Our Food Has Feelings Too :: social issues

Our Food Has Feelings Too A piece of meat, a glass of milk, or even an egg might seem pretty harmless. Everyone knows where they come from but most choose not to think about it. The truth is that the piece of meat sitting on your plate at dinner came from an animal that was tormented and put through enormous stress and pain to get from the ‘farm’ to the dinner table. Farms that breed and raise animals for meat and other such things aren’t at all what we picture. Green meadows where the animals graze in peace for the few short years of their lives have been replaced by â€Å"fresh produce factories†. Animals not being treated with any respect or humanity, instead seen only as profitable meat products. Cows sheep and pigs don’t just suffer at the slaughterhouse but throughout their lives. Feedlots, the place they are sent to fatten up before being killed are full of harmful bacteria and are extremely crowded. What the animals are fed is also very harmful. Steroids and unnaturally rich diets are used to fatten them quickly, thereby maximising profitability. Metabolic disorders are the result of this. In modern dairies, cows also forced to endure calfing every year, whilst producing milk for seven months of their nine-month gestation period. Cows live up to twenty-five years in a healthy environment, but in these dairies only live three or four years. Like beef cows they are fed unnaturally rich diets to make them produce more milk. Milk production can be as much as ten times more than that of a natural grazed animal. But if you thought that only grown cows suffer, that these farmers at least take care of the babies, you were wrong. Veal is a very profitable meat, the calf usually only living to sixteen weeks in a small wooden crate where it can’t move properly or even lie down comfortably. Some are killed just after a few days, then sold as low grade frozen TV dinners. Chickens and other poultry also suffer in small cages (usually two hens in a cage sixteen inches wide). After having their beaks cut off to reduce pecking their feathers usually fall out, from the constant rubbing against the wire cage. Eventually with bruises and sores covering their bodies, the hens die from fatty liver syndrome, lack of calcium, heat prostration, infectious disease and cancer.