I'm not saying that animals are not being treated badly. Some are, but most of those,IME, come not by fault of the farmer. Most of the farmers I know treat their animals very well, after all a sickley cow doesn't sell for much @ the auction. They are well feed, generally get vet care when needed. generally farmers don't beat the animals. Some due use hormones and such. So, what I'm saying is that the farmers generally  treat their animals well. It just doesn't pay not too. Poorly treated animals prduce less milk or eggs and meat animals tend to show signs of being abused (like ulcers and such) that will lower their price.


Where the abuse comes in is @ the slaughter house, which is a big part why I only worked there for a short time.

Cattle are killed with what they called a "cap hammer" which is basically a special hammer with a .22 LR round in it and when you hit them in the head the shell goes off. This is supposed to killed them instanly, but often doesn't. The round is to small, heck I have seen 9mm have a hard time killing a deer with a head shot. Worse yet, the slaughter house doesn't want to waste another shell so they just start processing the animal while it's still alive. Not to mention the filthy holding areas that the animals have to stay in while waiting their time. Wounded animals many times are just left to suffer and die.

Thats where my problem with the system comes from.

I take it you've not seen the footage from Bernard Matthews (a major European turkey producer) farms of hands playing football with living turkeys then?

Quote from: BalbinusI take it you've not seen the footage from Bernard Matthews (a major European turkey producer) farms of hands playing football with living turkeys then?

I'm not saying all farmers are on the straight and narrow, just that the majority  are not quarter as bad as they are made out to be. I have no idea of how or if farming is different in outside of th US.

Quote from: McrowI'm not saying all farmers are on the straight and narrow, just that the majority  are not quarter as bad as they are made out to be. I have no idea of how or if farming is different in outside of th US.

That may be true for Farmer Johnson or Rancher Bob who own a couple dozen acres down the road, but the big factory farms that supply companies like Tyson or Perdue are a different story.  The assembly line mentality doesn't allow much if any consideration for the well-being of the animals, just get as many heads in and out the door as you can as quickly as possible.

Also, my intent was not to be hostile but to clearly point out that this seems to be some sort of uninformed crusade by some animal rights groups.

Most of the people involved are those who would like to have the world free of people using animals for food.

I wasn't speak of techno or any other poster specifically because I think most of the average folk, me included, don't mind animals as food as long as the whole process is humane as possible.

That said, is there really a truely human way to process an animal? I'm not sure there is, but a reasonable effort should be made.

Quote from: TechnomancerThat may be true for Farmer Johnson or Rancher Bob who own a couple dozen acres down the road, but the big factory farms that supply companies like Tyson or Perdue are a different story.  The assembly line mentality doesn't allow much if any consideration for the well-being of the animals, just get as many heads in and out the door as you can as quickly as possible.

Well the thing most people don't know is that most of those large companies actually have contracts with farmers to purchase direct from them.

For instance:

I worked for BAER Poultry CO, in the chicken barn. They sell their chickens to Tyson (or atleast they did when I was there). They also sold turkeys to Butter Ball. A lot of the local turykey farmers sell direct to Jenny-O.

I don't think the companies generally own their own farms.

On the package, it says that my soylent green is made locally.

Wow, a product made in america and delivered fresh to my store. What could be wrong with that?

Eh,...whatever.  I still say my food comes from the local KROGERS store.
 If I lived closer to Ted Nugent - might have taken one of his  classes or camping trips so that I could  learn to kill my own game.  According to my aging father , I was pretty damn good shot with a rifle and shotgun back when I was 11 or 12 years old. Always scored better on targets than he  did or my grandfather.

- E.W.C.

It comes down to what you as a consumer can tolerate whether in cost or convenience.  Living off a vegetable garden, hunting & fishing, and utilizing the local farms is a wonderful option back home but it's next to impossible here.  Inhumane treatment of animals is not a good thing but it doesn't exactly keep me awake at night.  Nature has a way of treating organisms inhumanely.  Where do you as individual feel comfortable drawing the line?

Everything on this Earth lives at the expense of other life.

Some of the practices of factory farms are less than humane, and as such I do prefer, when I can, to buy locally raised meats and such, but beyond that, I eat meat, period.

I've seen the PETA rags, seen the pics that are supposed to scare me into never eating meat again, and honestly the only thing about it that bothers me is just that I doubt much terribly high quality meat comes out of animals raised that way.  Does badly by the food quality.

Animals raised well with good care make better food.  Which is why the Japanese make the best beef in the world, but also why it costs a bloody fortune.

Hunting animals for food is not a big thing in Europe, the whole hunting trip with dad thing is culturally American (well, the Aussies and Canucks may do it too for all I know, but we sure as hell don't).

In Britain it's almost certainly illegal, in any event the necessary guns definitely are.  We have way strict gun control laws.

The Penn & Teller show  "Bullshit!" did a good episode last night about obesity and the diet industry  that touched on some of these topics. If they re-run ...I'll try to tape it.

 They made some interesting points.

- E.W.C.

Quote from: GunslingerIt comes down to what you as a consumer can tolerate whether in cost or convenience.  Living off a vegetable garden, hunting & fishing, and utilizing the local farms is a wonderful option back home but it's next to impossible here.  

Again on the internet we've got someone saying, "oh my God, if it's not black, it must be purest white!" No, we have shades of grey.

It's not either brutal factory farms or everyone lives on the land once more. There's a sensible middle ground, as I described, with farmers running old-style mixed farms. Those are very productive. It would mean that we'd have something like 5-10% of the population working on farms rather than the current 2%, but given that most of the Western world has effective underemployment rates of 20-35% (not unemployment, underemployment), and given that many of the undermeployed and employed people both would be delighted to live in lower-density semi-rural areas, I don't think that's a problem.

You also perhaps don't realise just how much of your food is produced locally. Outside the outer suburbs of many major cities across the developed West are large horticultural areas. In Cuba today, and in the UK and USA in WWII, nature strips and suburban backyards, roofs of apartment buildings and the gardens of government buildings were all turned to fruit and vegetable gardening, and small-scale livestock.

It's possible in temperate and tropical zones for a person to supply themselves with much of their food from quite a small area. The Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us that the average Australian consumes 163kg (360lbs) of vegetables, 122kg (270lbs) of fruit, and 73kg (161lbs) of red meat  a year.

Three plots of 10m x 1m (3x 108 sq ft, or 324 sq ft in all) can provide 540kg (1,192lbs) of vegetables a year. This will feed to gross obesity a single person, feed to slight overweight a couple, or feed well a couple and child. Allowing for paths around the three garden beds brings the total area to 42m2, or 450 square feet. A single person can eat well with just on garden bed, or 150 square feet. By comparison, an average bedroom in a house might be 4m x 4m, or 172 sq ft.

Setting up the three garden beds would take most of a weekend, and cost a day or two's wages in materials, depending on how fancy you want to get. After that, about 2-4 hours per week will be required to sow, water, feed, mulch and harvest the plants. If you have just the one garden bed, it'll be a short day to set it up, half a day's wages for its materials, and an hour or so's work a week.

So if you have garden area the size of a large bedroom in a temperate or tropical zone, a spare day's wages and a spare weekend to set it up, and a couple of hours a week, you can have all of your non-meat nutritional needs supplied.

I am not saying that everyone should do this; but many people can do it. We don't have to live like Grizzly Adams. Once you've eaten meals cooked entirely from things you've grown for a few months, relying on supermarkets for your food starts to seem like relying on the government for money - you'll do it if you have to, but if you've a choice, you'll look after yourself. To my mind, a person who has garden space in a temperate or tropical zone and does not produce their own food, is no better or worse than a person who can do paid work, and chooses to watch daytime tv and eat pizza instead.

I can be in farm country in less than 15  minutes driving time going either north or west of where I live.

 Ohio is still  a good percentage rural farm country - even after all these decades.

- Ed  C.

Quote from: JimBobOzTo my mind, a person who has garden space in a temperate or tropical zone and does not produce their own food, is no better or worse than a person who can do paid work, and chooses to watch daytime tv and eat pizza instead.

So you're not saying a person should do it, but if they don't, they're just lazy SOB's....

I mean it's cool if you're not intending to say that, but you just did.

Because, you see, some of us work, instead of watching TV and eating pizza, so that we can buy food instead of having to grow it ourselves.  There could be various reasons - lack of desire, experience, success in past attempts, zoning laws, preference to use the space for a pool to lay about, or a play areas for the kids, or a flower garden for the wife, etc, etc, etc.

Do you have a list of approved reasons why we could not have our own garden so that I can see if I'm just a lazy SOB or not?