Damn it!!

Ok, so I was looking for an image for a Prosperity Project post, and ended up on this website… I’m never eating meat again! I say this… and I think it might even be true. I don’t want one dime of my money to go to support the companies that do this shit!!

This really pisses me off! If I actually follow through on this, my life just got way more complicated!! Me not eating meat is one thing, but what about my dogs? I have been making my own dog food with turkey and rice. It’s easy, it seems (now I’m not so sure) to be healthy for my dogs, and up until today, I felt pretty good about it. Now, I’m not so sure… How can the food we eat be even remotely good for us when this is what happens to it?

For example:

• Over 300 million turkeys are killed every year in the United States, 40 million of them specifically for Thanksgiving.
• These valued lives that humans breed, are killed when just a few weeks old.   Their short lives are filled with pain and misery.
• All turkeys get for Thanksgiving and Christmas is a terrifying, violent, death.
• The majority of these are raised in factory farms where they are stacked in cages in windowless sheds where they can’t live naturally (or happily) in any sense of the word.
• They are debeaked and declawed without anesthesia, making it difficult or even impossible for them to eat.
• Often they cannot move, and many die in the conditions before they are fully grown.
• Those who survive are fed until they are grotesquely obese and cannot stand because their skeletons are too weak from confinement.
• Factory-farmed turkeys are fattened up so quickly that often their legs cannot support them.
• They collapse and try to drag themselves along on their wings.
• Tens of thousands die because they cannot get to food and water points.
• Over-burdened in this way, and trapped in close quarters with too little oxygen, many turkeys die when their hearts explode from the physical stress.
• Most birds are fed a cocktail of antibiotics to keep them alive yet diseases run rife in the filthy conditions.
• Male turkeys are bred to be so big they are unable to mate naturally.
• They have to be clamped upside down and their seed taken by a farm-worker, collected and forcibly injected into the females.
• To stop them cannibalizing each other in the cramped, unnatural conditions, turkeys have their beaks sliced off, which can leave them in permanent pain.
• At the slaughterhouse, most are hung upside down and dragged through an electrified waterbath to stun them.
• It often does not work and many birds are fully conscious when their throats are cut.
• Some are even alive when they are plunged into boiling water to loosen their feathers.
• Others may be killed by gassing; often birds gasp and flap violently for several minutes.
• Beating a turkey to death with a crowbar is an acceptable practice in U.S. farming of animals. Still not illegal.
• Turkeys do not receive even the scant protection given to pigs and cows by the Humane Slaughter Act and many are tied upside down still alive and conveyed to the part of the factory where they are knifed.
• Not all die right away and suffer unspeakably by bleeding slowly to death.

There’s more, and it’s way worse, and I’ll spare you the details. If you’re curious, follow this link. I do not understand why there is so much disrespect for living things. What I do understand is that it is pervasive and undeniable. But where did it come from? How can a person sleep at night knowing they are managing, operating, owning, or simply working in places like that? Are they totally anesthetized? Do they think only humans are alive?

So… now, having posted all this… I’m going to go to the kitchen, wash out my big stainless steel cook pot, fill it with water, dump in a fair amount of rice, and beans, and … yes … ground turkey. And I’m going to feed it to my dogs – whom I love – and I’m going to send Reiki and blessings and all kinds of good energy into that food … and to the living beings that agreed to be made part of it … and I’m going to be prayerful and grateful … and I hope that’s good enough!