When I read this, this morning, I thought about how people used to milk
cows, and then I thought about the bottle of milk in my refrigerator. The
eggs in my refrigerator are organic, which means that they're more expensive
than other eggs and theoretically, the chickens are given natural food, but
really, I have no idea about the lives of those chickens. I still remember
the chickens on my grandmother's farm, who wandered around a shaded
enclosure with lots of trees and coops that they could enter for shelter.
And I remember the first so called, scientific, chicken farm near my uncle's
house on Long Island with chickens in little cages stacked on top of each
other, unable to walk around. I was, maybe 12 years old when I saw that new
fangled way of raising chickens, and I had no idea of its implications.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2016 11:02 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Female Reproductive Exploitation Comes Home
Man!!!
Master of the Universe!
Old Mother Earth, like Humpty Dumpty, will find that all the Kings horses
and all the Kings men cannot put her together again.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/10/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
bodies.
Truthdig
Female Reproductive Exploitation Comes Home
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/female_reproductive_exploitation_c
omes_h
ome_20161209/
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Posted on Dec 9, 2016
By Carol Adams
Animal rights activists have decried the conditions in which
chickens are kept at egg farms. (Robert F. Bukaty / AP Photo
(http://www.apimages.com/Search?query=chicken+farm+hens&ss=10&st=kw&en
tityse
arch=&toItem=15&orderBy=Newest&searchMediaType=allmedia) )
Sexual violation and reproductive exploitation happen to vulnerable
their bodies.
After studying systems of female reproductive servitude and visiting
"parlors," exhibitions and auctions where females are sold into
captivity, Dr. Kathryn Gillespie (http://kathrynagillespie.com/) of
the University of Washington found relentless "sexually violent
commodification of the female body."
Meet Carly (not her real name). Carly was torn from her mother shortly
after birth, and while her umbilical cord hung from her, was auctioned
off. She lived a life of physical and social isolation until her
captors felt she was sexually mature. She was immobilized by chains or
with a specially designed containment device, and impregnated with an
insemination gun that was forcibly inserted into her uterus.
After nine months, Carly gave birth and bent to caress her child. Once
her milk came in (within 24 hours), her baby was taken from her.
Sometimes, the children are removed within fifteen minutes of birth.
Had they not been parted, Carly would have suckled her infant for at
least six months. After their forced separation, Carly called for her
baby
(http://www.newburyportnews.com/news/local_news/strange-noises-turn-ou
t-to-b
e-cows-missing-their-calves/article_d872e4da-b318-5e90-870e-51266f8eea
7f.htm l ) for at least two weeks, looked for her and cried for her.
Carly is a cow used in the dairy industry.
Author pattrice jones
(https://lanternbooks.presswarehouse.com/books/AuthorDetail.aspx?id=25
102)
,
co-founder of VINE Sanctuary (http://vine.bravebirds.org/ ;) , explains
what typically happens next: Cows like Carly are "hooked up to a
machine that simulates sucking and is so rough in doing so that most
[cows] develop abrasions and mastitis." Mastitis is inflammation of
the breast tissue, forming painful pockets of pus around the teats.
Several times daily, cows are taken to a milking "parlor." Today's
cows used in the dairy industry produce 61 percent more milk than cows
from only 25 years ago, due to genetic engineering, feed rations and
growth hormones.
Their udders must carry an extra 58 pounds of milk. But it is
profitable weight for the farmer who owns them and sells the products of
eggs.
After being pushed through this regimen, Carly's bloated udders may
force her hind legs apart, causing lameness. Within a few months, she
is again restrained and forcibly impregnated. During the first seven
months of her next pregnancy, machines continue to take her milk from
her. The physical demands of both lactation and pregnancy under these
conditions have been compared to jogging six hours a day
(https://books.google.com/books?id=Tn55CgAAQBAJ&pg=PT73&lpg=PT73&dq=%C
3%89li
se+Desaulniers+cows+jogging+six+hours+a+day&source=bl&ots=1cFN1NnZup&s
se+Desaulniers+cows+jogging+six+hours+a+ig=LV2
JfgXQySp2xlOLPlwXaSn5YT0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjN45Gn3cbNAhXG1IMKHWSsD
FgQ6AE
IHjAA#v=onepage&q=%C3%89lise%20Desaulniers%20cows%20jogging%20six%20ho
urs%20
a%20day&f=false) .
Again, Carly gives birth; again, the baby is taken away. Again, she is
hooked up to a milking machine. After three or four cycles of forced
pregnancy and continuous lactation, her body, depleted of minerals, is
sold, though she may be barely able to walk into the ring at the
auction house.
Her udders are so distended through overuse they drag on the ground.
She gently kicks at her udder with her back legs so that she can walk.
Someone then purchases Carly's body to make ground beef.
Now meet Henny Penny. Her relatives love to sit in trees, form close
relationships with others, dust bathe for at least 30 minutes a day
and forage for a majority of the day. Henny began calling out to her
mother while still an embryo in an egg, but her mother wasn't there to
cluck back or gently turn the egg. After Henny was born, her beak,
filled with nerve endings, was sheared off with a hot blade. After
four to five months, she was moved to a battery farm and installed
with four to nine other hens in a cage no bigger than 18 by 20 inches.
Once there, she is psychologically frustrated because she cannot build
or sit on a nest. Nor can she cluck to her embryos, move to a perch,
forage, preen, scratch, turn around, stretch her wings, dust bathe,
or-because of her deformed beak-eat and drink properly.
"Hens used by the egg industry lead lives of unimaginable misery,"
says journalist Mark Hawthorne (http://markhawthorne.com/) . "There is
absolutely no relief from being crammed into a cage with other birds
such that none of them can even spread their wings and [get] no relief
from standing on wire day and night. Their muscles atrophy, their skin
is rubbed raw, and they never receive medical attention-the industry
considers that a waste of money." He wrote about rescuing hens from
battery cages in his book "Bleating Hearts": "I opened tiny wire
prisons to remove birds almost completely denuded of feathers. They
seemed so incredibly fragile: all that remained of their wings were a
few pitiful quills protruding from the bone.
Instead of plumage, these White Leghorns were covered with swaths of
red-raw skin. The combs that crowned their heads were flaccid and pale
pink, rather than the brilliant rose hue they would regain, along with
their feathers, after time in a loving home."
Though birds can grasp abstract concepts and are now considered
"feathered apes" in terms of cognitive processing, Henny is viewed as
stupid. For the next year or so, the intense ammonia fumes from the
vast pool of urine and feces inside the battery shed will sting her
eyes and burn her lungs. Urine and feces from hens in the battery
cages stacked above hers rain down on her continually. Her cage-mates
die and remain in the cage, mummified and trampled underfoot. She
lives under artificial light at least 17 hours a day. According to Dr.
Karen Davis
(https://lanternbooks.presswarehouse.com/books/AuthorDetail.aspx?id=24
458)
,
author and founder of a poultry sanctuary (http://www.upc-online.org/)
, the lights mimic "the longest days of summer since it is the length
of daylight that stimulates a hen's reproductive system to form and
lay eggs."
Henny's eggs roll down the sloping wire floor of the battery cage for
easy collection by the farmer. Hens used for their eggs in commercial
operations lay an average
(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/science/how-many-eggs-does-a-chicke
n-lay- in-its-lifetime.html?_r=0 ) of 276 eggs a year.
After about 75 weeks, Henny's reproductive system begins to wear out.
She may be starved for up to two weeks-a common trick used to stress hens'
bodies into more weeks of egg production. When her egg production
returns, she will produce "jumbo" eggs, causing uterine prolapse.
Calcium deficiencies create deformities in her feet, as does standing
on wire 24 hours a day. Her uterus, from overuse, protrudes out of her
body. Between
75
and 110 weeks of age, a hand grabs her out of the battery cage. Her
cage-mates are snatched as well. Because their bodies are so depleted,
the hens are considered worthless to the meat industry. Most are
suffocated, gassed or buried alive in landfills. Some will be trucked
to slaughterhouses and used in low-grade meat products such as pet
food.
This is the female torture, violence and exploitation that is almost
certainly supported by and normalized within most households.
The same myths that for years defended sexual violence against human
women continue to defend the sexual violation and reproductive
coercion in the production-and consumption-of cows' milk and chickens'
Service."
Myth #1, Used when speaking about sexual violence victims: She liked
it. As applied to nonhuman victims: "She needs us to take her milk"
and "Only happy hens lay eggs." pattrice jones explains, "Cows are
mammals just like us, and just like us, they don't produce milk unless
they have recently given birth and are nursing."
In her 2012 book "Chicken," scholar Annie Potts points out
(http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781861898586) that
"hens lay whether they are happy or not."
Myth #2: She needs us to protect her from violence by others. This is
the paternalistic view that women, not men, need curfews. On the farm,
this myth becomes the cow or chicken is safer under our control in
industrial situations than in the barnyard, where she can be attacked
by a bull or a rooster. In fact, the non-human female is often able to
refuse sexual advances. jones explains, "If a male cow mounts her and
she doesn't want to be mounted, all she has to do is walk forward, and
he falls down. If she does want to be mounted, she positions herself
to make it easier." However, cows cannot walk away from their
imprisonment in the animal agriculture industry.
Of chickens, Karen Davis says, "She is not at the mercy of roosters
the same as she is with humans. With humans, chickens will try to
fight, or go limp, knowing they are in the hands of a power they can't
resist. But with roosters, they know each other's signals through
their evolutionary genetic knowledge. Roosters do not jump on them
constantly. Hens signal roosters and communicate through body
language, run away, or circle around them, in ways that say they don't
want to mate right now."
And importantly, they aren't protected now. A hen who would normally
lay two clutches of about 12 eggs a year in the spring and in the
summer has been genetically manipulated to produce 270 or more eggs
per year. A cow in the dairy industry is "producing" ten times more
milk than her calf would ever need.
A cow's or chicken's experience of violation matters to her. It is the
fact of her existence. We cannot know what they know, but we can know
what they feel and experience: discomfort, pain, fear, grief,
exhaustion, prolapsed uteri, broken and damaged bones. As Davis
describes the hen's life
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myqgi0Y-aXg) : "Her body is basically
being assaulted, against her will, without her consent and she cannot
fight back, cannot defend herself. She is living just as intimately
within her body, just as any woman is living intimately within her
body and experiencing whatever is done to her body against her will."
Myth #3: It's not sexual violence. Of cows, jones says, "Whatever word
you use for this, it's forced penetration by a foreign object of an
immobilized female, and at least part of the purpose is an expression
of power and control."
Animal agriculture denies that this treatment of cows and chickens is
even sex. Gillespie observes:
There is all this work to obscure the fact that it is not sexualized
violence, not violence, not sex, yet looking at the [bull] semen
industry, a lot of their advertising materials-the t-shirts, boxer
shorts, mugs, and other paraphernalia they sell-reveal through
humorous puns and jokes about the process that it is an act of sex, it
is an act of sexual violence. They match up with the discourses about
human women, too.
A graphic for Universal Semen Sales pictures a grinning cartoon bull,
two lipsticked cows in the background spreading their hind legs and
presenting their backsides, and the slogan, "We Stand Behind Every Cow We
peaceful place:
Myth #4: The home is a haven and the farm is a peaceful place. We know
the home is a very unsafe place for marital rape victims, incest
victims and domestic violence victims. Nor is the farm necessarily a
frightened, abused and physically overused animals live and die there.make a living").
Yet empathy is often reserved for the abuser: the rapist ("whose
promising life is now cut short") or the farmer ("who is struggling to
Theshot.
throwaway victim is epitomized in the cow and the chicken.
Dr. Gillespie described a cow she saw at an auction as so lame that
she collapsed, her legs splayed out behind her. Unable to stand, her
huge udders were crushed beneath the weight of her body. She was
leaking blood and milk.
For hours, she lay there. Her back legs were tied together to see if
she could stand up. But she could not and at the end of the day, she was
as "cows"
The myths listed above not only allow female exploitation in the dairy
and egg industries; they also naturalize sexual objectification and
violence against women, who themselves are referred to in certain circles
or "chicks." A state legislator in Georgia compared a womanwomen.
(http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/03/12/442637/georgia-rep-compare
s-wome
n-to-animals/) needing a late-term abortion to a cow giving birth to
a dead calf. The bill he was supporting became known
(http://msmagazine.com/blog/2012/03/31/at-11th-hour-georgia-passes-wom
en-as-
livestock-bill/) as the "women as livestock" bill.
In response to this and other abortion restrictions being introduced
in various state legislatures, Democrats Organizing for America
(https://www.facebook.com/DemocratsOrganizingForAmerica/) released
this
meme:
Some animal rights activists mistook it for a pro-animal statement.
The image used the commodified bodies of female cows and the
reproductive slavery they endure to communicate something about the
precarious nature of women's reproductive rights. All the same, there
was no understanding that condoning female exploitation in the
production of milk and eggs might actually influence attitudes toward
sexual violence against women?
When a vet school sells a T-shirt that says, "The Hardest Part is
Getting In," showing a man's arm elbow-deep in a cow's vagina, they
are talking about more than forced artificial insemination.
Pharmaceutical companies sell their products with images of sexy
chickens who desire to be consumed and cows who need to stay pregnant.
They, too, are talking on several levels at the same time: The idea of
women's bodies as sexually consumable and available for pregnancy are
evoked by these images.
As long as we do not examine the products of female torture and
servitude that we consume every day and feed to others, we are likely
to leave unexamined the ways that gender oppression is intensified and
justified by the treatment of these powerless and exploited females.
We will continue to support an institution that teaches
objectification, distance from the victim and violence in service to
personal desires-and are not these also the attitudes that contribute to
Reader"
Carol J. Adams is the author of "The Sexual Politics of Meat," which
has been translated into numerous languages and is now available in a
25th anniversary edition from Bloomsbury. This fall, "The Carol J. Adams
was published. www.caroljadams.com
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