Duh. Fur is the enemy. Leather coats good, fur coats bad! Leather coats good, fur coats bad!
Seriously though, I think it is just that they have conditioned themselves to be outraged at seeing fur but not leather, for whatever reason.
No mink farmer that I know of kills mink with electric shock, I never knew anyone who, I only heard rumours of it being done in Scandanavia. CO is the only “approved method”. PETA spouts a great deal of crap, anyone is wise who checks out their outrageous claims.
We are a small operation, but larger farms do what we do, only on a larger scale. Land is very expensive where I live and we would need more land to increase our herd - and since we are getting to retirement age, we won’t bother.
I don’t assert that farmed mink have a “better quality of life” than wild mink, although it could be argued that they do. They are fed high quality feed, have constant access to clean water, kept sheltered from the elements. They are confined in cages, but there are laws regulating the size of the cages. My husband worked for many years on various provincial, national and international committees dealing with animal welfare matters; as a humane man who really likes animals, he’s satisfied that our animals are well cared for.
A wild animal lives a wild animal’s life, it is subject to nature’s whims, etc., but I suppose it’s fair to say it’s living a “natural life”. As for traps, in Canada leg-hold traps are illegal and I believe that’s so in the US as well.
A link to some information from the US Fur Council.
I know that many people wiggle their eyebrows when I say we love animals - after all, we raise them and then we kill them!!! But while non-farmers see it as an absurdity I think most livestock farmers know what I mean. It isn’t just that well-cared for animals thrive better and so increase the eventual income. I have never known a deliberately cruel farmer and I have lived on a farm all my life.
We feed our mink the byproducts of the fishery, and of chicken processing. The end result is beautiful fur. And in our case, 5 full time jobs, and the money our farm pours into our local economy - these are benefits to our society, as far as I’m concerned.
Thank you for the information vison - I suspected as much, re: PETA being full of crap.
love
yams!!
As a meat eater I care if animals are suffering. Even if cows are maybe the dumbest creatures on the planet, which is very possible, I still don’t want them to suffer.
I don’t want to be killed, but if I had to choose a method of execution I’d definitely choose CO over anal shocks or shattered glass, as the former is MUCH less painful than the other two.
I can understand being opposed to the killing regardless, but if there is killing to be done then yes, I think the method does matter.
How do you define killing with necessity?
Re. farming methods, most of the animal foods sold in the US are the product of factory farming methods, not some sunny, green pastured, family farm somewhere.
The animals are kept in cages or in open but very crowded buildings. Cows, with the exception of the veal calves (the male offspring of dairy cows) are more fortunate in that they often get more freedom to wander.
It’s not a humane system, imo, and I don’t want to support it.
As for cows being stupid (or chickens or pigs), I gew up with cows, pigs and chickens. Also dogs, cats and horses.
Cows may not be the brightest, by our standards, but they are deeply emotional and social creatures. They bond strongly to their young/mothers and pine horribly when seperated. They fear death, and are perceptive enough to seek to escape being led to the slaughter, esp. when they can see/hear/smell others ahead of them in line. They suffer.
Chickens are actually quite intelligent, imo. They are also very social birds with strong parental bonds. They have a natural drive to wander around, scratch, peck, nest, and interact with others of their flock. All of this is denied to them when they are raised for eggs or meat in the typical factory farm setting.
As for pigs, it is my educated opinion that they are smarter than dogs and much smarter than horses. They are capable of affection and of suffering. They anticipate death and seek to escape it.
But regardless of how “intelligent” a creature is by our standards, they are all capable of suffering, both from being raised in unnatural, uncomfortable conditions and from the pain and terror of being slaughtered.
The idea that animals are merely “machines” which only seem to feel pain or to suffer because of automatic reflexes is an old one and fully disproven.
I just don’t care to be complicit in the suffering of other sentient creatures, esp. when it is completely uneccessary for my own survival or well-being. (and I would define killing with necessity as killing which is necessary for one’s own survival, like if I required meat to not starve (I don’t) or fur to not freeze (I don’t) or had to kill in self-defense (has not arisen).)
Which, you know, they don’t. They eat, they lay down to chew their cud, they drink, they sleep. If they are dairy cows, they walk up to the barn to be milked. Cows don’t explore their surroundings, other than to look for food and water. I’ve seen a cow stand in one place for over an hour frequently.
I have had dogs and cats all of my life, one horse and have had various types of birds all of my adult life. Until I moved to California I lived and trained on and near dairy farms.
You know all of that can be explained by instinct? Cows are herd animals, so of course they are social creatures. This doesn’t mean that they have some sort of society. Cows will miss their young of course due to the maternal instinct that all mammals have, but once that young is no longer nursing that cow has no more interest in it than any other member of the herd. Which is next to zero - cows don’t care who is in their herd, as long as it is other cows. We could move cows about at will and put them into whatever groups we wanted and they didn’t care in the slightest.
Well, yes, as a beef cow walks into the slaughter house and hears ahead other cows making noises of severe distress, they get scared. Do they know those other cows are being killed? I don’t know - I rather doubt that cows have that good of a communication system, but I suppose it’s possible. I do know that the cows showed the same fear response to being put in a squeeze shoot to be vaccinated, which makes me doubt that their fear at the slaughterhouse was any more than their fear at getting vaccinations.
This is completely opposite of the chickens that I have owned. They were social in the sense that they flock together for protection, but there were no pairs or groups that stayed always together. Actually, when they were free range, they tended to wander off by themselves. There was no evidence of a parental bond after the chicks were hatched, other than the chicks following the hens about. The hens didn’t care - we boxed them up as we could catch them and the hens never noticed they were gone. Yes, they have a natural desire to wander and peck at interesting things, but once I decided free range meant we were losing too many birds and eggs and put them in a pen, there was zero difference in the birds - they just didn’t care that they had a much smaller area to wander and peck in.
Have you been to a poultry farm? For one thing, they don’t live long enough to nest, so that is immaterial as is the “parental bond”. They live in huge covered barns where they can wander and peck to their hearts content, tho they don’t tend to because there is always plenty of food. In areas where the weather allows it, there are no sides to the barns so there is plenty of fresh air, because chickens stink, or rather chicken poo stinks. They are in those barns both for the convenience of the farmer and the protection of the chickens as they grow.
Egg farm chickens have much less room but exhibit no distress. If they did, they wouldn’t lay, simple as that. Egg farmers walk a line between keeping their birds happy and making it all as efficient as possible, so an egg bird’s life isn’t ideal. On the other hand, since they have known no other life, I doubt that they care - chickens are not intelligent enough to ask “is this all there is?”
I don’t know anything about pigs other than they smell really bad and make an incredible amount of noise. The pigs kept as pets seem to be very intelligent but since I have no idea how farmed pigs are kept, I have no idea if they suffer at all.
That I think is the crux of the discussion. Because you wouldn’t want to live in a barn, you think it must be unnatural and uncomfortable for poultry. Because humans have an advanced communication system, you think that when a cow hears another cow bellow as it dies, it must know that it is going to die and therefore is in terror of dying. I don’t know how beef cattle are currently slaughtered but it used to be very quick. Up until that time they live the life of Riley, standing around, eating, pooping and sleeping.
Look at it this way. If man quits eating meat,eggs and poultry and drinking milk, there would be no reason to have cows, chickens and turkeys. Well, except for rodeos I guess. Anyway, is your goal the same as PETA’s, to eliminate all of these animals off the face of the earth? I think given the choice, they would rather live than never exist.
Actually, I’ve been thinking of something along similar lines.
If you look at different animals, they all have a specific life-cycle. They are born, go through life, live on average a certain number of years, and then die. The “successful” species are the ones that have large populations and/or are spread over large geographical distances.
There are many animals whose life cycle seems terrible to us (e.g. for me, the penguins in Antarctica), but no one seems to say that they’re better off not existing.
Viewed in this light, cows have a specific life cycle that just happens to end with them being slaughtered for their meat. They are born, go through life, live on average a certain number of years, and then die, just like any other animal. As long as we try not to make their living years a living hell, the fact that we kill them for meat isn’t really pertinent. Other animals die of age-related malfunctions, viruses, predators, etc. Cows die from being killed for their meat. This is their life cycle, and they happen to be a successful species since there are millions and millions of them around the world.
Oh please…I see, it’s actually an issue of conservation, of protecting species (which were bred selectively by humans for their “desirable” characteristics, some of which would render them incapable of surviving in the wild, such as cows bred to produce so much milk that their udders would burst if not machine-milked twice a day, even if they were nursing a calf or chickens bred with such large breasts that they are incapable of flight) from extinction. :rolleyes:
If these creatures don’t care about the conditions they live and die in, or if their caring or not doesn’t matter, why should they care if they live at all and why should it matter?
Bottom line is humans created these varieties of animals and breed and raise them for no other reason than to harvest them and their products. Simple. If humans stopped demanding those products, they would stop breeding and raising these animals and they would all be killed (as they all are anyway on an ongoing basis) and just never replaced. The unborn generations wouldn’t know or care, I’d wager.
We’d still have the original species which the current breeds were derived from (wild pigs, turkeys, chickens, bovines, etc…) They, as naturally evolved species, are worthy of protection. More often than not, the domesticated versions are ill-adapted parodies of the original (as evidenced by the difference in intelligence between wild turkeys, reportedly among the brightest and most difficult to hunt, and the domesticated varieties who are, arguably, among the stupidest birds on the planet.)
Why are nature’s products more valuable that mankind’s? This is my main problem with most environmentalists—there is no inherent value in preserving species; their value as curiosities (and to the environment as a whole and, by extension, man) must be judged against the price (to human development) of keeping them alive.
Well, for one, in this case “Nature’s products” are more “valuable” because they are capable OF surviving on their own without human intervention. They are adapted to survival, whereas many domesticated species which man has genetically modified for his own uses are not as well adapted to life outside of domesticity.
Your view that the value of all other species is measurable only in relation to their value to man is not only extremely arrogant but woefully misguided from a scientific perspective.
We do not yet understand the full complexity of this planet’s ecosytem or the full ramifications of extinctions on the whole, but we understand enough to grasp that is IS an incredibly complex web and the rupture of the smallest strand could cause effects including our own extinction.
If you want to look at it your way, we must consider every naturally evolved species as potentially vital to man’s survival or at least to man’s benefit. Perhaps you do, but somehow I don’t get that impression.
And of course, I argue that other species have as much of a right to exist as we do and have value beyond whatever we can do with them. JMHO.
I note that you only quoted the part of my post that you could get all emotional about. I still think that you need to quit looking at cows as if they are humans and realize that a cow can be just fine if not comfortable in surroundings that would be impossible for a human to live in.
So - you do support PETA’s agenda? That is certainly what it sounds like here.
Well, we will have them as long as there is land for them to live on. (Are there wild versions of cows and chickens? I mean wild as opposed to feral.) As for the intelligence of wild turkies, a few weeks ago I visited a friend who lives in an area where there a quite a few wild turkeys. I almost hit several with my car. The only reason I didn’t is because I know they wander about on her road so I was watching for them.
I get that you don’t like the idea of animals living on farms and have some idealized concept of how wonderful it is for them to live in the wild, but I just don’t think that is a realistic way to look at it.
Are you hypocritcal? Let’s see, why are you against fur? Is it because you feel it’s not necessary to use an animal to keep warm? If so then you are, because it’s not necessary for you to wear leather nor to eat meat to live.
But then again ask yourself this? Do different types of life have different value? Is a fetus different from a baby 24 hours old? I think so. Is a bug different from a mouse? Is a rat different from a cat? Would you step on a roach in your house? Probably. Would you take a broom to a rat and kill it if it was in your house? Maybe. If a stray cat got into your house would you poison it? Maybe / Maybe not.
See people do assign different values to types of life. A roach isn’t worth much, a cat is. A cow is worth less to you than a mink or beaver.
Let’s face it a cow doesn’t hurt any less than a mink? A hunter shooting a deer at least has a slim chance of getting away. A cow on a farm has zero chance.