A Haven From the Animal Holocaust
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_haven_from_the_animal_holocaust_201508
02/
Posted on Aug 2, 2015
By Chris Hedges
Farm Sanctuary, Watkins Glen, N.Y. (p. / CC BY 2.0)
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y.-There are mornings when Susie Coston, walking up to the
gate of this bucolic farm in her rubber boots, finds crates of pigs, sheep,
chickens, goats, geese or turkeys on the dirt road. Sometimes there are
notes with the crates letting her know that the animals are sick or injured.
The animals, often barely able to stand when taken from the crates, have
been rescued from huge industrial or factory farms by activists.
The crates are delivered anonymously under the cover of darkness. This is
because those who liberate animals from factory farms are considered
terrorists under U.S. law. If caught, they can get a 10-year prison term and
a $250,000 fine under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. That is the
punishment faced by two activists who were arrested in Oakland, Calif., last
month and charged with freeing more than 5,700 minks in 2013, destroying
breeding records and vandalizing other property of the fur industry.
Only in the insanity of corporate America can nonviolent animal rights
activists be charged as terrorists while a white supremacist who gunned down
African-Americans in a South Carolina church is charged on criminal counts.
Only in the insanity of America can Wall Street financers implode the global
economy through massive acts of fraud, causing widespread suffering, and be
rewarded with trillions of dollars in government bailouts. Only in the
insanity of America can government leaders wage wars that are defined as
criminal acts of aggression under international law and then remain,
unchallenged, in positions of power and influence. All this makes no sense
in an open society. But it makes perfect sense in our species of corporate
totalitarianism, in which life, especially the life of the vulnerable, is
expendable and corporate profit alone is protected and sanctified as the
highest good.
The animal agriculture industry causes suffering, death and environmental
degradation-to humans as well as animals-on a scale equaled only by the arms
industry and the fossil fuel industry. And by eating meat and dairy products
we aid and abet a system that is perhaps the primary cause of global warming
and is pumping toxins and poisons into our bodies and the rest of the
ecosystem.
Animal agriculture sends more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere
than worldwide transportation. The waste and flatulence from livestock are
responsible for creating at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide per
year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock
causes 65 percent of all emissions of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, a
greenhouse gas 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Crops raised
to feed livestock consume 56 percent of the water used in the United States.
Seventy percent of the crops we grow in the U.S. are fed to animals. Eighty
percent of the world's soy crop is fed to animals. It is a flagrant waste of
precious and diminishing resources. It takes 1,000 gallons of water to
produce one gallon of milk.
Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen-which the government briefly listed as an
"extremist" animal rights group in the early 1990s-is probably the world's
most lavish retirement home for farm animals. Gene Baur and Lorri Houston
founded it. They raised money to create Farm Sanctuary, and to pass out
literature about the abuse of animals at the hands of factory farm
operators, by selling vegan hot dogs from a Volkswagen van at Grateful Dead
concerts. In all, they drove their van to the parking lots outside nearly
100 concerts across the country. The first animal they rescued was a sheep,
later named Hilda, found lying in a pile of dead animals behind a stockyard.
"Farm Sanctuary begins with the idea that there's this horrible system and
most people are unwittingly supporting it by buying animal-based foods,"
Baur said when I reached him by phone at his home in Arlington, Va.
"We can only rescue a small handful compared to the billions who deserve to
be rescued," he said. "So we try to model and encourage a new kind of
relationship with animals. Rescuing individuals also helped us cope with the
horrors of factory farming. Going into these places we would see atrocious
abuse. We would witness thousands of animals confined in horrible
conditions, held in crates where they couldn't even turn around. This takes
a toll on you emotionally. Being able to rescue a few individuals out of
that system helped heal us. Farm Sanctuary is a place of hope. It is a place
of transformation. Animals who had been terribly mistreated, and seen only
as production units, as commodities, have their lives transformed. They
become our friends, instead of our food. You can't rescue them all, but you
do what you can. Farm animal rescue is an immediate concrete response to an
untenable chronic problem."
Farm Sanctuary, which operates through donations, has a budget of $10
million a year and runs two farms in California besides the one in New York
state.
There are 1,000 animals at the organization's three farms-cows, sheep,
goats, turkeys, pigs, geese, donkeys, chickens and ducks. The animals, which
receive state-of-the-art medical care and are fed vegan food, roam the
pastures unmolested. Cows are not impregnated in order to keep them
producing milk. Eggs are not taken from chickens for human use. And all the
creatures live out their natural lives liberated from the animal holocaust
that defines the animal agriculture industry.
"It is very easy to love dogs and cats," Coston, the sanctuary's shelter
director, said as we stood amid a flock of turkeys one rainy morning. "They
are everywhere. They are in our world. But it is not easy to love turkeys
because very few people get to meet turkeys. But look, they just followed us
in," she said as we stepped into a barn. "They love being around people.
They love attention. They are no different from pets. They also like to be
petted."
"Every animal [at the farm] has a different personality, every animal has a
name, all have health records," she went on as we walked to a barn that held
rescued pigs. "We are saying they are as important as any other individual."
The relationships between the animals, including two blind cows that are
inseparable, and between the animals and the men and women who work at the
sanctuary were evident, and often moving. Pigs, chickens, turkeys and cows
often responded to those working in the barns the way pets respond to their
human companions. The animals gathered around barn workers to be scratched
or stroked. Coston often suspended our conversation to address a pig or a
cow by name and explain the intricacies of their histories and
personalities-some shy, some gregarious, some rebellious, some jealous of
others in the herd or flock, some moody and some attached to a particular
worker at the farm.
Coston said the farm keeps the numbers small to maintain the relationships.
"I won't overcrowd," she said. "I could go out now and save 5,000 spent
layers [chickens]. But I would not see them, and many of them would die.
They would no longer be individuals."
Farm Sanctuary has been behind ballot initiatives to end the worst abuses in
factory farming and has rescued pigs trapped by flooding in Iowa and more
than 700 chickens at a Mississippi broiler factory struck by a tornado.
Coston said that after storms hit factory farms-some of which can house more
than a million chickens-the animals often are bulldozed alive into pits.
Yet the sanctuary movement is not without its critics within the animal
rights community.
"Farm Sanctuary is a strong supporter of what I call 'happy exploitation,'
or the idea that we can exploit nonhuman animals in a 'compassionate' way
through welfare reforms that supposedly make animal exploitation more
'humane,' " said the animal rights philosopher and author Gary Francione,
whom I spoke with in New York City. "This sort of approach sends a most
problematic normative signal and encourages people to be comfortable about
their continued participation in the institutionalized exploitation of
animals. For example-one of many-Farm Sanctuary joined with Peter Singer and
others in publicly expressing 'appreciation and support' for the supposedly
'pioneering' effort of Whole Foods that has evolved into the Animal Welfare
Rating program, which gives Whole Foods customers a choice of what level of
animal torture they will purchase-and all with the stamp of approval of
'animal advocates' such as Farm Sanctuary. To the extent that Farm Sanctuary
promotes veganism, it does so as a means to reduce suffering, along with
'enriched' caged eggs, crate-free pork and other supposedly more 'humane'
foods, and not as a moral imperative required by fundamental justice.
Indeed, Farm Sanctuary denigrates principled, consistent veganism as a moral
imperative, characterizing it [instead] as involving 'personal purity.' "
Farm Sanctuary's Baur said he is more willing than strict abolitionists such
as Francione to "meet people where they are." He sees his organization's
farms as educational tools, a way for visitors to begin to recognize that
food-stock animals are worthy of life.
"We are a vegan organization. We encourage people to eat plants, instead of
animals, but we also understand that sometimes change happens
incrementally," Baur said.
"Proposition 2 in California was an initiative that was on the ballot in
2008 to ban the use of veal crates, gestation crates and battery cages in
the state of California," Baur said. "It was approved by voters. Gary sees
this as a 'welfare reform' that only enables and further codifies this
notion that animals are consumables and commodities. My belief is that it
gets people thinking and talking about farm animals as living creatures who
suffer. It begins a process and a discussion. If these are living, feeling
creatures, don't they deserve to be treated with compassion and respect?
When you start thinking through those issues, the logical conclusion is that
you don't eat animals."
Baur, like Francione, dismisses what he calls industry "marketing tools"
that present cattle or chicken as free-range, grass-fed or naturally raised.
"[These animals] basically still live on a factory farm," Baur said. "And at
the end of the day, there's the fundamental question of whether or not we
should be killing and eating animals. If we can live well without killing
and causing unnecessary harm, why wouldn't we? The words 'humane' and
'slaughter' don't fit well together."
"Our food system is a mess," Baur said. "The vegan movement and the animal
rights movement have focused largely on what happens to the nonhuman animals
who are exploited. But the human beings in the system are also treated very
badly," he said in speaking of workers in the slaughterhouses and factory
farms. "They too are treated as expendable commodities. To me, being vegan
is about trying to live as kindly as possible. That includes how we relate
to nonhuman animals, as well as to human animals, as well as to the planet.
It's about creating mutually beneficial relationships, instead of abusive
and exploitive relationships."
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
A Haven From the Animal Holocaust
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_haven_from_the_animal_holocaust_201508
02/
Posted on Aug 2, 2015
By Chris Hedges
Farm Sanctuary, Watkins Glen, N.Y. (p. / CC BY 2.0)
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y.-There are mornings when Susie Coston, walking up to the
gate of this bucolic farm in her rubber boots, finds crates of pigs, sheep,
chickens, goats, geese or turkeys on the dirt road. Sometimes there are
notes with the crates letting her know that the animals are sick or injured.
The animals, often barely able to stand when taken from the crates, have
been rescued from huge industrial or factory farms by activists.
The crates are delivered anonymously under the cover of darkness. This is
because those who liberate animals from factory farms are considered
terrorists under U.S. law. If caught, they can get a 10-year prison term and
a $250,000 fine under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. That is the
punishment faced by two activists who were arrested in Oakland, Calif., last
month and charged with freeing more than 5,700 minks in 2013, destroying
breeding records and vandalizing other property of the fur industry.
Only in the insanity of corporate America can nonviolent animal rights
activists be charged as terrorists while a white supremacist who gunned down
African-Americans in a South Carolina church is charged on criminal counts.
Only in the insanity of America can Wall Street financers implode the global
economy through massive acts of fraud, causing widespread suffering, and be
rewarded with trillions of dollars in government bailouts. Only in the
insanity of America can government leaders wage wars that are defined as
criminal acts of aggression under international law and then remain,
unchallenged, in positions of power and influence. All this makes no sense
in an open society. But it makes perfect sense in our species of corporate
totalitarianism, in which life, especially the life of the vulnerable, is
expendable and corporate profit alone is protected and sanctified as the
highest good.
The animal agriculture industry causes suffering, death and environmental
degradation-to humans as well as animals-on a scale equaled only by the arms
industry and the fossil fuel industry. And by eating meat and dairy products
we aid and abet a system that is perhaps the primary cause of global warming
and is pumping toxins and poisons into our bodies and the rest of the
ecosystem.
Animal agriculture sends more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere
than worldwide transportation. The waste and flatulence from livestock are
responsible for creating at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide per
year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock
causes 65 percent of all emissions of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, a
greenhouse gas 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Crops raised
to feed livestock consume 56 percent of the water used in the United States.
Seventy percent of the crops we grow in the U.S. are fed to animals. Eighty
percent of the world's soy crop is fed to animals. It is a flagrant waste of
precious and diminishing resources. It takes 1,000 gallons of water to
produce one gallon of milk.
Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen-which the government briefly listed as an
"extremist" animal rights group in the early 1990s-is probably the world's
most lavish retirement home for farm animals. Gene Baur and Lorri Houston
founded it. They raised money to create Farm Sanctuary, and to pass out
literature about the abuse of animals at the hands of factory farm
operators, by selling vegan hot dogs from a Volkswagen van at Grateful Dead
concerts. In all, they drove their van to the parking lots outside nearly
100 concerts across the country. The first animal they rescued was a sheep,
later named Hilda, found lying in a pile of dead animals behind a stockyard.
"Farm Sanctuary begins with the idea that there's this horrible system and
most people are unwittingly supporting it by buying animal-based foods,"
Baur said when I reached him by phone at his home in Arlington, Va.
"We can only rescue a small handful compared to the billions who deserve to
be rescued," he said. "So we try to model and encourage a new kind of
relationship with animals. Rescuing individuals also helped us cope with the
horrors of factory farming. Going into these places we would see atrocious
abuse. We would witness thousands of animals confined in horrible
conditions, held in crates where they couldn't even turn around. This takes
a toll on you emotionally. Being able to rescue a few individuals out of
that system helped heal us. Farm Sanctuary is a place of hope. It is a place
of transformation. Animals who had been terribly mistreated, and seen only
as production units, as commodities, have their lives transformed. They
become our friends, instead of our food. You can't rescue them all, but you
do what you can. Farm animal rescue is an immediate concrete response to an
untenable chronic problem."
Farm Sanctuary, which operates through donations, has a budget of $10
million a year and runs two farms in California besides the one in New York
state.
There are 1,000 animals at the organization's three farms-cows, sheep,
goats, turkeys, pigs, geese, donkeys, chickens and ducks. The animals, which
receive state-of-the-art medical care and are fed vegan food, roam the
pastures unmolested. Cows are not impregnated in order to keep them
producing milk. Eggs are not taken from chickens for human use. And all the
creatures live out their natural lives liberated from the animal holocaust
that defines the animal agriculture industry.
"It is very easy to love dogs and cats," Coston, the sanctuary's shelter
director, said as we stood amid a flock of turkeys one rainy morning. "They
are everywhere. They are in our world. But it is not easy to love turkeys
because very few people get to meet turkeys. But look, they just followed us
in," she said as we stepped into a barn. "They love being around people.
They love attention. They are no different from pets. They also like to be
petted."
"Every animal [at the farm] has a different personality, every animal has a
name, all have health records," she went on as we walked to a barn that held
rescued pigs. "We are saying they are as important as any other individual."
The relationships between the animals, including two blind cows that are
inseparable, and between the animals and the men and women who work at the
sanctuary were evident, and often moving. Pigs, chickens, turkeys and cows
often responded to those working in the barns the way pets respond to their
human companions. The animals gathered around barn workers to be scratched
or stroked. Coston often suspended our conversation to address a pig or a
cow by name and explain the intricacies of their histories and
personalities-some shy, some gregarious, some rebellious, some jealous of
others in the herd or flock, some moody and some attached to a particular
worker at the farm.
Coston said the farm keeps the numbers small to maintain the relationships.
"I won't overcrowd," she said. "I could go out now and save 5,000 spent
layers [chickens]. But I would not see them, and many of them would die.
They would no longer be individuals."
Farm Sanctuary has been behind ballot initiatives to end the worst abuses in
factory farming and has rescued pigs trapped by flooding in Iowa and more
than 700 chickens at a Mississippi broiler factory struck by a tornado.
Coston said that after storms hit factory farms-some of which can house more
than a million chickens-the animals often are bulldozed alive into pits.
Yet the sanctuary movement is not without its critics within the animal
rights community.
"Farm Sanctuary is a strong supporter of what I call 'happy exploitation,'
or the idea that we can exploit nonhuman animals in a 'compassionate' way
through welfare reforms that supposedly make animal exploitation more
'humane,' " said the animal rights philosopher and author Gary Francione,
whom I spoke with in New York City. "This sort of approach sends a most
problematic normative signal and encourages people to be comfortable about
their continued participation in the institutionalized exploitation of
animals. For example-one of many-Farm Sanctuary joined with Peter Singer and
others in publicly expressing 'appreciation and support' for the supposedly
'pioneering' effort of Whole Foods that has evolved into the Animal Welfare
Rating program, which gives Whole Foods customers a choice of what level of
animal torture they will purchase-and all with the stamp of approval of
'animal advocates' such as Farm Sanctuary. To the extent that Farm Sanctuary
promotes veganism, it does so as a means to reduce suffering, along with
'enriched' caged eggs, crate-free pork and other supposedly more 'humane'
foods, and not as a moral imperative required by fundamental justice.
Indeed, Farm Sanctuary denigrates principled, consistent veganism as a moral
imperative, characterizing it [instead] as involving 'personal purity.' "
Farm Sanctuary's Baur said he is more willing than strict abolitionists such
as Francione to "meet people where they are." He sees his organization's
farms as educational tools, a way for visitors to begin to recognize that
food-stock animals are worthy of life.
"We are a vegan organization. We encourage people to eat plants, instead of
animals, but we also understand that sometimes change happens
incrementally," Baur said.
"Proposition 2 in California was an initiative that was on the ballot in
2008 to ban the use of veal crates, gestation crates and battery cages in
the state of California," Baur said. "It was approved by voters. Gary sees
this as a 'welfare reform' that only enables and further codifies this
notion that animals are consumables and commodities. My belief is that it
gets people thinking and talking about farm animals as living creatures who
suffer. It begins a process and a discussion. If these are living, feeling
creatures, don't they deserve to be treated with compassion and respect?
When you start thinking through those issues, the logical conclusion is that
you don't eat animals."
Baur, like Francione, dismisses what he calls industry "marketing tools"
that present cattle or chicken as free-range, grass-fed or naturally raised.
"[These animals] basically still live on a factory farm," Baur said. "And at
the end of the day, there's the fundamental question of whether or not we
should be killing and eating animals. If we can live well without killing
and causing unnecessary harm, why wouldn't we? The words 'humane' and
'slaughter' don't fit well together."
"Our food system is a mess," Baur said. "The vegan movement and the animal
rights movement have focused largely on what happens to the nonhuman animals
who are exploited. But the human beings in the system are also treated very
badly," he said in speaking of workers in the slaughterhouses and factory
farms. "They too are treated as expendable commodities. To me, being vegan
is about trying to live as kindly as possible. That includes how we relate
to nonhuman animals, as well as to human animals, as well as to the planet.
It's about creating mutually beneficial relationships, instead of abusive
and exploitive relationships."
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dealing_with_mass_killings_in_america_20
150803/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dealing_with_mass_killings_in_america_20
150803/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dealing_with_mass_killings_in_america_20
150803/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/wildfire_threat_spreads_across_warming_w
orld_20150803/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/wildfire_threat_spreads_across_warming_w
orld_20150803/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/wildfire_threat_spreads_across_warming_w
orld_20150803/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_haven_from_the_animal_holocaust_201508
02/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_haven_from_the_animal_holocaust_201508
02/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_haven_from_the_animal_holocaust_201508
02/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_greek_coup_liquidity_as_a_weapon_of_
coercion_20150802/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_greek_coup_liquidity_as_a_weapon_of_
coercion_20150802/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_greek_coup_liquidity_as_a_weapon_of_
coercion_20150802/ http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
http://www.truthdig.com/about/http://www.truthdig.com/contact/http://www.tru
thdig.com/user_agreement/http://www.truthdig.com/privacy_policy/http://www.t
ruthdig.com/about/comment_policy/
C 2015 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
http://www.hopstudios.com/
http://support.truthdig.com/signup_page/subscribe
http://support.truthdig.com/signup_page/subscribe
http://www.facebook.com/truthdighttp://twitter.com/intent/follow?source=foll
owbutton&variant=1.0&screen_name=truthdighttps://plus.google.com/+truthdight
tp://www.linkedin.com/company/truthdighttp://truthdig.tumblr.com/http://www.
truthdig.com/connect
