Acceptable Limits

Surprise! They found another BSE cow in Canada. This cow was born after the ruminant feed ban, so theoretically it should be safe. But no. Because, as noted in the article, a cow can be infected by just one one-thousandth of a gram of bad feed. Other cows ate this contaminated feed too. The US will not close the Canadian border to beef imports, so people in the US will get plenty of Canadian beef - unlabeled of course.

Japan wants to close its border again to US beef because they recently got some beef that had banned parts in it. Our safety protocols aren't working and they know it.

Listen to what Canada is saying. No longer is the language about prevention.

"the finding of additional cases of BSE into the future, small numbers, is entirely predictable and falls within that range of acceptable limits,"

"This case is, of course, unwelcome, but it is not unexpected,"


The language has now turned to acceptable limits.

Query - If CJD did not have a 10-30 year incubation period in humans, how many deaths would we allow? If all the people who will die in the next 30 years suddenly showed symptoms tomorrow, would there be an outcry?

Or do a few human deaths fall within "acceptable limits" when it comes to the taste of beef? Judging by the behavior of the American and Canadian consumers and their governments, the deaths of innocent people in the future in exchange for money and pleasure now is just dandy.

Meat Eating Environmentalists don't exist.

This is one of those things that you don't really think about until someone points it out.

Link to Article

Excerpt:
Each of us could make a bigger contribution to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by becoming a vegan than by converting to an eco-friendly car.

[snip]

An average burger man (that is, not the outsize variety) emits the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes more CO2 every year than the standard vegan. By comparison, were you to trade in your conventional gas-guzzler for a state of the art Prius hybrid, your CO2 savings would amount to little more than one tonne per year.

[snip]

Only a tiny proportion of those recently alerted to the threat of climate change would make any connection whatsoever between this and the food they eat. These are two entirely different zones of environmental reality - and getting one's head around climate change is proving to be enough of a challenge anyway.

[snip]

When oil starts trading at $100 a barrel, what happens to food production systems that are entirely dependent on cheap fossil fuels? How secure - let alone economically viable - will today's global supply chains prove to be when the worst effects of climate change begin to impact on food production all around the world?



So why isn't this common knowledge? There's a waiting list for hybrid cars, and people who dutifully recycle and donate to environmental causes have no idea about the connection between their diet and the environmental destruction it causes.

Cars and recycling are advertised. Cutting back or eliminating meat isn't. Hybrid cars make money, but a diet that eliminated meat would hurt big businesses. And we all know that it's really money that influences public policy. That's why meat and dairy get government subsidies, but organic produce does not. It's not about public health or the environment. It never was.

But what difference can one person make? Or even a couple thousand? I don't know about you, but when my grandkids ask me about the world when I was young, I don't want to have to look them in the eye and tell them I did nothing. One of the reasons I went vegan was because of my kids. I couldn't lie to them about where their food came from (chickens die happy or some other bullshit) and I couldn't feed them something I knew was heavily contaminated with pesticides (80-90% of a person's pesticide exposure is through meat and dairy).

So when we're all living in the Mad Max world, I'll be in my tire-soled shoes and trash bag shawl screeching about how I knew it all along.

For more information on diet and the environment, click here.

Vegan Lunchbox wins the Proggy!

PETA has given Jenifershmoo's site Vegan Lunchbox (http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com) the 2005 Proggy award for best blog!

I love her site. She always has the best goodies.

http://peta.org/feat/proggy/2005/winners.html#blog


I'm not the only one out there who wishes she could pack my lunch every day.

Product Review: Aveda Hand Relief

I heard about this stuff from Pleather and Girl Least Likely To. I'm very particular about lotions. In fact, after 11 years of eczema, and 2 eczema-free years, I'm very wary of anything that will irritate my skin. The only thing that got rid of the eczema was quitting dairy and using a natural lotion that is pricey, but worth it.

So most lotions and I are not friends. In short, this Aveda stuff is great. It doesn't just coat the hands, but makes them softer, so even after I wash my hands they feel nice. It smells good too, a little citrusy, but nothing overwhelming. It's $16 a bottle, but it lasts a long time since you only use a little.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire

I first learned about this idea over at Gary's blog.

Here's a quote from Meat Market, which I have yet to read. (It's on my list!)

"When I was a teenager, my greatest ambition was to one day be a millionaire. In my twenties, as my primary ambition shifted away from making money and toward protecting animals, I adapted the millionaire concept for purposes of activism. I decided that I still wanted to be a millionaire, but not in terms of earning a million dollars. I wanted to be a millionaire in terms of keeping a million animals out of slaughterhouses."

That is such a neat idea. I have kind of thought about saving as many animals as I killed, just as a sort of penance for willfully remaining ignorant and knowingly causing terrible suffering. Balance the karmic scales and all that. After that, I'd keep on working, but without a specific goal. Now I have decided to try to become a millionaire.

I have heard various calculations on how many animals a vegetarian saves per year. PETA says 95 per year. Vegan Outreach says 35. I think PETA may be including the animals killed by agricultural pollution and deforestation, but I'm only guessing. I'm going to take an an average and say 65 animals per year.

As I have mentioned before, I put out Even If You Like Meat leaflets out at my local library. I also distribute them in other ways, which I won't go into here. I like it because I'm not even there at the library, so people who take them are probably genuinely interested. So far, people have taken 750 leaflets. Vegan Outreach estimates 2.5 vegetarians for every 100 leaflets distributed. They're going on their Adopt-A-College numbers, so I'm going to seriously lowball and say 1 per 100 since we're a red county in a blue state.

That would mean I can take "credit" for 7.5 anonymous vegetarians from leafletting. I finally did a detailed count, and I have 6 people in my personal life who are no longer eating any meat (3 vegan, 3 vegetarian), plus 3 who are now about 80% vegetarian (I'll count them as 2.4 vegetarians). And one who is 95% veg (.95 of a person) 16.85 people @ 65 animals per year = 1095 animals per year who are not going through the factory farming system.

Now, honestly I don't really take credit for anything other people do. That would be egotistical and lame. But for tallying purposes, that's 43,810 animals spared over those people's lifetimes. I'm karmically in the black. Especially if God loves chickens too and doesn't care for us treating tiny animals as if they were garbage.

Fun photo!

Living and dead male chicks mixed in a dumpster at an egg farm. (Not a grinder, but they often grind them up alive and make chicken feed out of them). The chicks do try to get out, clawing their way up from under their dead brothers. Of course, some get crushed or suffocated by the dead ones. This is standard practice on egg farms, even free range ones.

Snowball

Well, I'm feeling a lot better this week. Part of it was a note from my best friend (see comments two posts down) and part of it was reading something on Vegan Outreach's site.

They say that for every 100 Even If You Like Meat pamphlets handed out, about 2.5 people become vegetarian. By that ratio, only 2.5% of the population is bothered enough to seek out more information and then make a change. Nothing to celebrate, but big social change always starts small.

I have informed a few people (in real life, not just random people who hit my blog or take pamphlets at the library) about factory farming. That means I gave them a book or talked to them a bunch on it. There are many people I know to whom I may have mentioned random things, or they may have hit my family website, but I have no idea how much they know about animal agriculture. Of the people who I know for certain received in-depth info, 2 are now vegetarian, 2 are now 80% veg (eat meat only once a week or so and only from a local family farm), 1 person was seriously considering going vegan. Plus I get a bonus because one person took her daughter and boyfriend with her. There are a few other people who got info and I don't know what they thought about it, so they're not included in my tally.

When I look at it like that, it's not so discouraging. Way better than 2.5%. Not so bad.

The Triumph of Evil

Update - after I wrote the previous post, I was sitting with my husband at chez Taco Bell. I wasn't hungry, so I stared out the window, and as soon as I tried to talk about the family and friends thing with him, the flood gates opened an I sat there like a big dork crying in fucking Taco Bell.

For some reason, I couldn't stop once I started. It just got to me that so many kind and wonderful people feel nothing. I had this idea that my friends and family were special and different than the rest of society - more open-minded, more kind. So it was jarring to find out that they aren't different. What hope is there for anything - the end of war or abuse or hunger or rape or even factory farming if the truly wonderful people of the world can turn a blind eye and not care? If the kindest people cannot feel sadness or empathy beyond what they were taught by their parents, or what is convenient or "normal," it means that the suffering in the world will never end. All of this will go on forever.

We got into the car, and I held it together for awhile, but then I cried some more because I couldn't stop myself. My husband talked to me in the calm way he has that makes everything seem Not So Bad. Stuff about how people can't imagine changing their whole lives, how people might have trouble admitting to themselves that they have been wrong, how ingrained habits are hard to break and how the wall separating food animals from other animals is too high for people to cross. I argued that we did it, we changed, and I stubbornly refuse to believe we're better or more compassionate than everyone else. Then we got into pain-avoidance. Maybe people don't feel empathy because then they'd be in emotional pain all the time if they really thought about what happens to animals every day.

It is true that if you feel sorrow for suffering (human and animal) you walk around with your heart broken. I can't feel that all's-right-with-the-world feeling like when I was a teenager. I can try to forget about it, but that feels like putting part of myself to sleep.

So where does that leave us? I try to be optimistic. After all, when slavery was common, white people didn't honestly care about black people. It took a really long time for people's hearts to shift. Before that, even many of the kindest-hearted people just felt nothing for the suffering of the slaves. I just imagine the animal thing is similar. People exist a certain way and just can't change. Maybe the seeds being planted now will take a few generations to sprout.

At least I hope so. Because I refuse to believe that people are dead inside.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." --Edmund Burke

Bleeding Hearts

This is going to sound really naive, but I honestly thought that when my friends and family learned about factory farming, they'd be so appalled that they'd quit supporting those industries. I have been very careful never to be a pain, and I asked my closest friends and family members if I could send them a book on it. I said I wasn't trying to be a pushy vegan, but I had learned a lot and wanted to share. I would expect no less of them if they knew something I didn't. So they all received books over the past year or so. I never followed up to see if they read them, figuring my work was done. Plus I didn't want to be pushy again.

My best friend quit eating all meat except for a farm near her which she says is "humane" and she's fine with how they kill the chickens. Another friend went totally vegetarian, took her daughter with her, and her boyfriend is now 95% vegetarian (only eats meat when out). Hooray for progress.

But this holiday, I spent more time with people, and some of them told me they really don't care about the animals. They knew the details, but just didn't care. They told me so in as many words. One is trying to be near-vegan for health reasons. The other was vegan for two weeks for health reasons, but gave it up because it was inconvenient. There are others, but I won't detail them today.

At one point, I started to get depressed because a few people I love have said this. I was just so...disappointed in them I guess. These are good people, kind people, and I hate that awful feeling of being disappointed in them. I feel like a bitch because I'm no better than them. I love and respect them, but I don't understand them.

All along, I have insisted over and over that I'm not more kind-hearted than omnivores are. I just know what's happening to the animals. They don't. Once you know, there is really no question. But now, I don't know what to think. As I hear from my family and friends one by one, I justify their apathy toward animal cruelty by thinking that they are shut off because they think they have to eat meat to be healthy or because they can't imagine going vegetarian. They have to "not care" in order to function. They're not really uncaring, right?

But how can that be true of so many people? Is there truly something different about some people that makes us give a shit and makes others not care? The whole thing put me in a dark mood because I felt even more like a weirdo than usual and it made me so sad that people are so indifferent in their cruelty. I mean, I'd almost rather someone be sadistic than to just shrug and not care. How can you fucking not care about an animal being skinned alive? How does a human being learn that and feel nothing inside?