What Can I Do?

Depending on how much you already know about animal exploitation issues, you have probably asked yourself, "What can I do to help stop animal suffering?"

If you attended the guest speaker event with Brian Grupe from Vegan Outreach and Eric Deardorff from Banana Slugs for Animals at UC Santa Cruz, you definitely got a quick look into the source of the animal products most of us continue to eat. However, most people are still totally oblivious to the ins-and-outs of flesh, dairy, and egg production and, thus, continue to consume these cruel products. Once you have an idea of what sorts of places and conditions these animals were forced to live in and endure, it is much easier to see that there really is only one choice we can consider if we are seriously concerned with animal suffering: veganism.

Now, before you start muttering grossly misinformed myths about veganism, it is important to understand why people choose to leave animal products off of their plates.

In your mind

In reality

We treat animals like shit. Let's just be honest, because that is what the rest of this post is going to talk about: the truth behind animal agriculture. Animals are the lowest of the low. They are purposely left outside of our moral community so that we can continue to commit heinous crimes against them for our pleasure. Keep that idea in mind as I attempt to portray the miserable existences that we allow animals before we kill them, because if we did care about animals, NONE of the following would still be occurring.

Below is a very brief overview of the life of 3 of the most commonly consumed animals.

-COWS:

For food, cows are raised for their milk and for their flesh. It may be surprising to you that the diary and meat industries are not so different.

Dairy: Females are forcibly impregnated with the use of a "rape rack" (industry terminology)

Male calves are usually sent of to the veal industry. IN EVERY GLASS OF MILK THERE IS A CHUNK OF VEAL.

Cows' sensitive teats are hooked onto vicious pumping machines multiple times a day.

Mastitis is very common from the machines as utters become infected, causing sores to form. Pus and blood often enter through the tubes. There is a legal amount of pus allowed in milk and it varies in each state.

Once the cows' can no longer reproduce and are too exhausted to produce the necessary amount of milk for them to be profitable THEY ARE KILLED and used for flesh.

Meat: Cows undergo torturous castrations, branding, and de-horning sessisons. All without painkillers.

After possibly spending some time on the range, they are sent to feedlots for the remainder of their lives. Here they are fattened up with an unnatural diet of corn, soy, and other high-protein feed, including other animal waste. Yes, that's right. Sometimes are fed shit. That hamburger looks delish still, right?

Once the cows are at their prime weight, THEY ARE KILLED for their meat, skin, etc.

-PIGS: Pigs undergo painful mutilations where their testicles are ripped out of their scrotums and parts of their teeth and tails are snipped off.

Mother pigs are usually forced to spend their gestation period in crates so small that they cannot even lie down comfortably, let alone turn around. As breeder sows, they are forced to repeat this horrific experience until they are no longer profitable and are killed.

Their babies are taken from them after about a month and spend the rest of their time on concrete slabs in filthy sheds until they are at their prime weight and THEY ARE KILLED.

-CHICKENS:

For food, chickens are raised for their flesh and for their eggs. Eggs have no part in a

compassionate diet.

Eggs: Chicks are hatched in industrialized hatching facilities. Male chicks have no use in the layer industry and are either thrown out in large masses to suffocate or ground up alive.

Layer hens are then usually crammed into horrible wire cages with many other hens. Imagine raising a hen in a shoebox. That is about how much room they have. They are often trampled to death and left to rot on the floor of the cages. Their long talons can become entangled in the wire floors and their bones become exposed from the constant bodily contact with other hens.

Often time, if the flock becomes less productive, their food is removed for days or even weeks at a time until their bodies shock themselves into another laying cycle. Once the cost of keeping the hens becomes higher than the profit their eggs yield, THEY ARE KILLED.

Meat: Broiler chickens, as they are adeptly called, live very similar lives to egg-laying hens, except they are kept alive for less time.

In both cases, the stench of ammonia in the warehouses in which these birds are kept can cause breathing problems and cause the formation of abnormal growths on their bodies and faces.

After they are drugged to be so huge that their legs cannot oftentimes hold their body weight, they are shipped to slaughter and THEY ARE KILLED.