sweasel.com

I actually saw Roseanne do stand up at the Comedy Store (now Comedy Stop) at the Tropicana here in Las Vegas back when she was a nobody. She absolutely killed the room. A couple years later she got big. Then real big, then way too real big. Now she’s back to being a nobody, and crazy. It’s sad.

Wow. I just realized that Roseanne is our Nora Desmond dude! (Yes, I ‘flixed Sunset Blvd) She’s gazing into her blog and fantasizing that she still matters.

Wow. That is really nutbar. …she’s not far off with the chicken thing, though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2slDi5GzlU

and this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP8Q7ZN1IkQ

There’s an urban legend that Kentucky Fried Chicken had to change their name to KFC because their products were genetically altered to such an extent that they weren’t technically chickens anymore. It’s a legend, however

they really do make them grow so large, so fast that their legs often can’t support them. That’s disgusting, if you think about it. Perverting an animal’s natural makeup so drastically, changing it’s physiology to make it a more efficient food source.

Ummm…that was a video of blurry clips of turkey pictures and a guy in silhouette describing moderately horrible things he says he saw happening to them. I didn’t bother with the chicken one (that would be another ten minutes of my life I would never get back).

They always wait to go after a KFC or a Butterball. You know, eeeevil corporations. Big Poultry.

Having grown up on a family farm, I can tell you the time-honored practices of the little guys are a good deal scarier than any of that. They cut the tails off lambs and the testicles off bullocks just standing in the field with a sharp knife. (Though I gather the wool production in Australia is corporate enough that they’re going after the lamb tail thing now). Don’t get me going on hunting or hog killing time.

People who derive a living from the death of animals become desensitized to it. They have to. That includes old Farmer Brown and, very likely, your veterinarian. I wouldn’t want that life — I hated the farm — but it isn’t a corporate thing. It’s ancient.

The word for “perverting an animal’s natural makeup so drastically, changing it’s physiology to make it a more efficient food source” is “domestication.” Not a one of our pets or livestock could exist as they are in the wild; we made them to suit our needs. Perverting their natures over thousands of years. If we all suddenly went vegetarian, we’d have to kill them all and not make new ones — they cannot sustain themselves.

I remember when the KFC rumor took hold. In the version I remember, chicken meat was secretly cloned in great vats. We were discussing it in the office and the copier repairman put his hand on his heart and swore it was true. Jesus. If we could do that — grow meat without inflicting cruelty on an animal — it would be HUGELY profitable! They wouldn’t hide it, they’d advertise it loudly. About half the world’s vegetarians would take up meat eating on the spot. Hell, I’d switch to a cruelty-free meat, if it tasted the same.

Beware people who can’t distinguish between what happens to an animal in life, and what happens after death.

Man, I was thinking about all this on my way in to work — oh, noes, Alissa, you hit the button! — and all this stuff came flooding out. I hope you don’t think I’m piling on, but I gotta vent a little.

In case I wasn’t explicit above, I am suspicious of propositions like the two films you linked, because they neatly propagandize two old stalwarts of left: socialism and vegetarianism.

Me, I’m much more creeped out by fancy show dogs. Look at a chihuahua and look at a wolf and tell me we didn’t pervert the hell out of that poor animal’s nature. Which isn’t on the face of it a bad thing, but they massively overbreed. Is it boston terriers or pekingese whose eyeballs have a tendency to pop out of their little heads? Meh.

Right here, in this corner of the world in this first half of the 21st Century, is the first time our species has ever had the possibility of thriving without cruelty to animals being a necessary part of our survival. You and I, we wouldn’t be here without hundreds of thousands of years of cruelty to animals perpetrated by our ancestors. (There is one amino — is it taurine? — that cannot be got in even the most well-balanced vegan regime, and must be got through supplements or animal protein. Not possible until now).

The difference in attitude between even our grandparents and ourselves is striking. My grandmother — a woman from a time when the lady of the house stepped out back and wrung a chicken’s neck on Sunday morning — mocked me bitterly for squeamishness. She pointed out, quite rightly, that I simply let other people do my killing for me. There’s a sequence in the 1933 version of a Christmas Carol (not the excellent 1939 version) where the camera follows as Bob Cratchit (I think) brings home the goose for supper. We see the dead goose’s head, thrown over his shoulder, flopping around to the rhythm of his stride. Per the music, it’s clearly supposed to be funny. But the modern reaction is, “ulch!”

And go back a generation and there’s cock fights and dog fights and bear baiting and badger baiting. People found watching animals suffer amusing. Speaking of cock fighting, I suspect one of the reason that first film didn’t use more actual footage is the voices of the workers would clearly identify them as Mexicans. I gather most of our abbatoir workers are immigrants at this point — native born Americans don’t have the stomach for it.

And don’t get me started on the Chinese and Japanese and Koreans and their attitude to animals! Jesus, even the continental Europeans think Brits and Americans are mad for sentimentalizing animals as we do.

What I’m saying is, getting all wadded up about factory farming and giving the impression that animal cruelty is a modern phenomenon that can be pinned on capitalism and fast food is dreadfully obscuring the real conversation we could be having. There are people (whose names escape me at the moment) making a conservative’s case for vegetarianism, on the grounds of the inevitable barbarity of meat production, whether it’s on a giant factory farm or Farmer Brown’s charming sixty acre family farm up the road. I could be persuaded. I very nearly have been. But it’s only because of modernity and technology and the food growing and distribution efficiencies of Western capitalist societies that this is possible to contemplate.

They can’t be growing meat in tanks fast enough for me.

Oh! And another possibility — since we in the West are rich enough to afford it — is finding kinder ways to produce our meat.

Take Temple Grandin. She’s a high-functioning autistic woman who claims her autism gives her insight into how animals feel. Certainly, autism gives her empathy without sentimentality. She designs kinder, gentler slaughterhouses for a living.

Because, we really would have to wipe domestic livestock off the face of the earth if we stopped having a use for them. They are entirely dependent. (Which is why I have no embarrassment at all about supporting cat and dog charities — our species bent their natures for our benefit and their detriment, so we owe them a living).

See, if we were all to go down this road, we would have to talk about deliberately making a host of species extinct — all the ones we meddled with until they are unable to support themselves in the wild. Or keeping them in museums or something.

If you hug bunnies in all sincerity, these questions make your brain ache.

Okay, I’ll stop now. For chrissakes, keep your finger off that button!

You make some interesting arguments, I think you down-played the video a bit cuz you knew what was in it and sounds like you’ve already thought about this a lot. Meaning you were predisposed to brush off the ugly images.

You’re right about domesticated animals (with at least one notable exception: cat’s can and do survive without human beings. And oh, the havoc it wreaks on a natural eco-system when a feral cat intrudes on the natural balance.)

And maybe it’s even true that people who make their living off the death of animals must become desensitized to do so. I don’t think those people were in these examples. What I saw was willful brutality, not people who had overcome their attachment to a domesticated creature in the name of industry. I would argue further that the nature of these jobs actually attracts abusive personalities, people that get their jollies off of punching, kicking and throwing small animals against concrete walls. (How ironic that I’m making this argument when I envisioned doing much the same thing to that stupid parrot) It is poor management… naw, it’s outright negligence not to have oversight and severe penalties in place for this behavior, like we do in all social and public walks of life.

I do not agree that domestication justifies willfully inflicting excessive pain and misery on a creature just because someone can, and the creature is cog in the food industry. I don’t advocate the individual rights of chickens, but I think we have an obligation as human beings with souls and hearts and higher intelligence to minimize the distress we inflict on other creatures.

Since you smashed open this can of (poor wittle itsy, bitsy) worms, I’ll go further: Conservatives tend to deride ‘bunny-huggers’ if you will for sentimentalizing animals, trees, the plight of the sea-plover what have you. They miss the point: it isn’t the sentimentalization of cute creatures, it’s an idealistic belief that human nature is better than that. These videos are appealing to what hopefully resides in each individual: A finer nature. A willingness to care about something not directly related to your life, because delivering mutilation and pain to a smaller, weaker animal is wrong. Eradicating a species in order to build more houses is wrong. Acceptance of a horrifying system requires more than the desensitizing of poultry workers: It requires a desensitized human race. Scary thought, and already a partial reality. I consider ‘apathy’ one of the scariest by-products of my culture.

People are animals with highly developed intelligence and sensitivity. Corporate supporters actually seem to downplay the intelligence of human beings with the attitude that ‘this is the way things are’ …the ‘be realistic’ attitude that this kind of thing is acceptable in the name of industry, of putting food on the table. It’s a deliberate obtuseness, and it doesn’t settle. We can do better. Human beings know exactly what they’re doing when they abuse another creature. I firmly believe that this awareness, gifted or cursed on the human race makes us accountable for our actions.

A sidenote: Killing an animal that has been raised in livable conditions on Sunday morning because you have to get dinner on the table is not the same as inflicting intense life-long pain and misery on millions of animals because it is the most convenient, cost-efficient way to pull a profit.

We aren’t the least animal-friendly people who have ever lived, we are the most animal-friendly people who have ever lived. My grandparents didn’t just wring the necks of chickens, they drowned inconvenient kittens, branded cattle, cut the tails off adorable lambs, shut up animals in small pens for their entire lives and did all manner of cruel things trying to heal them of all manner of cruel ailments.

One early Alaskan explorer (sorry, I forget where I read this) was shocked by the behavior of Inuit toward their dogs. They lived with their dogs, depended on them heavily. They were like family. But when one became injured, they laughed and threw stones at it until it died.

What’s the Japanese sushi dish where they skewer a live fish and cut a viewing window in it, and you pull off bits and eat them while it wriggles in front of you?

We and the Brits (the Brits especially) are the goopiest people in the world when it comes to animals. You don’t get much traction scolding people who are doing pretty darn well, graded on the curve.

Yes, of course, the meat industry attracts sadists. It always has. That’s my point, I guess. Cruelty isn’t new. Viewing animals as having any rights at all is what’s new. And if it’s framed in the old, familiar language about greedy corporations, people will miss the newness of it dismiss it as the old, familiar anti-globalist, anti-capitalist nonsense.

If you (generic “you”) really want to advance the welfare of animals, we need to be realistic about what is and is not cruel — as far as I know, a chicken’s beak has as much feeling in it as a horse’s hoof. We need to figure out what’s needed (what is a chicken’s actual boredom level, anyhow?). Not just show people ugly pictures to make them flinch.

Temple Grandin and her kindly slaughterhouses has done more to relieve actual animal suffering than a whole thundering herd of bunny huggers starring in their own shocking exposés of corporate greed.

Least animal friendly, most animal-friendly… Who do you mean? You mean our society is the most animal-friendly of all societies that have ever existed, big or small, in the whole history of mankind? Well, I’m in no position to argue that assumption, and I dont’ think you’re in a position to make it.

It doesn’t matter. Previous atrocities don’t justify current ones. I don’t think my definition of cruelty is particularly high falutin, either. ‘Poultry boredom’ hasn’t factored highly in my argument, you’ll notice.

And I could *totally* jump in on the anti-capitalist thing- Capitalism is not the be all, end all. It’s an influential factor in the way we live our lives here in America, but it isn’t *the* factor, that should decide the day on all issues, big and small. Accepting that notion has invited such misery to the table. It isn’t socialism to present the idea that *something* in the world is more important than the almighty dollar.

The C.E.O’s of major companies aren’t going to admit that. The board of directors will remain incredibly tight lipped on the notion, which is why people (activists) have to pry basic standards of decency from their balled up fists.

And not showing people the ugly pictures is just as manipulative as showing them the ugly pictures out of context. You better believe those images were meant to drive folks out of their comfortable, nugget-nibbling existences. You can’t start the conversation till somebody wantsta.

Sounds like you want to. So what’s needed? What actions can you and I take on an individual level to improve conditions for the animals we eat?

Weasel, if in your next incarnation you came back as a cow and you could come back as either of these two options, which would you choose?

The first would be to spend all of your born days in a pen, with your head stuck between bars. You would not be able to move, feed would be shoveled into a trough in front of you, and you would never, ever see a blue sky, smell fresh air, or go for a walk, but in the last moments of your life you’d be electrocuted quickly.

In the second you would have the comparative freedom of a pasture, free range therein, you would learn where the good clover was, learn as cows normally do what plants grow at what times of year and learn to seek them out, and generally spend time with your herd, know your herd, and live your life in a way your instincts had prepared you for, but at the time of your death it would be a bit more grisly — perhaps comparable to how wolves take down their prey or how the farms you speak of might have slaughtered.

Obviously, you aren’t going to know how your death goes down beforehand.

Would you pick the life in a cage without movement and the same stale feed your whole life, for the assurance of a quick death?

One of the reasons it’s hard for the anti-corporate argument to get traction is that so many people you’re trying to convince actually work for corporations. Me, f’rinstance. From the inside, we can see companies spending a lot of their almighty dollars trying to impress their customers with what good citizens they are: investing in charities and green initiatives and community projects. Too much, in my opinion — but I’m saving my “United Way is a Den of Cynical Cripple-Pimping Thieves” post for UW drive next year.

Once upon a time, makeup companies blinded thousands of bunnies, not because they were sadistic bastards, but because they were required to by law. Remove the law, and they had no problem finding other ways to test mascara. But somehow, government never takes the heat for this kind of thing; corporations do. A cynical righty is apt to think this is because people who wish to meddle with us in other ways need government as a tool, but that too is another discussion for another day.

My point is, corporations try to do the right thing because a) corporations are made of individuals who are not noticeably evil human beings and b) it’s good for business. But decades of having microphones thrust in their faces as they pull into the company parking lot have made CEO’s a nervous and furtive lot. When you punish people equally whether they do well or poorly, they are apt eventually to tune you out.

From personal experience, if I had to choose between the integrity of a corporate CEO and an animal rights activist, I’d go with the CEO. Barring some notable exceptions.

Well. Evening commute time. What do I do? I deal with any animal that strays into my sphere of influence (usually by taking it into the house and feeding it). I give money to small local animal charities (the kind that take care of actual animals; not the big ones that are, once again, more anti-people than pro-animal). I buy from local farm shops when I can — though as I said earlier, typical farm life ain’t exactly Disney. I am willing to pay substantially more for food (animal or vegetable) that I am convinced has had more care and attention, so I am a potential market for all sorts of products. I already don’t eat junk food, but that is, frankly, a health and vanity issue. Also, as I get older, it tastes ever more crap-like to me.

Even from a pure animal husbandry position, I think the larger animal charities are insane. Like, spending tens of thousands washing ducks caught in oil spills. The ducks are wild animals; they’re terrified (at least as terrified as those turkeys, I would imagine). They are not individually precious. Wouldn’t it make more sense to give them a quick and merciful death and spend those monies propping up the whole species?

Until they show me a little more not-craziness, I can’t get behind them.

Ben: I might well choose the miserable life and the easy death. A Good Death is a bit of a neurotic obsession with me, frankly.

And here I thought she was just obnoxious, she’s genuinely loopy, that’s just sad.

But you might understand how some would prefer to live the full life according to what their bodies and instincts prepared them for, rather than to live in perpetual frustration before death? (I’ll tell you how the pigs self-anesthetize, if you want to read of it.)

And how others might prefer their food uncaged? The word ‘natural’ gets so distorted it loses meaning, but the point is that some prefer the taste from animals that lived, laid its eggs, etc., naturally.

Last winter, hoem sick, I finally picked up “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” which someone lent me and I’d been avoiding. But needed to return it, so gave it a quick go. And truth be told his writing put me off, no matter how much others raved — his hyperbole sometimes annoyed me.

But his points about corn as “welfare queen” (gov’t subsidies) and the advantage of the Virginia evangelical who called himself a “grass farmer” (grass for food for his free range chickens, pigs) were well-researched and made.

My wife has us eating eggs from chickens born and living outdoors now. (Hafta be wary – they can say free range but it only means access given after the chicken has learned its cage and fears the outdoors.)

The yolks are more flavorful, and firmer. I had thought an egg was an egg, but I was wrong. So we pay a little more, and warm our virtuous insides — that last was just to give you a laugh.

You have a very good way of presenting your point of view, it’s interesting to read. I’m gonna let all this brand new, crunchy debate fodder go till another day because.. well, the sun’s shining and my brain hurts.

Just out of curiosity, though- Do you keep referring to bunnies because my i.d. is ‘whitishrabbit’? I *do* love bunny-rabbits… In a fine stew.

Ha! No, no! Bunnies are the staple food of weasels, so referring to bunnies is a bit of a habit. And “bunny huggers” is a standard term (you will note I describe myself as one in the sidebar). Bunny was one of my least favorite things to find bleeding out in the sink at home, because…awwwww, bunny! Also, my brother told me the way to shoot them was go out in the fields and whistle, and they’ll stand up to see what the noise is. I thought that was a bit of dirty pool, frankly.

Ben, the difference between the yolks of “country eggs” and “city eggs” (i.e. birds that roamed and ate bugs and birds that were captive and ate grain) was noted in medieval times. You can’t paint in egg tempera with country eggs — the color is too strong.

But no domesticated animal lives a life that is entirely natural. That’s what “domesticated” means — we’ve selectively bred them for characteristics that we favor. We’ve spent thousands of years genetically engineering them the old-fashioned way and now they can’t survive without us.

Even cats, Alissa. Cats are fertile for a brief period after giving birth so, if he can, a male will kill and eat a rival’s kittens and rebreed her. For the females, this means a life of constant pregnancy and, ultimately, malnourishment and weaker and weaker (and easier and easier to catch) kittens. They probably had this physical characteristic as wild cats, too, but I’m guessing they were more solitary, so it happened far less often. We had a small colony of feral cats develop near us on the farm. You feed them, you get lots more of them. You don’t feed them, you have a property full of sick, skinny, unapproachable wildcats. You kill them, and….well, ick. Killing cats. It’s a horrible dilemma.

Anyway! Back to my point, wherever I left it…livestock aren’t natural animals. Among many other characteristics, we’ve tried hard to breed them to be stupid and docile. How stupid and docile? I don’t know. Probably not stupid and docile enough to be happy under many factory breeding conditions. Probably not clever and energetic enough to be as unhappy as we think, looking at the pictures.

One thing’s for sure, I don’t trust either the meat sellers nor the animal rights activists to find me the correct answer. I trust agricultural researchers a good deal more, though.

And I wasn’t snarking about chicken boredom. Chicken TV is one of the things they’re looking into. For chickens, it’s just bright lights and moving colors, but they wanted to know if it improved their quality of life. I don’t know what they decided.

Grow your own pork chops.

http://moralauthority.wordpress.com/2007/02/12/grow-your-own-pork-chops/

Weasel, I think we agree on lots of this.

There’s a semantic argument available on what’s artificial and what’s natural, but my sense is we’re beyond that.

For what it’s worth, lots of the symbiosis we think of as natural, from remoras to lampreys to wasps, might easily have begun with dependencies similar to what drew domestic dogs or cats to humans — it’s all natural, from a certain p.o.v.

But much more interesting is this — you grew up in Tennessee (near where Mr. planet-saver Gore now lives, yea?) with a hippie Mom?

Can you give us some good links about this?
Posts you’ve written?
Did your Mom take you to rock’n’roll festivals in your tender youth?
(I ask you this with full confidence in your capacity for droll reply … )

Hm. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before. Mother was a little old to be a hippie, but she was willing to apply herself. She used to claim she was the only judicially recognized hippie in the state, since her hippie status figured prominently in her divorce papers.

I never got to any music festivals, but I used to work with a woman whose mom dropped her off at Woodstock. Is that very cool or very uncool? I can never decide.

Give her a break- she can’t sing. Well, I mean. No, she can’t sing.

But then we really can’t give her a break for what she writes.

My version of Kabbalah has a level 56 Pikachu that knows Surf.