Out With The Old…

Three years ago, I was wielding a spatula, slinging spices, and rocking a carving knife, making some delish meat-centric meals for my family. All this whilst brandishing a dry pinot or three in a tipsy waltz across the kitchen.

My favourite shows were Master Chef, Hell’s Kitchen and Dinner Party Wars. I watched them almost exclusively, over and over, as I drained bottle after bottle of dry white.  I seemed to have a penchant for anything creative all my life, writing, sewing, painting, and eventually that evolved to include cooking.

 All the recipes revolved around meat, which I didn’t actually like much. All my life I have had issues with eating meat: the stringiness, the fat, the cartilage, the gelatinous textures, the smell of bones. So I rarely ate it myself, but I was a “feeder”: I cooked for everyone else. And I mean everyone!

Every kid on the block stopped by for breakfast, lunch or dinner. My kids would call their friends and say “she’s making spaghetti” and BING! someone would magically arrive at my door just in time, and naturally, I made them up a plate. My daughter’s friend would ask his mother what they were having, and then contemplate one second before stating “I’ll see what Carol’s making.”I didn’t mind one bit; I enjoyed it. But I rarely ate it. Turkey at Christmas; a hamburger at a bbq, pepperoni on a pizza, but steak? nope. Chicken on the bone? Nope. Chops? hell no. 

Then I changed a few things in my life. I left an abusive ex; the box of pinot stopped gracing my counter, and I started thinking about my health. ME. My health. My life. Things I wanted. Not anyone else. Just me. What a revelation. 

I didn’t want to eat flesh. I didn’t want to eat animals. I didn’t want any part in an industry that commodifies sentient beings and reduces them to “cuts of meat” in a supermarket. I had spent years doing it in order to please others, to follow the status quo. I did it because doing what I wanted was not an option, and in truth, I didn’t know what I wanted because all my time was spent catering to what others wanted. I had become a non-entity in my own life. I was no better off than the animals bred into the agriculture industry. I followed “the herd” because that’s all I knew and all I was allowed.

And then I deleted the negative and inserted ME into the equation. 

Better late than never, eh?

And as most vegans say: I wish I had done it sooner!

Empathy for animals has to go beyond our pets: cats and dogs. It has to go beyond wild animals hunted or trapped for fur or other products. It has to go beyond animals threatened with extinction. These issues are understood around the world as being legitimate concerns which even non-vegans will support. 

But it also has to include agricultural animals: horses, cows, pigs, goats, sheep. It has to because it’s plain logical. Why protect some animals and not others? What is the difference? Non-vegans will say “well they are bred for food.”These animals which were bred to fill a human concept: that it’s easier to go out into the field and kill a cow for food than hunt it. So agricultural animals were bred out of human LAZINESS and greed. Nature didn’t breed domestic animals, humans did. So they are not natural to this world, but now they are here, why do we think it’s ok to abuse them and not dogs (which we also bred)?

We are disgusted at the Chinese Yulin Dog Meat Festival but celebrate ribfests all summer long. We think it’s horrific that some Asian cultures eat live octopus, but really enjoy slugging back that raw (read ALIVE) oyster. And this year, we were horrified that due to a Chinese delicacy of bat soup, we ended up locked down in our homes hiding from a zoonotic novel coronavirus, but we conveniently ignore H1N1 outbreaks because “mmm bacon”.

Oh believe me, I ignored the facts too. I’m guilty of all of the above and then some. But when I made the change and stopped eating meat, I also started reading and researching, and I opened my mind to thoughts and ideas about which I previously had not heard. I went back to my nature spirit roots and had some serious conversations with my soul. I did a lot of housecleaning in my mind, opened up a few musty windows and gave that space a new coat of paint. 

I like where I am now. I like me. I have goals. I have a purpose. I have drive. I’m connecting with a new tribe and I love how that feels. I’m tapping into my creativity, my spirituality, and my imagination and it’s looking up as never before. And it’s all because I stopped using other sentient beings for my own selfish needs. I recognized we are all animals: some human animals, some non-human animals, but animals just the same. We all deserve to be treated with respect; we all deserve love; we all deserve life.

Won’t you consider this concept too?  

The True Story of the Christmas Turkey

Our family used to have turkey only twice a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas, with mum’s special sausage stuffing and a creamy, savoury gravy – having it so rarely made it extra special. As adults, we followed the same recipe and the same rules, and that made the Turkey Dinner the star of the show.

In fact, turkeys are very intelligent creatures with distinct personalities. They can fly at 55 miles per hour, run up to 35 miles per hour, and can live for up to 10 years under natural conditions. Like all animals, they are sentient, and can feel pain, fear and stress. Farmers have labelled them dumb, hence the sobriquet “turkey” is usually used to insult someone, inferring lower intelligence, but studies have shown they are misunderstood in that when they don’t do what the farmer wants they are labelled “stupid” or “unintelligent”.

Well if not listening to an abuser makes them “stupid” then I am in good company!

The turkey on the Christmas platter was more than likely raised in a dark battery with no space to move, crammed in with other broiler birds. He was fed hormones and gmo grains to plump him up to an unusually meaty size so we can have lots of white breast meat, which caused him to be unable to support his weight, leaving him lying in his own feces, being trampled on by other oversize birds. Because of their tight quarters, their beaks are cut off, along with a portion of their toes, and also males may have their fleshy snood cut off – all without benefit of anaesthesia.

This is meant to prevent them damaging each other while they are confined and grown to optimum size for slaughter. Within five short months a turkey can weight up to 40 lbs, due to genetic manipulation – 56 per cent larger than those produces in the 60s. This means, due to their gargantuan size, they are unable to perform like a normal turkey in the wild: they cannot fly, often cannot walk, and certainly can’t procreate. Hence, artificial insemination is used to get turkey babies.

This is not a pristine, hygienic procedure as we might imagine. Basically, females are held upside down, while someone shoves their hand with a tube or syringe into their vent and inseminates them. A worker in Missouri was quoted as saying, ” I have never done such hard, dirty, disgusting work in my life: 10 hours of pushing birds, grabbing birds, wrestling birds, jerking them upside down, pushing open their vents, dodging their panic-blown excrement and breathing the dust stirred up by terrified birds.”

And once again, don’t think because you purchased ‘organic’ or ‘free range’ that your turkey was living in a meadow, frolicking and cavorting with the other barnyard buddies. Nope. All this means is the food was a little different and the shed they were kept in had no cages, just open floor, giving them a little more room to defecate on each other, step on each other, and breath in more ammonia fumes and dirt.

You may not realize, at the time of slaughter, most birds are suffering from … “painful respiratory diseases and eye disorders, including swelling of the eyelids, discharge, clouding and ulceration of the cornea, and even blindness. There is a high rate of viral and bacterial infections, …” according to ezine Free From Harm.

And if this isn’t bad enough, Mercy for Animals reports animals also suffer from “workers kicking and stomping on birds, dragging them by their fragile wings and necks, and maliciously throwing turkeys onto the ground or on top of other birds; birds suffering from serious untreated illnesses and injuries, including open sores, infections, and broken bones; and workers grabbing birds by their wings or necks and violently slamming them into tiny transport crates with no regard for their welfare.”

Yes, folks, your turkey probably had some kind of viral lung infection, most likely some sort of skin infection filled with pus from the filth, was not treated, and then you ate it, seasoned with all those GMOs and a few kicks in the head.

After living this five months or so of abuse, they are shipped to the slaughterhouse, where they are dipped in an electric water bath and HOPEFULLY stunned enough so their throats can be more easily cut, and again HOPEFULLY after that, they are actually dead so that the boiling water they are next dumped in to remove their feathers easier doesn’t hurt them – because, you know – we want to kill them humanely. Often, however, they are not dead by the time they reach the boiling vats. It’s estimated more than 1 million turkeys are boiled alive each year.

So much for that humane death.

What does this tell you? Well I know what it tells me: We care more for rapists, pedophiles, and serial killers on death row, criminals who have committed egregious acts, in terms of humane death than we do for the innocent beings on this earth.

I’m including a link here which has a video of such a turkey facility, right here in Ontario. Hybrid Turkeys is the second largest producer of turkeys in the world – so chances are, yours came from there. In this plant, workers abused the turkeys in front of management, but when a hidden camera exposed the brutality, management was quoted as saying it was an isolated incident, and the workers were let go.

Don’t kid yourself. None of this is isolated or unusual, and it’s not limited to just turkeys and chickens. I urge you – no, I implore you – to watch the video, as horrific as it is, and then tell me you can eat your turkey on Christmas Day without a thought as to how it got there.

Hybrid Turkeys, Ontario – undercover video

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/hidden-camera-captures-blatant-animal-cruelty-at-turkey-farm-1.1729233

Merry Christmas.

The Past Is The Present

Remember back in the day when it was cool to smoke? Oh man, those sloe-eyed sultry women who could inhale through their nostrils were my idols! Clicking open the shiny silver cigarette case, flicking the gold-plated zippo, inhaling the first whiffs of butane, then “zoopf” the flame itself, six inches high, dazzling in its initial flash, then the first tendrils of smoke curling around a glowing end.

It was pure Hollywood, peeps, and I was a part of it. So were many, many of my friends, starting in our early to mid-teens. There was a law about age, you had to be 16, but no one enforced it. Unless you looked about five years old, no one refused to sell anyone cigarettes. In fact, even if you were five years old, all you had to say was you were buying them for your parent or grandparent, and boom, away you went with a little box of death that in the late 70s cost about $2.

In the 80s, the health and welfare party poopers got real hot and heavy over the health risks of smoking, and in 1988 new legislation was passed requiring cigarette packages to list certain health warnings and it just snowballed from there, peeps. Before long, the age was raised again (and people actually checked ID this time around!), smoking was banned in public places, then in the workplace, then gruesome images graced the boxes. People were quitting left and right, like passengers jumping off a sinking ship. Tobacco companies rallied, but the health conscious boomers were stronger and today, smoking is persona-non-gratis everywhere.

But let me tell you, the uproar! The initial hue and cry! Campaigns about curtailing our rights to choose, personal freedoms, the financial impact on tobacco companies and tobacco farmers, oh the humanity! It was not a popular concept at first. Our health was less important than the income generated from the industry – I mean, how were these rich tobacco families going to continue to live their extravagant lifestyle? Would they have to sell a yacht or two? Perhaps they’d have to forgo a few vacations or budget for Christmas?

Eventually, those companies either rallied and diversified or they died out. But life went on, and the quality of life for many was so much better. Today, we recognize how bad smoking is for us, and the memories of the turmoil of the 80s and 90s, as changes were made, has faded.

I feel like this scenario is playing out again, peeps.

But this time, it’s with meat and dairy.

Think about it: animal agriculture is a huge part of our world. It’s not bread that is the mainstay of cultures around the world, it’s meat. Our diets are meat rich for the most part. Rarely does the average family have a meal that is not meat-centric with a side or two of high-fat carbs.

So think of animal agriculture today as the tobacco industry of yore; and the way people fight to continue to eat meat despite medical organizations and World Health Organization’s (WHO) warnings about the risks of eating meat.

Society at large does not appreciate the truths about eating meat, the same as they repudiated the truths about smoking back in the day.

I can see it now: suddenly, all meat packaging starts to carry warnings as to the health risks associated with its consumption, maybe even gruesome pictures of colorectal cancer and plugged up arteries.

Animal ag farmers and dairy producers are already crying foul as activists storm their facilities and expose their deplorable conditions and abusive methods. They are opening their arsenal of propaganda to fight to maintain their position financially and ethically, just like tobacco companies did way back. Billboards are going up for both sides, peeps, using the highways as battlegrounds, and slogans as weapons. 

It seemed like an unwinnable war, for either side, until I recalled the tobacco issued and suddenly saw a resemblance between the two.

Now I know who will win (at least a majority) because the writing is on the proverbial wall, peeps. Been there, done that.

Health and welfare will start to take the lead, as usual; and anti-meat sentiment will raise it’s broccoli-topped head and brandish carrot swords whilst showing the world a better, healthier more compassionate way. I know it, because health and welfare won the war against cigarettes, so I know it will be victorious here too.

Sure, some people still smoke. It is not gone completely. I expect meat eating to be the same. Neither will be completely eradicated until many, many years hence. But I figure it’s a start – and every little step taken is better for the environment, for us, and for our children.

Only 40 years ago practically every man, woman and child smoked. Today, only 20 per cent of the WORLD smokes. That’s fucking amazing, peeps! And guess what – people are living longer – back in the 50s, life expectancy was 52. Today it’s 72. That’s a 20 year difference and probably much of it is attributed to the non-smoking lifestyle choices and changes we have made. After all, we have fewer smokers and fewer incidences of second-hand smoke diseases. 

Imagine if meat were were mostly eliminated – life expectancy could be 82 or 92 – with less to no cholesterol ingested and very few carcinogens absorbed from processed meats, meat-related diseases would decrease drastically.

I changed my way of thinking about cigarettes way back when, and I quit smoking – as did most of my friends. Today, I also don’t eat meat or dairy – same with many of my friends. I adjusted to the changes both times based on new information and education about the reality of the industries and how they affect us and the world at large (not to mention the animals, in the case of animal agriculture).

If you can quit smoking because of the health benefits and what we now know, you can do the same with meat.

Go vegan!