**I apologize for the GRAPHIC NATURE of this video.  I had to stop it many times.  But I urge you, in fact, I implore you to gather all your strength, and take a few minutes our of your comfortable life, and look at the truth of what happens in this world of ours, and begin the change for good in your own world.  We have to, it’s the only way we will remain human. – s3

Thoughts on the video…

“Eating dead flesh”, by s3

When we wake up for the first time, we cry.  It’s almost agonizing the sound of entering the world, a plea for help… because we are indeed born helpless.

Waking up for the second time is no different.  Many of you read this site for amusement, or a glimmer to truth in this harsh world of untruth.

But as it has been since the beginning, I only wish for you to wake up.  I want to assure you of what you will feel when you open your eyes to the truth.  The truth, truth.  You will cry.  You will shrill like you did when you entered this world, for help.

Help because what you will see will be so uncomfortably different than what you have lived to believe, that indeed, you are helpless.

Eating another animal that is treated this way, is no different than eating our own flesh.  It is participating and allowing for the continued barbaric treatment of our fellow Earthlings, the species that are privileged like ours, to experience the miracle of living.

The food chain is a truth of nature, but in no part of it does this kind of abuse, and humiliation of another life form exist.  Every species on this planet, kills it’s prey with the least amount of suffering possible, except for Homo Sapien Sapien.

We enjoy to make these martyrs of the food chain suffer.  We love it so much, we collectively agree to turn our backs as it happens every day.  We go to our markets and buy our cleanly cut, butchered flesh in packaging that is so far from it’s original hairy, smelly form and celebrate in our marvelous accomplishment of enslaving an entire species for not only our own nourishment, but to serve as an outlet of our violent tendencies.

I wonder if intelligent life did arrive out our little blue planet, and did enslave us to rape us of our resources, would we all finally open our eyes and realize factory farming is the ultimate decay of human existence?

“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”  Henry David Thoreau

“I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it.”  Mahatma Gandhi

“Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”  Theodor Adorno

“As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”  Leo Tolstoy

“Who is the Devil?”, by s5

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.  ~William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922

Last week, a video was released by Mercy for Animals of horrific animal abuse happening at a dairy farm in Ohio.

In the two days since it has been released many are calling it the worst video of animal abuse ever recorded.  Calves are tortured with tire irons and pitch forks, their tails are cut off with anesthesia and they are beaten by the employees with such violence it is horrifying.

In Ohio, the abuse of an animal is considered a misdemeanor.  The men who are responsible for this will walk away with barely a snap of the wrist.

Why should you care?

For one thing, it is an empirical fact that the presence of factory farms and slaughterhouses increase the violent crimes that happen in the surrounding areas.  If you care about your community and the safety of your family, then you want to care about the presence of such facilities in your city.  When the men and women who work in this facility witness abject abuses towards animals, they internalize it and over time lose their sense of compassion towards every living being.  These facilities employ honest people looking for a way to provide for their families, and turn them in psychopaths.  (And, no, I do not believe in any regard that I am over exaggerating and I can link to study after study that confirms my point.)

The simple truth is that if you have complaints about your community (increases in violence, increases in immigration, increases in sickness) then you need to look to the meat industry and demand change.

But it is so much more than that and yet sometimes so hard to put into words.  The reason you are able to eat the meat that you do is because you protect yourself by not admitting the truth.  But you cannot protect yourself from the reality of this any longer.

I talk to so many people that care about the environment.  The oil spill is horrendous.  The fact that our rainforest is being depleted at alarming rates is tragic.  The truth that we are running out of water is frightening.  Everyone is so full of anger and yet we are so inert about it all.

But the truth is that you created the oil spill.  You participate in the cutting down of hundred year old trees.  You are the reason we are running out of water.  Put simply, you drive a car, and you buy clothes, and you eat meat at such alarming rates that factory farms have to exist in the first place.  The number one contribution to fossil fuel use, greenhouse gas release and dead zones in our ocean is because of this insatiable desire that you have for flesh.  The only reason we are drilling in the first place, that creates the environment for a disaster to occur, is because the infrastructure that you find comforting has to keep running.

So, the reason it is okay for a baby calf to be tortured and writhing in pain while its mother looks on with grief in her eyes… is because you don’t stop buying it at the super market.

So when you see this video, the person you should be mad at is the person looking back at you in the mirror.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.  He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits.  Yet he is lord of all the animals.  ~George Orwell, Animal Farm

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