Eating is something we take for granted due to conditioning. As little kids what choice do we have other than eating what our parents put before us? But, as we get older and somehow develop consciousness, we can make choices.
Hopefully, the processes by which some of our food choices get to us will enable us to seriously consider other
dietary avenues.
Many people feel uncomfortable about cooking and eating lobsters; and for good reason: lobsters suffer severe and prolonged pain when cut, broiled, or boiled alive. Wouldn’t you?
Lobsters are sensitive beings who struggle against death and have sophisticated nervous systems making it so that they feel a great deal of pain when cut or cooked while still alive. In addition, they contain excessive amounts of protein and cholesterol and are highly contaminated with bacteria, pesticides, and other toxins due to the fact that they, along with shrimp, are the scavengers of the ocean.
In their favor is the fact that they can take long-distance seasonal journeys and can cover 100 miles or more yearly. In life span, they can live 150 years or longer if they can manage to avoid the millions of traps along the coasts.
I really don’t think that anyone would consider dropping a dog or a cat into boiling water while still alive. Why should it be any different for lobsters?
Ben Franklin called turkeys “true American originals” and had tremendous respect for their resourcefulness, curiosity, agility and beauty. Obviously he was talking about wild turkeys, which can fly 55 mph, run 18 mph, and live up to 15 years. But the hundreds of millions of turkeys who end up on American dinner plates every year feel no less pain, than their wild cousins but are, sadly, birds of different feather.
The factory-farmed birds are fed enormous quantities of antibiotics and have been purposely bred to gain an enormous amount of weight in a short period of time. After all, who would want an emaciated turkey representing “Thanksgiving” on their dinner table? This enormous weight gain leads to painful, swollen joints, crippled feet, and heart attacks.
Turkeys slaughtered today live for months in sheds packed so tightly – usually 3 square feet per bird – that flapping a wing or stretching a leg is nearly impossible. Due to their environment, they stand mired in doo doo and urine waste, with the urine and ammonia fumes burning their eyes and lungs.
To keep the overcrowded birds from scratching and pecking each other to death, a portion of their upper beaks and toes are sliced off with a hot blade and without anesthesia. Think of how you would feel if you went to the dentist or had surgery all without anesthesia. If it’s not ok for you, why is it ok for them?
Millions of turkeys don’t make it past the first week, sometimes drowning in water dishes or starving to death when eating with their mutilated beaks is too painful. Then, if the knife misses its mark, they are boiled alive in a tank of scalding water used for feather removal.
Eating these guys has ramifications. Millions of people become sick and thousands die each year from eating contaminated flesh. Studies indicate that as many as 90 percent of supermarket birds are contaminated with salmonella, campylobacter, or other bacteria. They contain no fiber or carbohydrates but have lots of fat and cholesterol. For example, a roasted turkey’s leg contains 72 milligrams of cholesterol, 47 percent fat, and is anything but desirable for your heart.
When fish are caught and killed for their flesh, they suffer greatly. Whether caught by a hook or a net, fish experience fear. And like humans, their heart rates and breathing rates increase dramatically.
Fish, along with unintentional victims, including dolphins, birds, and turtles, are captured in huge trawlers’ nets, squeezed for hours along with any netted rocks and debris. As they are dragged from the ocean depths, fish undergo excruciating decompression and often the intense internal pressure ruptures their swim bladder, pops out their eyes, and pushes their stomach through their mouth.
Then, as if that’s not bad enough, they are tossed onboard where many slowly suffocate or are crushed to death. Others are still alive when their throats and bellies are subjected to intensive crowding and unnatural conditions, which spread infection and parasites. And how do the fish farmers deal with this? With more antibiotics to counteract the pollution and growth hormones to make them fatter faster.
We all know how polluted the oceans are with mercury, PCBs, radiation, and toxic wastes. Well, this is what fish ingest on a 24/7 basis. How come no one even comes close to thinking about this when they eat fish? And yet, we fall for the “eating fish is healthy” line.
In today’s factory farms, chickens have their beaks sliced off with a hot blade, pigs have their tails chopped off and their teeth removed with pliers, and male cows and pigs are castrated – all without anesthesia. Imagine what it would fell like to have your dick cut off or your breast removed without anesthesia. This is what they experience!
Then, they are fed a steady diet of genetically modified growth hormones and antibiotics so that they grow really fast. Because of this their hearts and limbs often cannot keep up, causing lameness and heart attacks. Finally, at the slaughterhouse, they are hung upside down and bled to death, often while still fully conscious.
Some religions, like the Jewish and Muslim, where compassion allegedly reigns supreme, the animals have to be slaughtered while still fully conscious. The Jews call this humane and loving act “Kosher” and the Muslims call it “Halal”. I call it despicable and heartless.
Every year in the United States alone, more than 8 billion chickens are slaughtered for food.
While chickens are shy and sensitive animals, almost all of them spend their unnaturally short, miserable lives crammed together in windowless sheds on factory farms, each one with less space than a standard sheet of typing paper.
“Broiler” chickens are raised and killed for their flesh and they are bred to grow so large so fast that often their legs cannot handle their weight. Tens of thousands of them are forced to live in a dark shed in their own doo doo among corpses of other birds who died of heart attacks, suffocation, starvation, or stress. Their natural lifespan of 15 to 20 years is cut short when their throats are slit after six or seven weeks and many broiler chickens spend much of their lives in so much pain that they are unable to move.
Only female chicks are useful to the egg industry, so the males are tossed live into a grinding machine, killed with carbon monoxide, or thrown live into the trash to suffocate. The female chicks have their beaks seared off with a red-hot iron, and then they are shoved into a tiny cage with three to six others in windowless sheds filled with thousands of stacked sheds. They have so little space that they can’t even stretch out a wing.
Eighteen months and about 400 eggs later, the hens are packed into trucks and sent to slaughter, with their battered flesh made into dog food, “chicken franks”. Or soup.
Chicken contains as much artery-clogging cholesterol as beef (100 mg in just four ounces) and a single egg has twice as much cholesterol as a hamburger.
The slaughter machines spatter bacteria-laden doo doo onto the carcasses so that up to 90 percent of all chicken flesh in the United States is swarming with salmonella, campylobacter, and other dangerous bacteria. But, our beloved USDA (U. S. Department of A#@holes) says, “If you cannot see the doo doo through the clear wrap, it’s finger licken good to eat!” As many as 4 million Americans get sick from salmonella “flu” each year, and about 500 die.
Oh yeah, chickens in the U.S. produce more solid manure than the entire human population. And the farms, being the upstanding environmentalists that they are, violate environmental laws by dumping their waste into nearby rivers and streams, to flow down to the oceans where it is consumed by the fish, which, as we all know,
are so healthy to eat.
How your consciousness develops, whether or not your heart becomes soft, if you develop compassion for the exploited, or if you continue to buy into the conditioned mind-set, is an individual choice. But, understand one given fact and reality – karma is a bitch! As you sow, so shall you reap.
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