Showing posts with label farm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label farm. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Down On The Farm

Two today from Leslie Bisgould, one of Canada's few animal rights lawyers.

The first, titled Anything Goes, is a detailed analysis of Canadian law respecting the treatment of farmed animals. Print it off, give it a read and some thought. It's an important report. One of many money quotes comes as she is discussing Canada's voluntary codes of practice for animal industry:
"As one reads the Codes and their recommendations in favour of or against particular practices (such as recommendations that containers of live animals not be dropped or thrown; that animals should not be unloaded by tilting the box of a dump truck; that hitting a calf on the head with a blunt instrument is no longer an approved method of rendering a calf unconscious; that animals must not be lifted by the head, ears, horns, tail or fleece; or to ensure there is no backlog at the point of entry where live, unwanted chicks wait to be shredded by a high speed macerator), it is apparent that, unless some piece of legislation specifically says otherwise, these practices may lawfully occur and do; if they did not, there would not be any reason to make recommendations in regard to them.

All of this raises a question which may be somewhat beyond the scope of this paper, but is unavoidable at this juncture: what kind of daily existence must be experienced by animals whose care-givers have to be told not to lift them by the head?"

Second, a much shorter article about human and nonhuman animals, meat, and language, called We All Are Meat. A money quote, you ask?

"In fact, the most intimate experience most of us have with animals begins when they are dead and we eat them.
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