Transport between factory farms and slaughterhouses is an oft-overlooked nightmare. Each year, tens of millions of chickens suffer broken wings and legs from rough handling. The animals are not given any food or water as they are trucked through all weather extremes, sometimes for hundreds of miles. Cows are denied food for their long journeys and may collapse in the extreme heat or freeze to the sides of trucks in cold weather, necessitating that workers pry them off with crowbars. Pigs experience much of the same, and overturned pig transport trucks are a common sight in some parts of the country. Says one former pig truck driver, pigs are "packed in so tight, their guts actually pop out their butts—a little softball of guts actually comes out." Millions of turkeys die as a result of heat exhaustion, freezing, or accidents during transport; nearly 2,000 turkeys can be loaded on a single truck headed to a slaughterhouse.
2 comments:
Blogger seems to have eaten my comment (big surprise).
Your blog is the most positive thing I have yet seen relating to the Judaism I left at roughly the age of 17, and to which, every year, I attempt to return, so far without success. (I am one of the 40% of American Jews who embraced Buddhism.) I would love to learn more about your philosophical and spiritual outlook in general.
Please keep up the wonderful work.
Sincerely,
f. kwan
Thanks so much for your kind words. I really appreciate the support and am happy to create some meaning out of Judaism for you.
It may interest you that I was really "fed up" with "all organized religion" in between when I visited Israel at age 15 and when I started college two years later. I took a Religions of Asia class my first semester and started to appreciate ahimsa and other concepts in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism, and I still do (I'm now 23). But then I read the books Food for the Gods and Om Shalom. And I started to see that everything I loved about these Eastern religions--e.g., compassion for animals--existed in Judaism as well. I've spent the years since then trying to tie it all together. In particular, my other blog, heebnvegan, is an effort to explore these matters.
If you want to discuss this further, send me an e-mail at mcroland@gmail.com. I wasn't able to figure out how to contact you directly.
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