Animal suffering

[Ridgerunner]

Personally, the idea of feed lots is not a good one. I would prefer raising beef cattle the typical way - in a ranch. Why? The cattle would not suffer and I can have more types of feeds available.

Oh, and for the likes of PETA who compare animal husbandry to slavery, the Holocaust and other evils, here’s what I’ll say to their arguments:
SHUT UP!

Seriously, their arguments in order to force the world to become vegans is nothing short of insulting, degrading, condescending and idiotic! I am honestly sick and tired of their garbage! What is more pathetic is that they are invading the Far East!

1/3 of the temperate world’s surface land is grassland. It won’t grow anything else. Grass is not digestible to humans; only to certain wild or domestic animals. Buffalo, antelope, sheep, cattle, goats; the ruminants. (There are some outliers) Say what one might about chickens and hogs, which are grain consumers, if it were not for cattle, sheep and goats, 1/3 of the world would produce no food at all.

I frankly question the world’s ability to go vegan without a lot of starvation resulting from it.
If one adds to that the general inefficiency of “organic” vegetarian food growing, I think things could get pretty grim if everybody was obliged to resort to that. Veganism, especially organic veganism, is a luxury.

But whoever can afford it and wants to do that, fine. But let’s not go thinking to ban the steaks of others.

 

[Abba]

Maybe the idea of free-roaming chickens has been a bit romanticized. Free roaming chickens are more prone to be contaminated with toxoplasmosis Gondii than those that are kept in suitable cages. I was reading that in the USA 1 out of 8 people are contaminated and that there are populations that are 45% to 95% contaminated to the point that researches think the virus has affected the culture, e.g. Brazil, that is, the friendliness and outgoing nature of the Brazilians. Experiments showed that contaminated rats lost fear of cats due to the virus effects on the brain, so the cat will eat the rat and the virus would return to where it wants to be - in the stomach of the cat. Wild roaming chickens eat just about anything that moves, including roaches. yum, yum. I like free roaming chickens and roosters, but, let’s not idealize them for profit or some unrealistic notion.

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/

As far as eating animals period, God said that we could eat anything we want and it’s kosher.
Acts 10 Peter’s Vision
biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+10&version=MSG

 

[Deo_Gratias42]

Not to put down Canada. Lots of fine people there. But I have long questioned whether most of Canada is actually a good place to raise cattle.
.

Them’s fighting words for someone from Southern Alberta, which Triumphguy is from, as is the majority of Canadian Beef.

raisedright.ca/Default.aspx

Random thought, I am sitting here craving a steak for lunch because of all this talk about meat and beef. Naturally, I just remembered something…it’s Friday. No meat for me. Grrr!

 

[SamH]

I frankly question the world’s ability to go vegan without a lot of starvation resulting from it.
.

You don’t think that population reduction isn’t a goal?

 

[Ridgerunner]

Them’s fighting words for someone from Southern Alberta, which Triumphguy is from, as is the majority of Canadian Beef.

I’m aware that there are a lot of cattle in Canada, and some pretty good bloodlines, too. Canada, after all, developed the whole “polled hereford” sub-breed.

But even so, unless you’re a prairie grain farmer who feeds the unsaleable part of his crop to cattle just to have something profitable to do with it, one has to recognize that (name removed by moderator)uts determine profitability. The biggest single (name removed by moderator)ut with cattle is feed, and the biggest single determinant of feed cost is the growing season for grass, because grass on the ground is the cheapest feed. Another is the degree to which one has to feed enriched stuff to provide cattle with heat energy in the winter.

The last I knew, Alberta has a rather short growing season and gets mighty cold in the winter. There is no way on earth their (name removed by moderator)uts aren’t significantly higher than they are in, say, the “Green Country” of Oklahoma, where fescue is green year-round, where Bermuda loves the summer heat and where body bulk and rumen action alone keep cattle comfortably warm in the winter on cheap feed.

 

[triumphguy]

What you claim is illogical.

You claim that you saw hogs that were piled on top of each other without even enough floor space to stand. How long do you think animals will survive in that kind of a situation? Not grow, not gain weight, but just survive to the next breath? In that kind of overcrowding they can’t eat because they can’t get to the feeders, they can’t drink because they can’t get to the waterers. They overheat, they stress out and they die. I know you were trying to relay a “death train” like image from the holocaust; the problem is the Jews died by the thousands on those trains in just a day or two of travel. Repeating that kind of treatment with animals on a farm will have the same result - in a day or two you’ll have hundreds if not thousands of dead animals.

As stated earlier – stress out animals = hungry farmer.

They were in line for slaughter.

 

[Ridgerunner]

They were in line for slaughter.

I have been in hog processing places. The hogs enter through a chute. At the end of it, they receive a massive electrical shock that knocks them out. The end of the chute drops the unconscious hog onto something like a metal “slide”. Then a worker at the bottom of the slide sticks a long knife into what I imagine is the big arteries coming out of the heart. The hog bleeds completely out in seconds.

Maybe this isn’t funny to anyone else, but it was to me. Once when I was in one of those places, I was asked whether I wanted to see them pack rectums (they didn’t call them rectums, though, they used a more colloquial term). “Ok”, I said. Well, the sure do. Apparently those are a delicacy in the Far East, and the specially pack them and put them in sealed shipping containers. At the time, they cost $40/lb before shipping. I was somewhat put to wonder how, exactly, Orientals prepare them, but perhaps it’s just as well that I don’t know.

Maybe somewhere they pile hogs atop each other, but that’s a far different thing from what I have seen.

As for hog-raising and breeding facilities, the ones I have seen all have concrete floors kept clean by power hoses. The size of the hog determines the size of the pen it’s in, but there’s no real crowding. Hogs are very vulnerable to disease, and those places are kept scrupulously clean. They even seal the buildings in such a way that birds can’t get in, because birds can carry some kind of disease that affects hogs. Special care is taken that even bugs can’t get in. They don’t allow people in without being specially clothed and wearing disinfected boots, either, and for the same reason.

The growers and processors are in it for the money, and filth and injuries cost them big. So they do everything they can to avoid those things.

 

[Deo_Gratias42]

Maybe this isn’t funny to anyone else, but it was to me. Once when I was in one of those places, I was asked whether I wanted to see them pack rectums (they didn’t call them rectums, though, they used a more colloquial term). “Ok”, I said. Well, the sure do. Apparently those are a delicacy in the Far East, and the specially pack them and put them in sealed shipping containers. At the time, they cost $40/lb before shipping. I was somewhat put to wonder how, exactly, Orientals prepare them, but perhaps it’s just as well that I don’t know.

Sounds like someone needs to try prairie oysters.

 

[Crescentinus]

1/3 of the temperate world’s surface land is grassland. It won’t grow anything else. Grass is not digestible to humans; only to certain wild or domestic animals. Buffalo, antelope, sheep, cattle, goats; the ruminants. (There are some outliers) Say what one might about chickens and hogs, which are grain consumers, if it were not for cattle, sheep and goats, 1/3 of the world would produce no food at all.

I frankly question the world’s ability to go vegan without a lot of starvation resulting from it.
If one adds to that the general inefficiency of “organic” vegetarian food growing, I think things could get pretty grim if everybody was obliged to resort to that. Veganism, especially organic veganism, is a luxury.

But whoever can afford it and wants to do that, fine. But let’s not go thinking to ban the steaks of others.

My grandmother taught me that there are alternatives to grass and hay. She was referring to what I call “harvest refuse”. Stuff such as rice stalks, corn stalks and the like have been used as feed for cattle here in the Philippines asides from the usual grass and hay.

People like Ingrid Newkirk loves shoving veganism down people’s throats. Frankly, I find their coercion as abusive and condescending. No wonder my people tend to mostly ignore their garbage.

 

[severus68]

Maybe the idea of free-roaming chickens has been a bit romanticized. Free roaming chickens are more prone to be contaminated with toxoplasmosis Gondii than those that are kept in suitable cages. I was reading that in the USA 1 out of 8 people are contaminated and that there are populations that are 45% to 95% contaminated to the point that researches think the virus has affected the culture, e.g. Brazil, that is, the friendliness and outgoing nature of the Brazilians. Experiments showed that contaminated rats lost fear of cats due to the virus effects on the brain, so the cat will eat the rat and the virus would return to where it wants to be - in the stomach of the cat. Wild roaming chickens eat just about anything that moves, including roaches. yum, yum. I like free roaming chickens and roosters, but, let’s not idealize them for profit or some unrealistic notion.

How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/

As far as eating animals period, God said that we could eat anything we want and it’s kosher.
Acts 10 Peter’s Vision
biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+10&version=MSG

Peter’s Vision should not be taken literally. It is about preaching to non Jews.

 

[Ridgerunner]

My grandmother taught me that there are alternatives to grass and hay. She was referring to what I call “harvest refuse”. Stuff such as rice stalks, corn stalks and the like have been used as feed for cattle here in the Philippines asides from the usual grass and hay.

People like Ingrid Newkirk loves shoving veganism down people’s throats. Frankly, I find their coercion as abusive and condescending. No wonder my people tend to mostly ignore their garbage.

Lots of secondary products are used in American agriculture. A good part of what is fed in feed lots consists in rice hulls and soybean hulls, mixed in with the richer distillers’ grain. Sometimes urea is added to aid the cattle’s digestive systems break down the cellulose.

Most of the time, though, corn stalks are plowed under to provide “tilth” to the soil. However, some are turned into silage and fed to cattle.

 

[Crescentinus]

Lots of secondary products are used in American agriculture. A good part of what is fed in feed lots consists in rice hulls and soybean hulls, mixed in with the richer distillers’ grain. Sometimes urea is added to aid the cattle’s digestive systems break down the cellulose.

Most of the time, though, corn stalks are plowed under to provide “tilth” to the soil. However, some are turned into silage and fed to cattle.

Here in the Philippines, ranchers do not feed corn to their cattle though.
Rice hulls, rice stalks and corn stalks are commonly fed to beef cattle here in the Philippines along with other types of feed, urea and sometimes, some salt. It’s mostly because there’s more rice being harvested and that rice stalks are better used to feed beef cattle than burned as fuel.

 

[SamH]

They were in line for slaughter.

They had a slaughterhouse on the farm? Still not sounding to logical.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Here in the Philippines, ranchers do not feed corn to their cattle though.
Rice hulls, rice stalks and corn stalks are commonly fed to beef cattle here in the Philippines along with other types of feed, urea and sometimes, some salt. It’s mostly because there’s more rice being harvested and that rice stalks are better used to feed beef cattle than burned as fuel.

There is only one reason why cattle in the U.S. (which is practically unique in the practice) are fed corn is to induce “marbling” (fat) within the meat. Aussies don’t do it.

But actually, nowadays corn is too expensive for cattle feeding and little of it is used for that purpose. Most of the “grain” fed in feedlots now is distillers’ grain or “inferior” grains like sorghum. A lot of distillers’ grain is “corn” of a sort, but it’s much different in its content than is corn itself. It’s what’s left after the starches and sugars are fermented and distilled out.

Interesting too is the fact that soybeans are not fed to cattle very much anymore, because China buys 40% of U.S. soybean production, which makes it too expensive for cattle feed.
Because distilling grain removes the starches and sugars but does not remove the protein, distiller’s grain is a lot higher in protein than is corn, and is pretty close to the protein content of soybeans.

 

[Crescentinus]

There is only one reason why cattle in the U.S. (which is practically unique in the practice) are fed corn is to induce “marbling” (fat) within the meat. Aussies don’t do it.

But actually, nowadays corn is too expensive for cattle feeding and little of it is used for that purpose. Most of the “grain” fed in feedlots now is distillers’ grain or “inferior” grains like sorghum. A lot of distillers’ grain is “corn” of a sort, but it’s much different in its content than is corn itself. It’s what’s left after the starches and sugars are fermented and distilled out.

Interesting too is the fact that soybeans are not fed to cattle very much anymore, because China buys 40% of U.S. soybean production, which makes it too expensive for cattle feed.
Because distilling grain removes the starches and sugars but does not remove the protein, distiller’s grain is a lot higher in protein than is corn, and is pretty close to the protein content of soybeans.

From what I know, the Japanese do not feed corn to their cattle. I’m not so sure about the Koreans though.

 

[thomasj349]

Why is anyone who worries about the well-being of animals, caring for the planet, or practicing a vegan lifestyle a “dumb liberal”?

Denying that abuse and horrible conditions go hand in hand with factory farming is just plain stupid. There are countless videos on the internet of large companies like Tyson kicking the **** out of chickens (just to name one).

After lots of reading on this site I have come to the conclusion that most of the “Catholics” on this site hide behind the phrase in Genesis that men hold dominion over the animals. I am not sure that God meant that they are not important and that caring about them is something for you to ridicule.

 

[Abba]

Hello thomasj349 and welcome to CAF.

Why is anyone who worries about the well-being of animals, caring for the planet, or practicing a vegan lifestyle a “dumb liberal”?

Denying that abuse and horrible conditions go hand in hand with factory farming is just plain stupid. There are countless videos on the internet of large companies like Tyson kicking the **** out of chickens (just to name one).

After lots of reading on this site I have come to the conclusion that most of the “Catholics” on this site hide behind the phrase in Genesis that men hold dominion over the animals. I am not sure that God meant that they are not important and that caring about them is something for you to ridicule.

Catholics are called to care and protect animals. However, animals are not equal to human beings. Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

2417 God entrusted animals to the stewardship of those whom he created in his own image. Hence it is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing. They may be domesticated to help man in his work and leisure. Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives.

2416 Animals are God’s creatures. He surrounds them with his providential care. By their mere existence they bless him and give him glory. Thus men owe them kindness. We should recall the gentleness with which saints like St. Francis of Assisi or St. Philip Neri treated animals.

2457 Animals are entrusted to man’s stewardship; he must show them kindness. They may be used to serve the just satisfaction of man’s needs.

2418 It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly. It is likewise unworthy to spend money on them that should as a priority go to the relief of human misery. One can love animals; one should not direct to them the affection due only to persons.

2415 The seventh commandment enjoins respect for the integrity of creation. Animals, like plants and inanimate beings, are by nature destined for the common good of past, present, and future humanity. Use of the mineral, vegetable, and animal resources of the universe cannot be divorced from respect for moral imperatives. Man’s dominion over inanimate and other living beings granted by the Creator is not absolute; it is limited by concern for the quality of life of his neighbor, including generations to come; it requires a religious respect for the integrity of creation.

371 God created man and woman together and willed each for the other. The Word of God gives us to understand this through various features of the sacred text. “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him.” None of the animals can be man’s partner. The woman God “fashions” from the man’s rib and brings to him elicits on the man’s part a cry of wonder, an exclamation of love and communion: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” Man discovers woman as another “I”, sharing the same humanity.

 

[Stephen168]

Why is anyone who worries about the well-being of animals, caring for the planet, or practicing a vegan lifestyle a “dumb liberal”?

Denying that abuse and horrible conditions go hand in hand with factory farming is just plain stupid. There are countless videos on the internet of large companies like Tyson kicking the **** out of chickens (just to name one).

After lots of reading on this site I have come to the conclusion that most of the “Catholics” on this site hide behind the phrase in Genesis that men hold dominion over the animals. I am not sure that God meant that they are not important and that caring about them is something for you to ridicule.

The Catholics on here seem full of hate and tend to use verses in the bible only when it works in their advantage. If the bible says something that is not practiced today then that verse it not important.

Welcome CAF
Do you have an example to support any of your claims about Catholics on this thread?

 

[thomasj349]

Hello thomasj349 and welcome to CAF.

Catholics are called to care and protect animals. However, animals are not equal to human beings. Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

2417 God entrusted animals to the stewardship of those whom he created in his own image. Hence it is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing. They may be domesticated to help man in his work and leisure. Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives.

2416 Animals are God’s creatures. He surrounds them with his providential care. By their mere existence they bless him and give him glory. Thus men owe them kindness. We should recall the gentleness with which saints like St. Francis of Assisi or St. Philip Neri treated animals.

2457 Animals are entrusted to man’s stewardship; he must show them kindness. They may be used to serve the just satisfaction of man’s needs.

2418 It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly. It is likewise unworthy to spend money on them that should as a priority go to the relief of human misery. One can love animals; one should not direct to them the affection due only to persons.

2415 The seventh commandment enjoins respect for the integrity of creation. Animals, like plants and inanimate beings, are by nature destined for the common good of past, present, and future humanity. Use of the mineral, vegetable, and animal resources of the universe cannot be divorced from respect for moral imperatives. Man’s dominion over inanimate and other living beings granted by the Creator is not absolute; it is limited by concern for the quality of life of his neighbor, including generations to come; it requires a religious respect for the integrity of creation.

371 God created man and woman together and willed each for the other. The Word of God gives us to understand this through various features of the sacred text. “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper fit for him.” None of the animals can be man’s partner. The woman God “fashions” from the man’s rib and brings to him elicits on the man’s part a cry of wonder, an exclamation of love and communion: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” Man discovers woman as another “I”, sharing the same humanity.

Thanks for commenting I have read all the various Catholic rules on animals. I just wonder these were not rules given by God but made by the Church who also said salvery was ok.

 

[spencelo]

Hello thomasj349 and welcome to CAF.

Catholics are called to care and protect animals. However, animals are not equal to human beings. Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

Then it appears that Catholics don’t seem to “care” very much about animals, when they don’t speak out against abuses that are intrinsic and unavoidable in the factory farming system.