On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 03:17:46AM -0500, frank theriault scripsit: > While that's regretable, and maybe even wrong, that's no > rationalization for harming animals by raising livestock in horrible > conditions for the sole purpose of killing them for their meat.
Of course not! > The meat we eat doesn't come from little mom and pop family farms > where contented cows ramble across huge sunny pastures all day long > for years until they're slaughtered. No, these animals are raised on > feedlots, spending all day in mud and manure, eating nothing but corn > (not a natural food for cattle, but high in energy so it fattens them > up faster). Each cow is basically a food factory and the idea is to > put as much meat on them in as short a time as possible, so they can > be slaughtered to get the highest yield for the smallest investment. The beef I eat is grass-fed, comes from the Bruce Peninsula, and doesn't even cost that much. (Farm kid; I know what meat is supposed to be like, so I don't buy any from supermarkets.) > Cattle who are properly fed and treated have an expected lifespan of > about 20 years. The average age of beef cattle being slaughtered is > twelve to eighteen ~months~. That's not cruel? _Wild_ cattle have about the same life expectancy. (It's like squirrels; if you're a squirrel, and you live to be 1 year old, you have ~90% odds of making it until you're 20. Your odds of making it to 1 year old are abysmal.) "Many more are born than can survive"; that, even more than "nature red in tooth and claw", is the line from Pappa Darwin that people have a lot of trouble with. It is, for instance, quite common for large cats to start eating prey animals before the other large cat has finished killing it. (observed in lions, leopards, and cheetah to my knowledge.) This makes perfect sense -- speed counts, before something shows up and disputes possession of dinner -- but from a human perspective it's horribly cruel. So I wouldn't particularly say the twelve to eighteen months is cruel; it does matter a lot how the animal is killed, though, and the conditions of its life up until that point. > And don't forget, livestock contribute more to greenhouse gases than > all the motor vehicles in the world, That's "livestock counting mechanized agriculture in toto, including fossil carbon sources for fertilizer production"; the methane load from cow farts is part of that, but very far from the major part and you're still stick with the issue if you're running truck gardens on that basis. (Which we, as a species, obviously ought not to be.) -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
