Meat-On-A-Stick For Earth Day?
by Brenda Shoss
To subscribe to Kinship Circle Letters for Animals, email: subscribe@kinshipcircle.orgDawn's mist dances over green, rousing the distinct fragrance of renewal. As my husband and I haul Kinship Circle materials across the grounds of Earth Day 2003, we pass other boot hs that retrace humankind's havoc upon the environment. Various displays promise to restore Earth's treasured remains through recycling, conservation, and meat-on-a-stick.
Meat-on-a-stick? I stumble over the paradox even as freshly grilled burgers, dogs and sausages saturate the air with the stench of confined animals, wasted resources and pollution. The incongruity is stunning and I vow to dedicate my next column to the upright recyclers who drive gas-efficient vehicles and still eat meat. Granted, the topic won't make me a shoe-in for Ms. Popularity among conscientious carnivores. I only ask readers to consider the contradiction.
Imagine the world hunger dilemma through the eyes of a starving child. With heart-wrenching proximity, she stares from magazine ads that ask for our empathy and financial aid. Yet as she goes to bed hungry, the affluent nations feed cattle 16 pounds of grain to generate a single pound of beef. A 10% reduction in U.S. meat output alone could free enough grain to nourish 60 million people, Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer contends. Farmed-animal conglomerates in the U.S. serve 80% of the annual grain harvest to livestock--who now outnumber humans by estimates that range from 3 to 1 to as high as 25 to 1.
"Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world's animals or it continues to feed the world's people. It cannot do both," writes Georges Monbiot for the British newspaper The Guardian.
Monbiot, an omnivore, admits that veganism may be more than a h ealth craze or animal lover's lament. "It now seems plain that [a vegan diet] is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue. We stuff ourselves, and the poor get stuffed."
Meat production taxes water reservoirs, forests, land and energy stores. "Within 150 years the planet's riches could be exhausted," the Living Planet Report 2002 predicts. "By 2050 two Earths would be needed to cope with resource demands."
While dire forecasts are nothing new, the close-at-hand deadlines are. If we continue to annually take 20% more resources than can be replenished, we leave a dying planet to our great grandkids' offspring. At the present time, more than one-third of U.S. raw materials and fossil fuels are allocated to animal agriculture. Consi der the hamburger to veggie burger ratio: One bovine patty usurps enough fuel to travel 20 miles, claims author John Robbins in The Food Revolution. Conversely, plant-based proteins require eight times less fossil-fuel energy. Cornell ecologist David Pimentel says the standard meat eater exhausts the equivalent of a gallon of gas per day--double the amount needed to cultivate a vegan diet.
That single burger also signifies a deficit of five times its weight in topsoil. Modern meat factories literally ravage once living soil, particularly rainforests at a rate of 125,000 sq. miles per year. One rainforest-produced patty clears 55 sq. feet of land.
The fact that we've run out of room to farm animals for food does not diminish our taste for meat. The meat industry seizes more Amazon rainforest, regularly razing segments of 20-30 plant species, 100 insect species, and dozens of bird, mammal and reptile species.
Grain-fed livestock also guzzle 80% of U.S. water reserves. Chicken factories alone can drain 100,000 gallons a day and beef production consumes more water than the total amount expended on U.S. fruit and vegetable crops. "You'd save more water by not eating a pound of California beef than you would by not showering for an entire year," Robbins asserts. A pound of flesh requires 2,500 gallons of water to go from live animal to grocer's freezer. A pound of wheat, on the other hand, uses a comparatively low 25 gallons of water.
If the starving girl and impoverished natural resources don't get to you, the poop just might. Every year enormous lagoons stockpile 220 billion gallons of the stinky stuff. Dissolved and drizzled over neighboring land, animal manure seeps into soil, ground water and local aquifers. A report for the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry found that farm ed animals expel 130 times as much fecal matter as the entire human population.
Waste runoffs, the chief source of surplus toxic microbes in coastal waters, have killed millions of fish and spread harmful pathogens to people. An EPA study reveals that U.S. farms cause 70% of river pollution and 49% of lake pollution.
In May 2003 a New York Times article chronicled the bizarre symptoms of adults and children in rural Aulding, Ohio. They suffered chronic headaches, diarrhea/vomiting, nosebleeds, earaches, lung burns, seizures, memory loss, vertigo and other neurological complications. The Thornell family's 14th doctor finally supplied answers for an entire town now accustomed to inhalers, nebulizers and oxygen tanks. He traced the health crisis to noxious gases, hydrogen sulfide and ammonia emitted from the football-field length wastepools of a nearby industrial hog farm.
According to University of Southern California professor Dr. Kaye H. Kilburn, "the coincidence of people showing a pattern of impairment and being exposed to hydrogen sulfide arising from lagoons where hog manure is stored and then sprayed on fields or sprayed into the air" renders the link "practicall y undeniable."
The Bush administration hopes to initiate voluntary oversight of air pollution through talks with lobbyists for mega-farms. What a relief! Agri-industry giants will maintain immunity from the Clean Air Act as long as they analyze their stashed stool.
The United States Department of Agriculture follows a don't-rock-the-boat script when it comes to enforcing what few laws exist for the powerful meat and dairy industries. Livestock are processed assembly-line style in artificial settings that call for antibiotics, chemicals, hormones and steroids. Industrial slaughterhouses kill over 25 billion animals every year.
Hog farms warehouse 600-pound sows in gestation stalls for a motionless life atop cement and excrement. At veal factories tiny calves are chained by the neck inside two-feet-wide crates, unable to flex their legs or lie down with ease. Egg-laying hens share their brief lives with eight to nine other birds inside wire cages no larger than a folded newspaper. Many are starved in 10-14 day cycles (forced molting) to bolster egg production. Meat-yielding chickens and turkeys are overcrowded inside windowless storehouses where workers amputate part of each bird's beak to subdue fighting.
Other "standard practices" include slicing off of animals' tails, toes or horns--without anesthesia. In a recent Los Angeles Times cover story, "Killing Them Softly," reporter Step hanie Simon offers a rare glimpse inside the killing room. Slung upside down by their hooves, the presumably dead bodies of pigs wiggle and sway as a conveyer belt propels them toward the gutting team. "Now and then, one would rear back and strain to right itself," Simon says. "No one made much fuss. The animals would be sliced for sausage within minutes. If a few left the kill floor still aware, still kicking--well that was how the slaughterhouses operated."
Veteran inspector Temple Grandin audits slaughterhouses to determine if they adhere to federal humane slaughter laws. Cows and pigs are commonly stunned with captive bolt guns that shoot a retractable metal rod into their brains. Grandin observed defective bolt guns and incompetent or insufficient sta ff at two-thirds of the processing plants she surveyed.
"Their eyes look like they are popping out," a former employee of the IBP-Wallula Slaughterhouse stated during a cruelty investigation of the Washington plant. "I feel bad when I have to do my job on them." Pigs who awaken after stunning wind up boiled alive in hot-water tanks. Grandin documented inept stunning procedures at one-third of the hog plants she examined.
For guilt-free meat and egg consumption, some shoppers swear by the "Animal Care Certified" label. USDA criterion for organic labeling requires open-air access for animals. Yet the USDA has already waived the new standard to appease poultry and egg factories. United Egg Producers (UEP) get the organic green light if they cage hens with 67 sq. inches of space per bird, rather than the typical 48 sq. inches. They may still force molt, debeak and smother birds at rendering plants and in landfills. Some poultry plants that claim to "free-range" their meat-producing birds do little more than carve a hole through the warehouse wall.
It seems sadly ir onic to cherish the planet and contribute to the suffering of its other occupants, the animals. Yet everyone has the right to live by a personal code of ethics. And before you ask: No, I don't know what would become of the world's farmed animals if societies evolved to a plant-based diet. I do know that the massive depletion of Earth's resources, along with the unparalleled suffering of billions of animals, did not occur overnight. We can begin to unravel the mess through a reduction in factory farms and the relent less breeding of animals for food. Eating lower on the food chain is the logical path toward a rejuvenated planet.
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