the pig, I would be a murderer, which is completely natural, since it is what humans have done for as long as we know – hunting and killing animals. But for some reason this gets much more difficult to handle in modern time, since we do not actually kill the animal we eat. We do not slaughter it, and therefore we do not see ourselves as murderers in the same way as if we would have killed it with our own hands.
In China, they eat dogs – this is a known fact. The way they treat dogs before serving them is also known; the dogs' skins are torn from them while they are still alive and they are kept in small boxes; but there is rarely anyone who stops and thinks about that this is very similar to what we do to our pigs, cows and especially our birds. They get their feathers ripped from their skin so that we can get warm and comfortable pillows and covers. As soon as they have grown back out, they are ripped away again.
We probably get just as concerned by how China treats dogs, as the Indians does about the way we treat the cow, which is to them a holy animal. In some religions slaughter of a cow is prohibited, and the meat is taboo. Sort of in the same way we look at dogs and cats.
Another problem is the transporting of the animals. During the transportation, they get seriously injured, or even killed; sometimes because they do not get any water or food breaks, sometimes because of the stress of being packed so close to other animals.
The transportation of animals and their food also affects the environment – by trucks, boats, trains and airplanes going such long distances, letting out great amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2). As a result of this, the amount of damages due to the green house effects increases, and the layer of ozone around the Earth gets thinner and thinner.
The most common answer to why we should eat meat is simply “it tastes good”. That is one lonely reason really, because it is not like we cannot get the amount of protein that we need from other sources. Of course meat is the most effective way of getting protein into your digestive system, but there are still other solutions to how we can get our daily amount of meat. Vegetables such as soy beans contain a high amount of protein, but also many other nutrients which we need. Since meat has a higher concentration of protein, we would of course need to eat more soy beans than we eat meat, but we easily forget that the beans contain other nutrients as well.
There is also a problem with people simply not wanting to eat soy beans or similar food instead of meat, because it does not taste as good as meat. I personally believe that this is because people of today are simply served the wrong kind of vegetarian food. We know that there are quorn and falafels, but that is generally as far as our imagination about food without meat goes. There is simply a lack of imagination, and people do not care enough to come up with their own recipes or search for new. It is therefore a brilliant idea to start serving healthy, tasty, vegetarian food at both schools and at work places, so that people get in touch with the food more often. This is one of the many things we can do to start decreasing our daily consumption of meat. You can also invent one day a week that count as the weekly vegetarian dinner at home.
If one feels as though meat is a part of life, one can at least be sure that the animals that are being eaten have had a great life while on this planet. You can for example buy meat from ecologic farms, where the animals get to live lives they deserve and where they can run and enjoy life instead of being trapped in a tiny cage. It is also good to buy meat that has been produced locally; that way the length of the meat transportation will get shorter, and less carbon dioxide will be released.
My personal belief is that we definitely should eat less meat. Both because it is not good for our bodies to eat as much meat as we do – there are several diseases linked to an over-consumption of meat – but also because I really feel sorry for the animals! Since I have a dog, I can relate to the feelings of an animal. To me, it seems more difficult to be able to relate to the animals' suffering if you rarely or almost never have contact with other kinds of creatures than humans.
I am not a vegetarian myself, but I have no problem eating vegetarian food, and I am trying to make my family eat less meat and more vegetables; both because it tastes really good and it makes me happy to know that no animal was harmed in the production of the food I eat.
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Also, here's two of my reference videos. Both with awesome Jamie Oliver.
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I have to say; I'm kinda proud if you got this far and didn't miss out on a single paragraph. And thanks for taking the time to read it through! :D
The part about China and India was the last part that I wrote. I got kinda stuck in the thoughts, and wanted to write more about how you look at the treatment of animals in different cultures, but I felt as though I didn't have the time. What a bummer...
Btw, I think I'm going to write in English more often! It's a lot funner than to always write everything in Swedish! Also *random fact* many of my thoughts are in English... for some weird, unknown reason. Plus! If I do, les Americanos won't have to use stupid tools such as Google Translate. So it's kinda like a win-win situations. :)
Although, I'll probably have the Grammar Nazis over me in like a sec. *sobs* Like: myself. I just found a part where I wrote "one feel" instead of "one feels". Argh! That's the kind of stuff that kills me; those tiny, tiny mistakes. *sigh*
Just went a little Grammar Nazi and corrected all my errors. There were, like, 15 of them, and it mad me sad, so I changed them - yay!
Just went a little Grammar Nazi and corrected all my errors. There were, like, 15 of them, and it mad me sad, so I changed them - yay!
Now, I'm just gonna sum all this up into a 5min "presentation" for school tomorrow...
I really don't feel like going to school tomorrow. My brain hurts, my tummy hurts (why do I sound like a 5yo in my head when I say "tummy"..?!), and everything's just... Bläusch.
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