Unless you buy organic food and pay more you probably did

I endorse your choice entirely and just wish we had a culture in America that didn't condone the routine slaughter of bovarians and other farm animals. Maybe a few lone voices can stir the multitude. Your message is a good one.

So gross, so sad, so funny, so true.Regards, Jack

"In fact, the only advantage to using free range cows is that they are more expensive"

That is not a fact.

Thank you very much for this useful article. I like it nakliyat evden eve nakliyat

Give me a f---n' break! Stop producing children? Howsabout the industrialized world stops consuming so much? Remember, the United States accounts for roughly 2 to 3% of the world population, yet we consume an astonishing 25% of the world resources. That means the non industrialized countries are not have nearly as much impact for 10 babies as the US has for one of its damn babies. The answer is not free range cows...its stop eating so many damn cows and chickens and pigs PERIOD. Other industrialized countries such as Germany don't eat meat more than once or twice a week. I just don't get it. Why do you need a slice of pig on your two cow patties?

Wow. You clearly know almost nothing about what you are saying. Please look in to this subject before you post some stupid comment. Then, it may be best if you get YOUR head examined.

Please do your homework on the subject. By moving to a more plant-based diet, we wouldn't have the food shortages that we do. We have enough food and stored grains to feed all the hungry people- but it's being feed to your hormone loaded, antibiotic laden beef.

I hope you look into this.

Thanks

You clearly know nothing about what you are saying. *sigh* you seem to be just another one of those people who thinks eating animals is the natural order and that sticking up for animals is stupid and obscene.

Please. learn stuff.

Commenting to animal rights people is foolish. Some of them are smarter than usual which means that you’ve got a tougher opponent than the usual sports fan and, unfortunately, “animal rights” is a sort of hippy-dippy, I-am-right, more virtuous than thou, way of looking at things. This means that you’re going to run into at least two levels of opposition: religious and reasoned.

The first are the people who have too much time on their hands and really love animals, often to the exclusion of their fellow humans (who count only as sources of human overpopulation). In them, you’ll find mentalities filled with read-only virtue: that is, “I am right and no counter-example or irony will change that.” Looking at this type of animal rights adherent, you see someone with real problems with reality.

“Meat is murder!… except when I use the meat-producing industry to feed beef to a cat or a dog I like."

“Human resource uses is ruining the environment and must be stopped!… um except where my position in society allows me to give animals veterinary care even as human children go without access to basic medical services.”

Seriously, good luck arguing with these people. Members of world religions routinely ignore or suppress well-understood reasons why you should stop believing their main ideas that have been around for centuries and you can expect no less rancid a style of thinking from this kind of animal lover.

They don’t think: they shout until you walk away either nauseated or laughing depending on your mindset.

The second type, the reasoned animal lover, is someone who is often highly intelligent and can look at things clearly and argue cogently; citing not shouted dogma but calmly asserting facts with various degrees of real relevance.

These are the people who are really deadly when it comes to argument because they are often *very* highly educated and committed, not on the basis of pure and ignorant touchy-feely, but from an examination of real ‘big-picture’ issues of which compassion for animals is only a part. It is very hard to keep your breathing even when trying to convince someone with multiple degrees that he/she is not and should not act like the Dalai Lama or that you won’t be made to see yourself personally immediately and individually responsible for industrial pollution.

Worse still, they employ complex arguments which use facts and truths. If you and everyone else in the United States ate nothing but grains, there would be a lot more grain available to feed the world’s hungry millions—that is, if anyone motivated only by profit was actually going to use that spare grain to feed anyone who couldn’t pay for it.

It is also true that if everyone in the world Bicycled to work, there would certainly be less in the way of greenhouse gasses (and it would turn the Nations of the Middle-east back into the forgotten backwaters they deserve to be). And they are certainly telling the truth when it comes to the treatment of downer cows: it is cruel and nasty and disrespectful to the lives we take to feed ourselves to mistreat animals for the sake of maximizing profit.

However, one thing that is always overlooked by the intelligent style of compassion-seller is just how unnatural compassion is.

To go beyond the biological complexity of algae in nature is to see a world that is run by murder. There are food-chains with predator and prey relationships on the land, in the sea and in the air and a strong argument against compassion as a force in human action with respect to animals is that it exists nowhere else in the animal kingdom. Predators don’t make pets of anything; they don’t make complex laws and regulations about how their prey died before they ate it. Bears pull perfectly healthy but wildly unlucky salmon out of rivers and literally eat them alive. There is a simple reason for this: everything kills to live and nature doesn’t give a damn about pain.

There is no compassion and no mercy to be found, not from an amoeba engulfing a paramecium and not from a pride of lions killing old and weakened wildebeests. In all the animal world compassion is a purely human trait and you can say that it is one that the intelligent type of animal lover carries to the point of ridiculousness.

Even *plants* defend themselves from animals and destroy competition from other plants by chemical means. The nicotine in tobacco plants is a natural insecticide and so is the Eucalyptus we use in cough drops. The above-ground parts of the potato and Jimson weed plants contain compounds to discourage herbivorous mammals from eating them.

As predators go, nature is worse than we are (remember, plant and animal species we use have a *greater* number of individual members than similar species found in the wild) and the only really valid attacks against how we handle the business of mass-producing meat is that it is environmentally disastrous (it is) and that with the profit motive behind it, we are bound to to increase pain in animals we eat to maximize profit.

This is true now and it was true when Upton Sinclair wrote, ‘The Jungle’ because the whole issue with downer cows that started this messy conversation stems from companies interpreting federal law to their own advantage; so that even animals too sick to stand, even *diseased* animals with bacteria and pus in their flesh, will make it through the factory slaughter system and onto your child’s lunch plate.

That is the part that you don’t see the animal compassion specialists of either type bothering to mention so I’ll say it for them.

“Causing additional suffering to animals that are brought into the meat factory system is monstrously cruel and potentially deadly to the people who later eat them.”

Now, having said that all that, I would like somebody to find some high-quality ground beef and to make me a cheeseburger. I like mine medium-rare.

"The are count less millions of living breathing human beings suffering all over the world cause of war, feminine disease and oppression ; all the while you guys spend you time championing/funding animal rights."

Just a couple of quick points on the comment above (OK, make it three):

1). It is actually quite possible to care about the rights of human AND non-human animals. Simultaneously. In fact, a person who is empathic enough to care about the lives, feelings, needs and rights of non-human animals is MORE, not less, likely to champion human rights causes as well.

2). There is a strong relationship between the war, famine, disease and oppression you mention and the horrific way in which animals are treated. The meat-centered North American diet is wasteful and resource-intensive, creating an increasing demand for land, oil, water and all the other resources that keep the big meat-machine chugging along, which in turn contributes to conflict over these resources -- in other words, war. The majority of grain grown in North America goes to feed animals, not hungry people, thus the North American burger habit also contributes to the famine you mentioned. And I think the downer cow video makes the link between disease and animal abuse abundantly obvious. Dr. Will Tuttle's book, "The World Peace Diet" is an excellent resource on all these facts and more.

3). Finally, if you care so much about human rights, you might want to ask yourself if there are better uses for your time and energy than attacking human beings who happen to also care about animals. Ironically, one of the very best things you can do to help your fellow human beings (AND the animals, AND the environment) is to GO VEGAN. You will be reducing your carbon footprint, freeing up land and resources so that the grain going to animal feed can go to hungry people instead, and you'll be making the world just a little bit less violent, and just that little bit more compassionate. And compassion is one resource we definitely can't get enough of right now.

***IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, JUST READ THIS:

The basic long and short of this discussion is that no animal wants to be killed. All animals (most humans included) want to live. Just because they may have a blue sky to look at once a day, or are able to stand in real grass (which I can assure you, is not the norm), it doesn't mean that they are skipping and carrying their happy, smiling faces right up to the dude that clocks them in the head with a hammer to stun them before slowly and painfully killing them. They don't want to die. Stop eating them. Just stop it.
Haven't you ever wondered why Americans typically only eat cows, pigs, chickens, and fish? It's because those animals don't have the teeth or claws to fight back. We are actually killing living beings that want to live and nurture their young so that we can eat their corspes. Now THAT is sick and twisted. Please think about it.