Showing posts with label Animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Animals. Show all posts

Monday, July 25, 2011

Best Speech You Will Ever Hear - Gary Yourofsky TheAnimalHolocaust

Gary Yourofsky's entire inspirational speech on animal rights and veganism held at Georgia Tech in summer of 2010. Listen to this amazing speaker who will blow away the myths, fill your mind with interesting facts, and help you make ethical choices for a healthy heart and soul. His charismatic preachy style is one of a kind - a must-see for anyone who cares about nonhuman animals or wishes to make the world a better place.

PLEASE SHARE this brilliant speech in any way you can.
Thank you.

Why you should share this speech in any way you can?
The amount of positive responses Gary gets from viewers & students says it all:
http://www.adaptt.org/comments-students.html

The Q&A session can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIkC4OJEx3c

Why vegetarianism should not be advocated

By Adam Kochanowicz

I was once a vegetarian who believed so strongly in vegetarian education, I continued to recommend others go vegetarian even when I was a vegan.  Eventually, I came to my senses and realized the ethical implications of a vegetarian diet are no better than an omnivorous one.

Yet advocates today are happy to tell people to go vegetarian due to some faulty logic which I will examine. Advocates believe vegetarianism is useful because it leads to veganism and anyone who disagrees is "infighting."

I've been accused plenty of times by vegetarians of being "anti-vegetarian," I was once a vegetarian myself and I wish someone would have written this article for me.  For those of you who truly take the rights of animals seriously, I'm asking you to read this article with an open mind.

Should animal rights activists promote vegetarianism?

imageOf course, advocating an entirely vegan lifestyle can be overwhelming to some but should advocating vegetarianism be our response?  While an individual may not be persuaded to give up all animal products, we should keep our message vegan, never recommending vegetarianism as a step. I will explain why I believe this momentarily.

Truly, there are no sets of animal products which are more ethical to animals than another set. All require exploitation which puts an animal in the situation in which poor treatment is inevitable.  The general public is lead to believe, for instance, dairy can't be so bad because you don't have to kill the cow to get the milk.

However, pretty much all food animals will end up in the slaughter house once they no longer fulfill their previous role as existing for our use.  When a cow stops giving milk, a bird stops producing eggs, an elephant stops doing tricks, what do you suppose a business which relies on these functions will do?

Read More on http://www.examiner.com Here!

Baby Cows Born in Hell

Ripped from their mothers on the day they're born, veal calves spend the rest of their lives in crates too small to turn around.

Courtesy of Youtube!

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Dairy is slavery

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Factory-farmed dairy cows endure annual cycles of artificial insemination, mechanized milking for 10 out of 12 months (including 7 months of their 9-month pregnancies), and giving birth. On industrialized dairy facilities, these animals are denied nearly all of their natural behaviors and instincts.

Even if dairy cows are "free range" and "organic" (as if that changes what happens to the male calves) ... slavery and early death is *still* wrong.

We don't need slaves. Go vegan, it's easy.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Overlooked: The Lives of Animals Raised for Food

Narrated by James Cromwell, 'Overlooked' takes a look at the cruelty animals endure on factory farms, as well as recent advancements for farm animals and what you can do to help them.

Help farm animals and follow the Three Rs:
http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/eating/

Courtesy of Youtube!

Monday, July 11, 2011

Stories from Behind the Walls

If you go behind the walls the industry erects to hide the truth, you will find the situation worse than you could have imagined.

When I saw what life is really like for pigs on today’s farms, I was left feeling physically sick for days. I suppose I knew they lived on concrete, indoors in factory farms. However, I was not prepared for the intensity of their confinement, and the awful reality of their boredom.

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In the gestation shed, I heard a constant clanging noise. It was the sows hitting their heads against their cage doors as if trying to escape. After a while, some would give up and lie down, while others again took up their futile action.

I saw the pens where pigs are fattened up for slaughter – essentially concrete cells, each holding about a dozen pigs (left). In one pen, there was a pig missing an ear. Another had a rupture the size of a grapefruit protruding from his stomach (above). A dead pig was constantly nudged and licked by others (below, right). The stench in these places is overwhelming.

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Read More on VeganOutreach.org Here!

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Does Eating Meat Support Bestiality?

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On Friday, the New York Times ran a front page story about chicken slaughter; the paper's quote of the day comes from a farmed animal researcher for the RSPCA, Marc Cooper, who says about chicken slaughter, "people don't want to know too much."

Indeed, slaughter is something meat-eaters don't want to think too much about. One needn't look further than their name to know that slaughterhouses are gruesome places. And just the term "factory farm" conjures up (correct) images of animals cruelly-crammed into filthy, polluting warehouses. But farmed animals endure abuses far worse than even the most horrific things we might think of when we hear "slaughterhouse" or "factory farm."

Some years back, PETA documented workers at a Smithfield supplier ramming gate rods into the anuses and vaginas of pregnant pigs, while laughing and bragging about it. One of the offenders was eventually given six months in jail, because he had (small wonder) spousal abuse charges in his past.

Read More on HuffingtonPost.com Here!

Milk Comes From Grieving Mothers - Truth About Organic Dairy

Is the taste of cows' milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, ice cream really worth this much suffering?

Lena, a mother cow's perspective of her experience as a dairy cow.
The truth about organic dairy.

From Organic Valley/CROPP Cooperative:
"Economically, it is not possible for farmers to keep retired cows on the farm.... Organically raised cows will stay a part of the herd for an average of 6-8 years verses conventionally raised cows who only average 4 years...." (PPS: this means that organically raised cows have two more years of emotional and physical suffering and two more of their newborn babies stolen from them and murdered for Veal).

"We require that the packing plants (another word for slaughterhouse) get certified before we will do business. This means that our animals must be processed (brutally slaughtered) separately with clean equipment. This also means that they cannot use chemicals or pesticides in the plant."
Organic Valley/CROPP Cooperative
Consumer Relations

http://www.peacefulprairie.org/outreach/grievingMother.html

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

GO VEGAN - Slaughter House


There are endless reasons to become vegan. The most urgent, to humans, is the fact that meat production produces more global warming gases than all the cars, trucks, trains, ships, planes, on earth- combined (this according to UN and industry statistics).

Another obvious fact is that it's horrifically cruel to the animals. And animals do feel pain, have a sense of self, emotions, etc, just like humans. So causing them unnecessary pain is a true ethical concern.

It is also unhealthy for humans to consume meat and dairy products, and meat and dairy production waste irreplaceable natural resources and feed fewer people than if we simply raised vegan food. Plus, by going vegan, we'd be able to feed the 30,000 impoverished people who die daily due to starvation related disease. Meat production uses more resources and land and yields far less food than farming a vegan diet.

This is NOT opinion, it's all sound scientific fact based on peer reviewed scientific research.

Farming and consuming meat is NOT a sustainable practice, therefor it cannot continue. So, if you care about anything at all, do the right thing and go vegan. Now.

Your body will thank you, the animals will thank you, the planet will thank you, the 30,000 people who starve to death daily due to wealthy western nations growing meat rather than a vegan diet will thank you.

A senior UN official and co-author of a UN report detailing this problem, Henning Steinfeld, said "Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems". Livestock production occupies 70% of all land used for agriculture, or 30% of the land surface of the planet. It is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases, responsible for 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalents. By comparison, all transportation emits 13.5% of the CO2. It produces 65% of human-related nitrous oxide (which has 296 times the global warming potential of CO2,) and 37% of all human-induced methane (which is 23 times as warming as CO2. It also generates 64% of the ammonia, which contributes to acid rain and acidification of ecosystems. Livestock expansion is cited as a key factor driving deforestation, in the Amazon basin 70% of previously forested area is now occupied by pastures and the remainder used for feedcrops. Through deforestation and land degradation, livestock is also driving reductions in biodiversity.

Courtesy of Youtube!

Humane Society: Undercover Video Shows Alleged Abuse at Egg Farm

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Washington (CNN) -- A group that protects the welfare of animals has released an undercover video it claims shows animal abuse at a Texas farm operated by the largest egg producer in the United States.

The Humane Society of the United States says one of its investigators worked at the Cal-Maine farm in Waelder, Texas, for almost a month this fall and documented multiple abuses and food-safety violations.

The video shows dead birds, birds stuck in their cages, overcrowding and what appears to be hens covered in feces. At one point the video shows a dead bird as eggs roll by just inches away on a conveyor belt.

The short, edited video was shown at a news conference on Wednesday by the Humane Society's president and CEO, Wayne Pacelle. "Our latest farm animal investigation documents inhumane treatment of laying hens and conditions that threaten food safety," Pacelle said from the group's headquarters in Washington.

Read More on http://edition.cnn.com Here!

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Viva! & Sky News: Happy Eggs Farms Exposed

8 Reasons You Should Stop Drinking Milk Now

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What could be more American than a glass of milk? Cow's milk, that is. In light of this common perception, the time is long overdue to add the milk mustache to that ever-growing list of American myths. Human beings are not designed to drink any milk except human milk (only during infancy, of course). As you'll see below, consuming dairy products—milk, cheese, yogurt, sour cream, ice cream, etc.—is not green and it's not healthy.

It's also a nightmare for the cows themselves. Here's a little of how the folks at GoVeg describe it: "The 9 million cows living on dairy farms in the United States spend most of their lives in large sheds or on feces-caked mud lots, where disease is rampant. Cows raised for their milk are repeatedly impregnated. Their babies are taken away so that humans can drink the milk intended for the calves. When their exhausted bodies can no longer provide enough milk, they are sent to slaughter and ground up for hamburgers."

1. Dairy cows produce waste.
Lots of waste. In fact, your average dairy cow produces
120 pounds of waste every day—equal to that of more than two dozen people, but without toilets, sewers, or treatment plants.

2. Let me repeat: Dairy cows produce lots and lots of waste (and greenhouse gases).
California produces one-fifth of the country's total milk supply. According to
MilkSucks.com, "in the Central Valley of California, the cows produce as much excrement as a city of 21 million people, and even a smallish farm of 200 cows will produce as much nitrogen as in the sewage from a community of 5,000 to 10,000 people, according to a U.S. Senate report on animal waste."

Read More on http://planetgreen.discovery.com Here!

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

How Does Drinking Milk Harm Cows?

Dairy cows are continually kept pregnant and lactating and their babies are taken away from them when they are only two days old. The life of a dairy cow is not as natural as you might think, especially considering that 80 percent of dairy cows are made pregnant through artificial insemination. 1

The only way for a cow, like any other mammal, to produce milk is for the cow to have a baby. The milk produced by cows is naturally meant for baby calves; however, because people want to drink this milk, the baby calves are taken away from their mothers when they are only a few days old. 1 Cows are extremely maternal animals and both the mother cow and the baby calf suffer terribly from being separated at such a young age. One study showed that calves with no interaction with their mothers or only interaction through a fence, "induced significant increases in walking, butting, urinating, and vocalizing"2. In fact, one cow missed her baby so much that she broke out of her paddock and trekked through 8 kilometers of paddocks and rivers to find her baby 3. On dairy farms, mother cows can be heard bellowing out wildly trying to find their babies as well as running after the cattle trucks that take their babies to separate farms.

The baby calves lives are then decided by their gender. If the calf is male then he is taken away to be raised and slaughtered for meat. Because of this the NZ dairy industry contributes to the death of more than 1 million male calves every year. 4 That’s one death every 20 seconds. In fact, 55 percent of all beef in New Zealand supermarkets comes directly from the dairy industry. 5 These male calves are transported to separate meat farms or slaughterhouses, where they will never see their mothers again. Transported as young as 4 days of age, they endure cold and hunger, without food for up to 30 hours, while struggling to maintain their footing in the cattle truck.

Read More on http://nzdairy.webs.com Here!

Friday, June 10, 2011

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Pregnancy at Slaughter: What Happens to the Calves?

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What happens when a cow is pregnant at the time of slaughter? I almost wish I didn't know. From the calves experiencing their mother's death from inside her, while they too suffer or die their own terrible death, to live calves being cut from their dead mother's womb, so that their blood can be drained for science while they're still alive--it's all horrific, and none of it is ever talked about, even though it's a part of the dairy and beef industries and a part of how people get their "finest" leather. There's enough to cover here that two posts are required. This is the first.

By accident a few months ago, I ended up watching a video of a pregnant cow already stunned and hung upside down--and the video showed an apparently almost-full-term calf struggling inside and against the mother's body, kicking in desperation, dying a horrible death inside the womb. Later came the image of that young calf's presumably dead body tossed into a bin (though it seems still live calves are often tossed as well).

View More on change.org Here!

Monday, June 6, 2011

Saving Billy

Please watch, not only do female dairy cows suffer, but so do their male offspring as they are considered worthless to the industry!

He had only been in the world one day, but it was to be his last. Billy, one of many male calves considered worthless by the dairy industry, was about to receive a fatal hammer blow to the head when a man named Larry intervened. In this video, hear more about the rescue and see Billy enjoying life at our New York Shelter.

Courtesy of Youtube!

Sunday, June 5, 2011

A Beautiful Friendship Between The Cow and The Dog

March 6th 2008 Baby Obama turned 1 month. I received her on February 14th 2008.

Before that she was abandoned by her mother we assume because the other cows cleaned her off or she was the heifer's first calf or the calf's eyes are white (birth defect). My boyfriend bung her home, he so I could care for her. I didn't want to, because unlike humans cows have to have first milk from their mother to live. But I did anyway. I got her some fake first milk from the Tractor Supply and nursed her every 4 hours for a month. She lived outside on my front porch inside a kid's tent. Yes it was messy and hard work, but she was just a baby. This video is just a glimpse of a few minutes of this calf's life.

The dog. Tracey is a mixed pit bull (WE THINK) from a rescue shelter if you would like to make a donation to them here is the web address. http://www.angelsofassisi.org/

Now for the sad part

Animals are unpredictable creatures, just from the comments I see people have no clue how instinctive they are. Tracey dog never showed any signs of rage or ill toward baby. Tracey Dog is a frog hunter that is right my dog enjoys hunting and playing with frogs till they die. She's a dog, it's an instinct, because she's a hunter and my son taught her to go into the creek and get them. Tracey dog is not aggressive and in any way violent, but she is a dog and dogs HUNT. That's nature!

The first week the cow would sleep in the tent and the dog didn't mind her much. She would lick the cows butt to help stimulate her bowls just like a mother cow, but other than that there was little to no interaction between the two. Again Tracy would lick her butt not to help the cow but to get rich stool from her. It's a dog and yes they eat poop, but in a since she was helping the calf. So, one evening I went with my boyfriend (I LEFT THE HOUSE) to feed the other cows. Tracey was inside with the family and the calf was on the porch. When I came home the calf was on the ground and Tracey was eating her ear. Of course I freaked out and had to whip my dog (for well being an animal) to get her to stop EATING THE CALF. It took me weeks to get over the fact my best friend; my dog was so evil. Then one day, a month after this happened I was about to go outside and fuss at Tracey for being around the calf. Then, I noticed Tracey was just standing there, and the calf was sucking on her ear. I grabbed the video camera and this is the images I filmed. I guess Tracy accepted that this was a calf we didn't eat, she was "family" like her, how she understood that other meat we eat and this meat we don't is beyond me. But for the next 4 months these two animals went everywhere together.

Baby Obama lived for 6 months, after she broke out of the yard (The neighbors didn't like that) and weighted close to or over 500 pounds I had to put her in the field with the other cattle. A 500 pound cow produces a lot of "MESS" and when it's in your garden or porch it's not cute (MEANING THE NEIGHBORS YARD, PORCH, GARDEN). Though, I was not able to teach her things that a mother cow could, and for her age she was very small. Meek. The other cows killed my baby Obama, because she was an outcast. She was not included in their pack. Yes cows travel in packs. She was the weakest cow and was trampled/tossed for a salt block. No I did not witness this or see it happen.

We do eat meat, and we do raise cattle. We DON'T butcher cows we RAISE CALF'S and sell them at an auction. I posted this video because it is cute, but it in no way shows true animal instinct. The dog is getting her ear scratched and licking any milk she can from the cows mouth. The cow is trying to get milk from the dog's ear.
In this wide world we cannot relate everything to a human's point of view. Animals are different from us and they have needs but they also have genetic programmed brains. Yes we need to protect them from cruelty, but we also have to understand nature is cruel. So until people who preach about protecting animals start providing the funds then NATURE WILL RUN ITS COURSE.

Tracey is still alive; in 2009 she was hit by a car the driver was so distributed she paid the entire hospital bill even though I asked her not to. Tracy dog is 6 years old now and doing fine. She still hunts frogs, enjoys stealing sweet feed from the cows, and sun bathing in the driveway. All the cows I have been around this was the first and only cow that I was not scared of. Cows that are not hand raised are not friendly and you can never predict an animal's behavior.

I will be revising this as I see fit; to answer repeated questions and clarify for the disbelievers that animals are different from humans. One cute little video can bring out so much HATE AND RAGE! My goodness people channel that toward something good. Volunteer, donate, and adopt something.

Source: Youtube.com

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Maxine the Cow: Escape from Slaughter

Running for her life in the streets of Queens, NY, and with nothing to identify her as a sentient individual but instead, a sticker with a number that labeled her as just another food product in the assembly line at the slaughterhouse, a young cow was spared the butcher's knife. Rescued by Farm Sanctuary and named "Maxine," she will live out the rest of her days on luscious green pastures with other rescued animals, and will know that human compassion still exists somewhere in this world. There are many more Maxines to be saved, and doing your part in it is as easy as switching your diet to vegetarian. On average, every vegetarian saves the lives of 95 animals per year. That's over 7,000 lives in a lifetime. Let your life have left behind you the footsteps of compassion. Go to farmsanctuary.org for more information.

Friday, May 20, 2011

The Lives of Dairy Cows and Veal Calves in Australia

"My perspective of veganism was most affected by learning that the veal calf is a by-product of dairying, and that in essence there is a slice of veal in every glass of what I had thought was an innocuous white liquid - milk."
~Rynn Berry, quoted in Joanne Stepaniak, The Vegan Sourcebook, 1998

Mother and Baby

Like all mammals, cows only produce milk to feed their babies. In order to get the highest milk yield, farmers artificially inseminate their cows every year. After a pregnancy that lasts 9 months, the cow gives birth. Her calf is taken away from her shortly afterwards, generally at around just 12-24 hours after the birth, and sometimes even sooner. This causes great distress to boh the calf and the mother. Just like humans and many other mammals, cows have a strong bond between mother and baby. When her calf is taken away from her, a mother cow will bellow, sometimes for days, for the calf she will never see again. Instead of nourishing her baby, her milk will be extracted by a milking machine and sold.

View More  on the Original Source TryVeg,net Here!

Thursday, May 19, 2011

How Free Is “Free-Range”?

“Just because it says free-range does not mean that it is welfare-friendly.”
—Dr. Charles Olentine, editor of Egg Industry magazine, an industry trade journal(1)

As concern grows over the way the meat, egg, and dairy industries treat the animals we eat, so does the number of animal products labeled “free-range.” What does this mean? Do “free-range” chickens, pigs, turkeys, and cows receive humane treatment? Are they slaughtered in less violent ways? While “free-range” practices may be less inhumane than the horrors animals are forced to endure on conventional factory farms, they are still very far from cruelty-free.

“Free-Range” Eggs

There is no inspection system for companies that label their eggs “free-range.”

The popular myth that “free-range” egg-laying hens enjoy fresh grass, bask in the sunlight, scratch the earth, sit on their nests, and engage in other natural habits is often just that: a myth. In many commercial “free-range” egg farms, hens are crowded inside windowless sheds with little more than a single, narrow exit leading to an enclosure, too small to accommodate all of the birds at once.

How about “Free-Range” Broiler Chickens? “Free-Range” Cows, Sheep, and Pigs?

View More on the Source: www.cok.net Here!

 
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