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You know, when it comes to hurting small children or animals, I get 'protective' not defensive. And I admit, the snide comments like 'your poor broken heart', etc., says volumes SlayerOfLight (and isn't that descriptive?)
You like so many others, talk always about their deaths being painless and fast, but to be honest, I think you are speaking of something that is very far outside of your range of understanding. Pigs for example, can smell the blood and adrenalin and fear hormones of the others who went before them, from five miles away, so even as they are approaching a slaughterhouse, they are even more terrified than the trip itself has so far caused them to be. They are routinely beaten and shocked, whether sick or not and if they are lucky enough to die before they hit the scalding tank, it cannot be said that there is anything fast or painless about the entire experience. While you are wearing your warm jackets and sweaters and hat pulled down close over your head and thermal gloves, they freeze to the sides of the transport trailers and are pried off with box cutters and pry bars or if they are chickens, their feet freeze between the layers of cages and are ripped off before they even get unloaded from the trucks and those torn off feet are often a complement to the broken wings and legs that result from the catching and loading into the cages. Fast and painless is a myth that some of us have woken up to.
And that horror is preceded by the complete and totally misery and pain of their short lives from the moment they are born, not to mention the years of misery and pain that their poor mothers feel. And take note, I'm not using hyperbole to boost the 'tear jerker' effect of this story, but speaking only the absolute truth. From having their tiny scrotums sliced open and testicles ripped out (without anesthetic) to having their tiny teeth broken off with pliers, to the inability of their mothers being able to move at all for years at a time (can you imagine your own body if you were so confined for years) and all the other tortures that the other animals are born into and die after.... For a pig, six months of hell, for chickens six weeks of hell, dairy cows, six years of filth and misery, their calves........it's all misery. And it's supported by the consumer who propels it along by your dollars. If you support it by buying it, you are part of it and that's just the plain truth of the matter.
A cross examination implies that something in this issue is debatable, so I'm not cross examining you at all. I've 'debated' many times with people who eat meat and don't know what is involved or with people who eat meat and don't care that they are the cause of an ocean of suffering. And you are right, my heart is broken, but it's not broken for me, only for the ones who suffer and whom my change of eating choices cannot help. Because while approximately 100 animals per year won't be born to suffer because of me, there are billions who still have no hope and no future except to feel pain and misery. 'Top of the food chain', only because we have the imagination and lack of heart that makes all of this suffering possible. Take all our tools away and we would be the prey.
I know that I'm lecturing you here and I am sorry it's coming across like that, but animals are suffering in ways that our society excuses and it's just wrong. Nobody deserves what we dish out to them. And it doesn't matter which continent, which country, every last one is allowing and justifying the most horrible things being done to animals who feel pain and terror just like you and I do. I simply cannot stay silent, because if people like me don't speak up for them, no one else will.
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