Seeds Of Destruction, by F. William Engdahl
Review By Stephen Lendman
The World Food Crisis: What's Behind it and What We Can Do About it
Bird flu: a bonanza for 'Big Chicken'
Swine flu impacts global economy
The Ten-Year Track Record of NAFTA
American Farmers, Korean Farmers' Enemies?
Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food
"Nature is smart as hell"
Great Plains
Farmer in Chief
alternative ( Read more... )
I would just like to say that this is a load of bull! Jerry the calf may be one in few calves who go untreated every year. They call his case, BAD MANAGEMENT! If you think that every dairy farm treats their calves like this you are insane. I'm an animal science major, I know how the industry works, and I know that what PETA is doing is spreading slander and lies so that you stop buying animal products. I spent the weekend at the university dairy farm and not a single one of those calves or cows was being mistreated. Do you know why they remove dairy calves from their mother's just hours after they are born?! Because dairy cows have HORRIBLE mothering instincts! Beef calves are protected by and cared for by their mothers, if we were to leave dairy calves with their mother's those calves would not survive. When those dairy calves like Jerry are removed from their mothers they are NOT left out in the cold with no food or water or shelter. They are given the best care by humans. We feed them as much colostrum as we can get them to drink, this has the antibodies and immunoglobulins that is from their mother's first milk. And you know what, we test the colostrum before we feed it too, and if it's not of the highest quality we don't feed it. We thaw out high quality frozen colostrum that came from a cow who produced good colostrum and feed that to the calf instead. We dip the calves navels in iodine to prevent septicemia, which is an infection of the navel.
And another thing about PETA, did you know that years ago they burned down an entire university run research facility that was full of years and years of research as well as full of 10,000 chickens?! Yeah, I didn't think so.... some heroes you are giving your money away to. Please, research this crap before you waste your money, time, and effort on these unknoledgable bozos.
And one more thing.... free range chickens, THE WORST IDEA KNOWN TO MAN KIND! If you think the chickens will be better off on pasture, you are nuts. Do you the increased levels of disease and death that come from having chickens living outside?! Chickens will die on pasture, and they also don't eat the grass. Their digestive systems can only digest a small amount of forage, so free range is doing them no favors except for putting them out in the open where predators and diseases can devour them alive. But go ahead, push for this.... makes a lot of sense to just send these chickens to their death out on pasture.
And lastly, the topic of gestation crates in gestating sows. Removing these from production is a horrible idea. Do you know why we have sows in gestation crates? It's not so we can confine them to not moving, it's so they don't bite and kick at each other and kill each other's fetuses. Group housing for pregnant sows is a horrible idea, half of the newborn piglets will be born dead from blunt trauma by other more agressive sows and the less agressive sows may even be killed by the agressive ones.
Rachael Fordham
When PETA stepped in to expose the factory farm I had worked in, I was extremely grateful for the job they did, and forever will be. But that being said, There are alot of bad eggs. The president Ingrid Newkirk, is one wicked witch. It has been proven that they euthanize the animals they were supposed to adopt out, after assuring their owners they were in good hands. And then you have PETA's vice president Mary Beth Sweetland: she has diabetes and injects herself daily with insulin that was tested on animals.
There are other ways to get your point across than some of the crazy protests that PETA is infamous for. In Defense of Animals USA aka http:www.idausa.org is a wonderful animal rights group, and they do not resort to the outlandish behavior that PETA is so well known for.
Reply
Now, turkeys are raised in large open sheds. Chickens and turkeys raised for meat are not grown in cages. As the critics of "industrial farming" like to point out, the sheds get quite crowded by the time Thanksgiving rolls around and the turkeys are fully grown. And yes, the birds are bedded in sawdust, so the turkeys do walk around in their own waste. Although the turkeys don't seem to mind, this quite clearly disgusts the various authors I've read whom have actually visited a turkey farm. But none of those authors, whose descriptions of the horrors of modern poultry production have a certain sameness, were there when Neimann picked up those 4,000 dead turkeys. Sheds are expensive, and it was easier to raise turkeys in open, inexpensive pastures. But that type of production really was hard on the turkeys. Protected from the weather and predators, today's turkeys may not be aware that they are a part of a morally reprehensible system.
Like most young people in my part of the world, I was a 4-H member. Raising cattle and hogs, showing them at the county fair, and then sending to slaughter those animals that we had spent the summer feeding, washing, and training. We would then tour the packing house, where our friend was hung on a rail, with his loin eye measured and his carcass evaluated. We farm kids got an early start on dulling our moral sensibilities. I'm still proud of my win in the Atchison County Carcass competition of 1969, as it is the only trophy I have ever received. We raised the hogs in a shed, or farrowing (birthing) house. On one side were eight crates of the kind that the good citizens of California have outlawed. On the other were the kind of wooden pens that our critics would have us use, where the sow could turn around, lie down, and presumably act in a natural way. Which included lying down on my 4-H project, killing several piglets, and forcing me to clean up the mess when I did my chores before school. The crates protect the piglets from their mothers. Farmers do not cage their hogs because of sadism, but because dead pigs are a drag on the profit margin, and because being crushed by your mother really is an awful way to go. As is being eaten by your mother, which I've seen sows do to newborn pigs as well.
Reply
Anyone can take a photographic tour on Facebook of Liberty Swine Farms, which produces 22,000 pigs a year. The tour shows photographs of artificial insemination, gestation or pregnancy crates, farrowing or birth crates, the nursery and the finishing barns, where pigs spend their last 160 days before going to market.
From the time the finishing pigs reach 50 pounds until they gain 250 pounds and are ready for slaughter, they are confined 25 pigs per pen in a pen measuring 200 square feet, or eight square feet per pig...
Curless' pigs do not have access to straw, wood chips or sawdust. The slatted floors of their pens are bare. Manure drops through the slats into pits.
Quantcast
"We do hang a rope down, and the last foot is chain for them to play with and chew on," he said. "Sometimes we provide large rubber balls to give the pigs something to do, so they're not thinking about cannibalizing their neighbor like they do in the wild."
Another practice at Liberty is becoming illegal in some states.
Pregnant sows at Liberty spend 110 days in gestation crates that are each two feet wide and seven-and-a-half feet long. The sows can't turn around while in the crates. The animals face forward where the feed and water are.
The purpose of the stalls is to prevent sows from biting and ramming each other. In group housing, sows fight, increasing the number of fetal deaths, Curless says. The bossy sows eat more and get fat, while the timid sows eat less and become thin...
The chickens and pigs [from the fourth-generation Gunthorp Farms in the northeastern Indiana community of LaGrange] are raised on pasture -- with no artificial insemination, crates or antibiotics.
How does the farm prevent its sows from biting, ramming and cannibalizing each other?
"Our animals have acres," said Lei Gunthorp. "When they have enough room to spread out, you don't run into that. Everyone's in their spot eating. There's not a bunch of them in a small area. And when they're outside, they have other things to do, like rooting, instead of picking on each other."
http://www.thestarpress.com/article/20091027/NEWS01/910270312&referrer=FRONTPAGECAROUSEL
Reply
Leave a comment