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The Forum > Article Comments > Binning the spin: animal welfare ‘speak’ and the law > Comments

Binning the spin: animal welfare ‘speak’ and the law : Comments

By Katrina Sharman, published 1/12/2009

We need to expose the fallacy of 'animal welfare speak' and take a stand against the suffering of animals.

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Dear Odo,

If we stopped eating meat we would need less of the earth's surface to grow food. Much of the food we grow is consumed by the animals we raise for meat. Approximately ten kilos of grain produces one kilo of beef. In much of the earth our grazing animals are kept alive by feed that requires land to grow.
Posted by david f, Tuesday, 1 December 2009 10:51:40 PM
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I'm a beef producer, but selling our steers (the by product of lots of sex!) to feedlots creeps me out. Cattle standing knee deep in their own manure, shot full of antibiotics pumped into them to cope with the resulting infections, while they are stuffed full of grain that could be feeding us directly - yuk. Sadly, we don't have the pasture (thanks to drought/global warming) to 'finish' the steers on farm, so cannot dictate where they will end up.

I hate the fact that as soon as animals become commercial units, whether they are chooks, sheep, cattle, horses or dogs, all bets are off when it comes to their welfare. Our neighbour was prosecuted (unsuccessfully)by the RSPCA because her much loved horse was old and frail, but racehorses suffer from stomach ulcers knowingly caused by their feeding-for-speed regime, and no-one does anything because they are money making machines.

If cost of food is used to justify cruelty, we may as well reintroduce slavery, to bring costs down as low as possible. You'd think people were undernourished in Australia....
Posted by Candide, Tuesday, 1 December 2009 11:23:45 PM
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Dear Odo,

We are not carnivores. We are omnivores which mean we can extract nourishment from either vegetable matter or meat. Carnivores such as lions, tigers and bears have short digestive tracts and need meat to survive. Vegetable matter requires much more processing, and herbivores have long digestive tracts to do it.

Omnivores have shorter digestive tracts than herbivores but long enough to digest vegetable matter. Eggs are animal products, but one need not kill an animal to get an egg. Some vegetarians eat eggs and milk. Some don't. Humans can survive without any animal products. Carnivores can't.
Posted by david f, Tuesday, 1 December 2009 11:36:13 PM
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*Come on, Yabby. Very few farmed animals have sex – even fewer get to do it because they choose to*

MOS, you are of course free to describe tens of millions of sheep
and cattle as "very few", but all it tells me is that you frankly
don't seem to have the foggiest, about what goes on in rural
Australia.

It seems to me that your mind is perhaps all mixed up between
factory farming and extensive agriculture. As Rehctub points out,
those concerned are free to buy free range pork, chicken lamb and
beef and hopefully cough up a bit extra, to allay their concerns.

http://dieoff.org/page80.htm

Meantime, the St Matthew Island experiment makes my point for me.
Leave herbivores to their own devices, nature takes its course,
populations build to enormous numbers of unstustainability and
crash, with much suffering and starvation, hardly a pretty picture.

I produce lambs and if we did not remove the excess numbers,
they would indeed starve to death too. Hardly humane.

So your philosophy seems to be a bit wonky. Time to rethink things
perhaps?
Posted by Yabby, Wednesday, 2 December 2009 12:28:35 AM
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Dear David F - thanks you for the correction, I probably should have said, yes we're omnivores - but I prefer meat.

I love meat, BBQ, baked, grilled, raw, smoked, hung, braised - any way it comes really.

I think vegetables are quite boring, I eat them on occassions, as a filler, but don't pursue them

I went to a vegetarian restaurant once, and now I understand why they aren't prolific.

You are probably right about how much of the surface is used to raise meat, but I think it is well worth it.

This is an issue for people who raise my food, not for consumers, I could care less as long as our officials tell me it's OK, I'm happy with that - I'm not going to go all tragic about it, life's too short.

Top of the food chain, and loving it!
Posted by odo, Wednesday, 2 December 2009 1:00:57 AM
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DavisF- "Humans can survive without any animal products."
I beg to differ DavidF.
Humans actually have developed teeth for tearing meat (our canines) and have evolved to eat and digest both meat and grain products. We can 'survive' without any meat products, but we may not be very well doing so unless supplements are taken to provide vitB12, other B vitamins, and iron to the body.

People can certainly live without meat, but by the time they have done so for many years, often suffer from anaemic diseases.

Human brains were able to develop into the thinking brains we have today because of the protein derived from meat that our ancestors consumed.
Posted by suzeonline, Wednesday, 2 December 2009 1:02:16 AM
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