I hope everyone got a chance to read Celine Dilfer’s piece on vegetarianism (“Vegetarianism is not a fad, has meaty history” in the March 1 issue of the Daily Forty-Niner).
If you ask anyone whether they are “for” or “against” cruelty to animals, they will obviously be against it. Yet, the average meat-eater consumes 100 animals per year. Animals in modern factory farms are deprived of everything that is natural to them, and they are treated in ways that would warrant felony cruelty-to-animals charges if the victims were dogs or cats.
Chickens’ beaks are sliced off with a hot blade, pigs’ tails are chopped off and their teeth are clipped with pliers. Cattle and pigs are castrated, all without any pain relief.
The animals are confined to crowded, filthy warehouses and dosed with powerful drugs to make them grow so quickly that their hearts and limbs often cannot keep up – they frequently become crippled or suffer from heart attacks when they’re only a few weeks old. Finally, at the slaughterhouse, they are hung upside-down, and their throats are slit, often while they are still conscious.
Students go to school to be informed and to apply their knowledge to the real world. Who really wants to wake up every morning knowing they are going to pay for animals to be crammed into cages, beaten and then bled to death? When young people learn more than one million animals are slaughtered for food every hour, they understandably want to avoid being part of that violence. It’s high time we think before we eat.
– Pulin Modi, Norfolk, Va.
