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1. COLUMN/ One Country's Companion, Another's Cuisine 1. COLUMN: One Country’s Companion Is Another’s Cuisine PERMISSION TO CROSS-POST AS WRITTEN For Thanksgiving, turn on the light inside someone else... Share this column widely. *************************************************************************************************** ACTION FOR ANIMALS, related to this column, emailed separately: 2. ACTION/ One Country's Companion Is Another's Cuisine If you’re email provider censored part #2, we’ll try to send it again. Request part #2 at: kinshipcircle *************************************************************************************************** One Country’s Companion Is Another’s Cuisine By Brenda Shoss, 11/22/07, http://www.KinshipCircle.org Kinship Circle's column runs in The Healthy Planet. Ms. Shoss has also contributed to The Animals Voice, Satya Magazine,

VegNews, and other publications. KC Columns: http://www.kinshipcircle.org/columns_articles/ Red rivulets flow past a cage where he and others huddle in the airless heat. Hands abruptly tug him through metal slats. They bash his head with a pipe and shove an electric prod against him. He is a carcass, but awake, dunked in boiling water and blowtorched. Finally, everything goes black. Elsewhere, an animal stiffens under the stomp of muddy boots. Hands drag him down a corridor and flip him over a four-foot ledge. A chain is looped around his neck and clipped to a forklift. Suddenly the ground goes away. Up, up, up. His legs fumble for an absent bottom. He panics beneath the rigid clamp at his neck. After four, five or more minutes, all breath leaves his body. Their fear and pain are equal. But the first is a dog, the second a

pig -- and herein lies our cultural divide. Empathy for the dog does not extend to empathy for the pig. The dog's death -- in a meat market in China, Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, or Thailand -- triggers rage. But the hanging of the pig, an arguably cute, tame animal, doesn't elicit parallel fury. Western societies sympathize with the "pets" they see, cuddle, walk and ride. Conversely, "livestock" is an abstract concept drawn from occasional petting zoos, childhood films, or packaged body parts. Pigs, like dogs, are outgoing individuals who form social ties and navigate life through curious snouts. Each year in the U.S., roughly 100 million pigs are denied space, sunlight, straw bedding, mudbaths or any feature fundamental to pigs. At hog factories, 600-pound sows are immobilized in two-foot wide gestation crates and forcibly impregnated. Farmed pigs are tail-docked,

castrated and teeth-clipped without anesthesia. They travel to Midwest slaughterhouses "in windchills as low as 70 degrees below zero. Many hogs become frozen solid and have to be ripped with chains from truck walls," says Humane Farming Association, a national organization that exposes factory farming abuses. On the kill floor, an "insufficiently stunned pig may be alert during some stages of dismemberment," observes Temple Grandin in Survey of Stunning and Handling in Federally Inspected Beef, Veal, Pork, and Sheep Slaughter Plants. Pigs kick and squeal as workers "stick" them with knives. Cruelty doesn't have one face or country. It is humans who compartmentalize animals based upon their "function." Thus, one country's companion is another's cuisine. DOGS FOR DINNER & CATS IN THE MEDICINE CABINET Westerners find the consumption of humankind's best

friend repugnant. Yet in South Korea some two million dogs are annually killed for human meals. Humane Society International estimates 500,000 dogs are butchered in the Philippines each year. In 2007, Koreans and Filipinos acknowledged global opposition to dog meat with rules to Westernize their dog-eating ways. Well, sort of. Revisions to the Korean Animal Protection Act of 1991 clarified animal cruelty and inflated penalties. But a leading anti-dog meat group, International Aid For Korean Animals (IAKA), worries the amended law "fails to directly address the chief source of cruelty: Dog meat markets." Korea's Food Sanitation Law of 1984 dubs dog soups or broths (Boshintang) "disgusting foods." Dog-meat eateries stay licensed by simply renaming canine entrees. Under Korea's Livestock Product Sanitation and Inspection Act, dogs aren't "livestock" and cannot be slain in accordance with Ministry of

Agriculture policy. But Korea's Food and Drug Administration labels dog meat a "natural product," thereby legitimizing it for human ingestion. Animal welfare regulations are "paper laws" until funded, enforced and loophole-free. Filipino President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo signed the Anti-Rabies Act of 2007 to ban commerce in dog meat and control rabies through required dog vaccination. While the decree imposes steeper fines and jail terms for each dog slaughtered or sold for meat, violators won't face penalties without subsidized police training and firm prosecution. LEFT PHOTO: In the Philippines, dogs are usually sold while still alive. Their front limbs are dislocated and tied behind their backs. A jagged tin can "muzzles" their jaws.

Sirius Global Animal Organisation, http://sirius.2kat.net/ RIGHT PHOTO: In China, cat selectors use a pole with a wire noose. The noose loops the cat’s neck and she is dragged out kicking and crying. Notice casual diners in nearby storefront. Ultimately, legal incongruities fail to safeguard dogs and cats. Documentation of Asian wet markets reveals dogs, some in collars and apparently stolen, squashed inside fly-infested crates. Dogs are beaten with pipes and hammers to expel the adrenaline coveted for its "aphrodisiac" properties. Butchers believe a dog's terror yields tender, profitable flesh. In 2007, Humane Society International (HSI) teamed with Filipino police and animal groups to save nearly 100 dogs en route to slaughter. HSI investigators saw dogs with mouths bound in plastic cord, wrenched from cages and

clubbed. Killers sliced their jugular veins and caught spurting blood to sell. In Korea, cats are viewed as pests. Collected in sacks, strays and former companions are slammed against the ground. Some are "liquefied" in pressure cookers for elixirs presumed to heal arthritis, neuralgia, and other human conditions. Photographic accounts show cats clinging to one another as workers pluck them from a box to boil and burn. HORSES ON THE MENU Americans don't eat their horses. Yet until 2007, three foreign-owned plants processed horses for diners in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan and Mexico. On September 21, 2007, the Illinois Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a ban on horse slaughter for human intake. The closure of Cavel International in DeKalb, Illinois mirrored earlier court-ordered shutdowns at Dallas Crown in Kaufman, Texas and Beltex Corp. in Fort Worth,

Texas. As a result, spent racehorses, companions, Premarin-industry foals, draft horses, ponies, donkeys and mules are spared slaughter on U.S. soil. The negative fallout is a 370 percent surge in American horses now trucked to Mexican kill floors. Animal protection advocates want Congress to pass the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act to outlaw horse export to Mexico, Canada, and other nations for slaughter. PHOTO: Unloading at the slaughter plant. http://www.atourhands.com/horse.html At Mexico's Ciudad Juarez plant, horses restrained in kill boxes are pierced with a small knife "seven, eight, nine times," the Houston Chronicle reported in U.S. Ban On Horse Slaughter Means A More Gruesome Death Elsewhere (9/30/07). By the 10th

stab around her withers, one horse collapses. Paralyzed but not dead, she is suspended from her rear leg while workers slit her throat. Horses travel 700 or more miles to kill floors, stuffed inside double-deck trucks or other vehicles built for smaller livestock. Most arrive dehydrated, weak and mangled. Some are dead by journey's end, a Ciudad Juarez veterinarian maintains. "This is not how Americans want their horses treated," Nancy Perry, vice president of Humane Society of the United States, told the San Antonio Express-News in October 2007. ONE ANIMAL'S PAIN IS ANOTHER'S INVISIBILITY Westerners aren't sure how they want their animals treated. While dogs, cats and horses receive legal immunity from cruelty, farmed animals are seldom protected. A vast gap separates consumption from origin. Each year over 47 billion animals are slaughtered worldwide. In

America 10 billion land animals, plus an estimated 17 billion fish, die for human ingestion. Every hour, roughly 1 million birds, pigs, cows and other perceptive beings are processed assembly-line style. Meat, milk and eggs come from mega-farms where revenue overshadows animal welfare. An unspoken contract with "we-don't-want-to-know" consumers lets industrial livestock operators evade repercussions for animal cruelty. In 2006 prosecutor Frank Forchione sought animal cruelty penalties for Wiles Farm, after viewing Humane Farming Association's undercover videos, photos and notes. At the 2007 trial, Judge Stuart Miller, of Wayne County, Ohio, concluded that veterinary neglect of pigs with prolapsed vaginas and broken legs or backs did not represent cruelty. Pigs bashed with hammers and flung into transport carts did not depict mistreatment. When asked if hanging neck-chained pigs via forklift made them suffer, defendant Ken

Wiles replied, "My pigs aren't suffering pain." Judge Miller wrist-slapped Wiles Farm with a $250 fine and one-year probation for Ken Wiles' son Joe. PHOTO: IATP.org, Hog Report. Stall-confined pigs at a typical factory farm. The justice system is uncertain where husbandry ends and cruelty begins. Lax animal welfare guidelines are rarely invoked. The U.S. Humane Slaughter Act doesn't even cover chickens, turkeys, ducks, or geese. In 2005 Ginny Conley, Acting Executive Director of the West Virginia Prosecuting Attorney's Institute, failed to convict 11 employees of Pilgrim's Pride, a KFC supplier. A 2004 videotape exposed workers twisting off the heads of live chickens. They spat tobacco into the birds' eyes and mouths, spray-painted faces, and crushed them against walls. Although workers violated

state animal cruelty statutes, Conley rationalized: "[The case] needs to be handled more on a regulatory end than prosecuting someone criminally." If "pets" are victimized, abusers face felony or misdemeanor prosecution. In fact, a chicken's aptitude is similar to a cat or dog. Chickens identify one another, nurture their young, build nests, and enjoy dust baths. At egg factories, six to nine hens subsist in a battery cage no larger than a filing drawer. "Broiler chickens" and turkeys are squeezed into dark grower houses. To curtail fighting and cannibalism, workers amputate the bottom third of each bird's beak. LEFT PHOTO: A chick’s upper beak is partially sliced off with a hot blade to stop overcrowded birds from pecking and scratching each

other to death. RIGHT PHOTO: White turkeys do not exist in nature. They are forcibly inseminated and bred with hormones inside overcrowded grower houses. When animals are distressed everyday, cruelty loses its boundaries. Among 30 million U.S. cows killed yearly, at least 195,000 are downers -- stockyard animals too sick or crippled to stand. Downers are beaten and dragged on severed bones and ligaments. At intensive dry lot dairies, cows are kept artificially pregnant and lactating so machines can siphon their milk. Many are injected with Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) and suffer bovine mastitis, an acute infection of the udder. After three to four years of exhaustive pregnancy cycles, dairy cows are slaughtered for beef. LEFT PHOTO: A chick’s upper beak is partially sliced off with a hot blade to stop overcrowded birds from pecking and scratching each other to death. RIGHT PHOTO: Downers, like this calf, are too ill or injured to move, eat or drink at stockyards and slaughterhouses. Photos: Farm Sanctuary Veal is a byproduct of the government-subsidized dairy industry. Within 24 hours of birth, male calves are auctioned to veal farms where they live chained by the neck inside two-feet wide crates. They are fed a liquid-only diet to suppress muscle growth and induce anemia. Calves earmarked for veal are denied maternal love. Though sensitivity to loss is considered a human attribute, evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin noted animal parents who grieve for missing youngsters. "When a flock of sheep is scattered, the ewes bleat incessantly for their lambs, and their mutual

pleasure at coming together is manifest." All nonhuman animals "have a point of view on what happens to them, their families, and their friends," writes Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Colorado University, Boulder. "Nonetheless, their lives are wantonly and brutally taken in deference to human interests." If animals value interconnected lives, how do we reconcile consumption of some with compassion for others? Once it is clear the dog and the pig BOTH want to live, the pig becomes less of a thing and more of an individual. And the vegetarian bacon starts to look downright delicious. *************************************************************************************************** Action for animals, related to this column, emailed separately: 2. ACTION/ One Country's Companion Is Another's Cuisine If you’re email provider censored part #2, we’ll try to send it again. Request part #2 at: kinshipcircle *************************************************************************************************** Kinship Circle is a nonprofit organization serving the animal advocacy community. Donations fund the literature, website, research/campaigns, educational outreach, and animal disaster aid networking -- that let YOU take action for animals. Your support keeps our voice for animals alive!

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