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WE SLAVE SUFFER BLEED AND DIE FOR ALL OF YOU


Black SPECIESIST PYRAMID OF CAPITALIST SYSTEM Black


It is taxing to sit at a table full of critical theorists, feminists, postcolonialists, and other social justice advocates, all excoriating capitalist exploitation while they devour bloody steaks and smear pig ribs and chicken grease across their overfed faces.... In short, the modern 'radical' tradition stands in continuity with the entire Western heritage of anthropocentrism, and in no way can be seen as a liberating philosophy from the standpoint of the environment and other species on this planet. A truly revolutionary social theory and movement must incorporate a new ethics of nature, as it maintains a commitment to Enlightenment norms, human justice, and anti-capitalism. (source)

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Matthew Scully - Former Speechwriter for President George W. Bush - Visiting a Pig Factory Farm



Matthew Scully is on a tour inside a standard Smithfield pig factory farm owned by Carroll's Foods in a place called Warsaw two hours southeast of Raleigh. He is being led by a woman by the name Gay, an agricultural scientist:

Gay embodies in her ample frame all of humanity's contradictions about animals, capable of touching solicitude one moment and staggering disregard the next. "This'll be your first time farrowing, won't it, baby?" she says to a sow I pose to inspect, identified on a tag above the cage as NPD 88-308.". "Baby" is lying there covered in feces and dried blood, yanking maniacally on chains that have torn her mouth raw as foraging animals will do when caged and denied straw or other roughage to chew. She's hurting herself with the chains, I remark. "Oh, that's normal."


The answer can be seen in the swollen legs of the sow standing or trying to stand. To lie on their side, a powerful inclination during month of confinement in twenty-two inch of space, they try to put their legs through the bars into a neighboring crate. Fragile from the pigs' abnormally large weight, and from rarely standing or walking, and then only on concrete, their legs get crushed and broken. About half of those pigs whose legs can be seen appear to have sprained or fractured limbs, never examined by a vet, never splinted never even noticed any more.

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We keep walking. Sores, tumors, ulcers pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other "vices", as they're called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical "vacuum" chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And "social defeat." lots of it, in every third or forth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you like poor NPD 50-421, creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the AI rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced. When they have conquered the "stress gene'", maybe the Ph. D.'s and guys in white coats can find us a cure for the despair gene, too.





Factory farming isn't just killing: It is negation, a complete denial of the animal as a living being with his or her own needs and nature. It is not the worst evil we can do, but it is the worst evil we can do to them. It confronts us with the animals equivalent of Abraham Lincoln condemnation of human slavery: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong."

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Take anything else I have described in this book - elephants ambushed at the waterhole, baby monkeys ripped from their mothers and eaten alive, dolphins trapped and clubbed to death - and the reality is that none of it is any worse then anything we tolerate in our corporate farms. Perhaps you share my opinion of people who do those other things. You may call them cruel. You may call them reprehensible. But they all have ready answer: "You eat meat, Don't you?"


Matthew Scully, 'Dominion, The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy', 266-268, 289


1 comment:

  1. You've been tagged: http://animalrightsmalta.blogspot.com/2007/07/memed-8-true-things.html

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