The Home Farm

             So I would like to change things up a bit from the last several blogs I have done. The past blogs focused on different types of animal rights activist groups that try everything they can to save animals from murder and abuse. I obviously feel different about this as explained before but I still have some beliefs that coincide with their feelings. I feel that commercial farming is mostly the reason for animal rights groups to grow into organizations that mass to fight for animal rights. The commercial farming industry is one where the groups get their firepower to support their cause.

            The reason that I say this is because most of the horrific pictures and videos that you see up on PETA’s website  are ones from commercial farming operations in which sick and dying animals are videotaped to show the worst of the worst conditions at the farm. I know that there are some farms that do not take care of their animals because they just seem not to care but in reality most family farms actually do take care of the animals because they want to produce the most amount of meat, milk, or eggs as possible for the lowest cost. That is the reason I would be more likely to say no to a commercial farming business coming into my town. I am for the local family farm operations where the business owners have more of a deeply vested interest in their animals then some big CEO that doesn’t know squat about what is happening or care what is happening within his business.

            I have grown up where my sister was in Future Farmers of America or FFA for three years of high school and my girlfriend was in 4H for 10 years of her life. I have been around and helped raise pigs, sheep, goats, cows, and chickens both for show and the home freezer. If you are wondering yes I did help slaughter and butcher the meat. I saw the whole stage from small piglets and chicks to sausage and chicken on the dinner table. I have to say a home grown animal tastes so much better then store bought meat. There are many reasons why, one is every day I get to see what I am feeding the animals and I get to raise them the way I feel will produce the best meat to eat. I never have a middle person that raises the animals and pumps them full of antibiotics that may be necessary only for farms with a lot of animals to help stop the spread of diseases throughout the heard. I also never used genetic modifying try and alter the weight of the animal to make the most money possible out of the weight of the meat. I do however feed the animals food that would enhance their meat for taste and sometimes would have to slim them down so that they fit the right criteria for the best fat content in the meat. So you can basically think of it like a normal human diet. If you want to lose weight then you can work out and change your diet to get the results that you want. This is the same for meat producing animals. So I am against genetically modifying animals for profit gain.. That is a very lame and cruel practice that big corporate owned companies make money off of pumping their animals full of fluids so that they can make more profit on essentially salt water. This is done most notably in chickens and turkeys.

            I do have to say that my preferred practice of raising my own animals is still against the animal rights activists since I am killing the animal  but people have been eating meat for so many centuries that there is no way they can possibly stop people from consuming meat. I have eaten meat all my life and even though there are multiple statistics out there to show that meats can possibly be more harmful then good for your longevity I will still not stop because I love the taste of a juicy barbeque tri-tip way too much and I would rather cut some years off my life instead of becoming a vegetarian. I do have several personal experiences with some friends and family members being vegetarian but I will give you the worst one so far. The personal experience that I want to share is one of my cousins who is an animal rights extremist that decided to be a vegan which means he did consume any animal based products at all.  He lost weight and a lot of it. He looked like a twig with skin wrapped around it and he started having health problems because his body was not getting the right nutrients needed to function properly. He ended up going to the doctor and the doctor prescribed eating eggs and other sources of protein rich meat such as chicken to help him get back the nutrients lost. So much for being a vegan, he is now just a vegetarian but still looks unhealthy and has not put on much weight since. With that example I am not saying that being a vegan to try and save animals is a bad thing or cannot be done, I am stating that to do it because you want to feel included in some protest that you sort of believe in is not the right thing to do. There are other ways you can help save animals like joining a humane society to find animals new homes or get a job at a SPCA or Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. SPCA’s go after people that are cruel to animals and LEGALLY find them to arrest or cite them through legal processes not through some crazy persons idea to try and destroy a company by committing illegal acts that will get you put in jail instead of the person actually committing the so called crime.  

            The moral to this blog is that even though animal rights activists groups are necessary to uncover some wrong doing in different companies that abuse their animals, the tactics that they deploy to try and bring attention to their cause and harm to the industry is just morally wrong. Committing illegal acts should never be supported in any circumstance. They are criminals and should be punished for what they do to these companies. If it is PETA throwing red paint on someone’s fur coat,  Captain Paul Watson ordering someone to throw stink bombs onto another ship’s deck, or an ALF member torching a delivery truck just to make a statement of stop killing animals; these people need to be taught the lesson of the law and be harshly punished for what they do. If they spend enough time in prison they will stop. I have no problem with people that want to support animal rights but please do it in a legal fashion because if I had my way the people committing these crimes for animals they would be sent to prison for a long time.

What is The ALF Good For?

          Today I would like to talk about the very controversial animal rights activist group the Animal Liberation Front or ALF. This group has been responsible for a number of acts against meat packing plants, animal production and research facilities. These terrorist cells use a direct action approach to handling any mistreatment they see. They are a known terrorist organization that is destroying people’s lives for animals and here are some facts about them.

            A brief history on the ALF from their website begins with the groups beginnings in England in the 1970’s with it being officially named Animal Liberation Front in 1976 after Ronnie Lee originally from the Band of Mercy was released from prison for the first time. “Taking shape in the mid-1990s, the numerous anti-vivisection struggles provoking controversy in England can be seen as a second wave of direct action, following the first wave that began in the 1960s with the actions of hunt saboteur groups. The new struggles often overlap with the ALF, but they are also independent of it. Whereas the ALF is an underground movement pursuing illegal tactics such as property destruction” (Front, Animal Liberation Front History). The group migrated to the US in the 1980’s where it has taken hold of twenty countries worldwide. This group has been a part of terrorizing the economic stability of a country by any way possible which includes arson and explosives. “Thus, contemporary direct action movements for animal liberation are diverse, powerful, and effective, and they are growing in sophistication and strength. In Britain, animal liberation movements now threaten the viability of the multi-billion dollar vivisection and pharmaceutical industry and therefore pose a serious economic threat.” (Front, Animal Liberation Front History).

           They seem to encourage the US and British Government to try and shut them down just like the US tried so hard to stop Al Qaeda. They state “Whatever actions animal exploitation industries and governments take against the animal liberation movement, they will no more stop it than US soldiers were able to quell North Vietnamese armies or the resistance movement spreading throughout Iraq, or the Israelis can stop the Palestinians in their efforts to achieve their goals.” (Front, Animal Liberation Front History). The ALF are antagonizing the governments just as Al Qaeda did after September 11, 2001. They also like to boast their so called achievements of effectively being able to cost American tax payers money which in essence could be going to help rebuild the economy. “According to FBI testimony to Congress in Feb 2002, since 1996 the ALF and ELF have committed over 600 "criminal acts" that caused $43 million in damage to animal industries.” (Front, Animal Liberation Front History).. They are in full support of causing as much destruction and damage as possible to any company having animals for their business. “The Animal Liberation Movement is a loosely-associated collection of cells of people who intentionally violate the law in order to free animals from captivity and the horrors of exploitation. As activists in one cell do not know activists in another cell, their non-hierarchical structure and anonymity prevents legal authorities from breaking up the organization. Animal Liberation activists break into any building or compound - be it a fur farm or university laboratory - in order to release and/or rescue animals. They also destroy property in order to prevent further harm done to animals and to weaken exploitation industries economically” (Front, Animal Liberation Front History). They have been effective in their philosophy to a point; the FBI instated Operation Backfire to help capture a set of eco-terrorists as the FBI calls them. Since the operation has been set into effect they have been successful in solving “…more than 40 criminal acts ranging from vandalism to arson have been solved. Seventeen individuals have been indicted, and 15 of them pled guilty and were sentenced in 2007 to jail time ranging from 37 months to 188 months” (Investigation, 2008). After reading the some of the attacks that the FBI reported on their website I was sick to my stomach. On January 3, 2000 “At approximately 1:00 a.m., on January 3, 2000, unknown suspects set three separate fires on the grounds of the Rancho Veal Corporation in Petaluma, California. Subsequent investigation determined that an accelerant, believed to be diesel fuel, was used in the attack. The fires damaged office space, two trucks, and an equipment storage facility, resulting in an estimated $150,000 in damages. On March 16, 2000, the North American Animal Liberation Front Press Office released a communiqué stating that a cell of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a terrorist animal rights movement, claimed responsibility for the fires. A similar act of attempted arson had been claimed by the ALF against the Rancho Veal Corporation in February 1997” (Investigation, Reports and Publications, 2001). I found this really upsetting because it is close to where I grew up as a child for so many years. I also found that another attack happened on January 15, 2000 at the Petaluma Farms processing plant. It was disturbing to think that an industry that is local company that supports our local economy in a relatively small community was targeted by this terrorist group so close to my home. I buy eggs from Petaluma farms regularly when at my parent’s house and  I never imagined a terrorist group trying to destroy such a local business where family friends work for their company and could have had their jobs affected by these absurd actions. Instead of helping animals they are just being trying to cause damage and be reckless to those in any animal business. Their focus is to “save animals from cruel situations” but how is burning a truck saving anything but the satisfaction of the rush of adrenaline they get by committing a crime. They did say that destroying property was to weaken the company economically expect they must not realize that burning some trucks really only is a nescience to the company because it only slows down transportation not production. So really the ALF members that did these acts are just idiots that just want to have fun destroying property. They seem to almost need a reason to do it and they found one through the ALF.

               We have seen these sorts of actions before as I explained in past blogs Paul Watson of SSCS fabricates his own reality so he can sleep at night when he commits illegal acts. This group I feel does mostly the same thing by not only committing crimes but they also think they are helping the animals and the world by doing this. They also have five ways that animal liberation helps human rights on their website to try and lure people into their cause. These five ways are “Less abuse and less exploitation of vulnerable human beings, less world hunger and starvation, a healthier population, less destruction of the planet, and fewer dangerous drugs being tested on humans.” (Front, How Animal Liberation Will Benefit Human Rights). These are explained further with little to no facts backing them up. They seem just to make statements that sound good to an average person that has no knowledge of the topic. One of their claims are “A driving force behind the destruction of the tropical rainforests: American meat habit” (Front, How Animal Liberation Will Benefit Human Rights) this has no references to back up they simply just put this so called fact on their website without supporting it with any data. This tells me that the ALF has zero conception of reality because they slap so called facts up there hoping people will believe them. They may have had their claims be supported in the past but they certainly don’t have them all supported now. This terrorist group has shown that they just allege statements that they think will bring in another person willing to commit illegal acts to support their cause, even if that is destroying property instead of saving animals from murder and abuse. ALF is a terrorist organization that is working in the US and affecting local economies near you and needs to be stopped  so someone doesn’t end up losing their life because of their acts.

References

Front, A. L. (n.d.). Animal Liberation Front History. Retrieved may 2011, from Animal Liberation Front: http://www.animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/Premise_History/ALF_History.htm

Front, A. L. (n.d.). How Animal Liberation Will Benefit Human Rights. Retrieved May 2011, from Animal Liberation Front: http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/Health/ALbenefitsHR.htm

Investigation, F. B. (2001). Reports and Publications. Retrieved May 2011, from Federal Bureau of Investigations: http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terror/terrorism-2000-2001/?searchterm=ALF

Investigation, F. B. (2008, November 19). Stories. Retrieved May 2011, from Federal Bureau of Investigation: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2008/november/backfire_11908

Whales? Do Only Crazy People "Save" Them?

                In the past blogs I have written about PETA and gave a brief introduction into SSCS or commonly known as “Whale Wars” the TV show on the History Channel, and on the AFL which is an extremist group that will stop at nothing to “Save” animals. This blog post however is going to focus on SSCS or Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and their tactics on saving marine ecosystems.

                The SSCS mission statement is “Established in 1977, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) is an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organization. Our mission is to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the world's oceans in order to conserve and protect ecosystems and species. Sea Shepherd uses innovative direct-action tactics to investigate, document, and take action when necessary to expose and confront illegal activities on the high seas. By safeguarding the biodiversity of our delicately-balanced ocean ecosystems, Sea Shepherd works to ensure their survival for future generations” (Society, 2011). Now I don’t know about you but the part that states “…take action when necessary to expose and confront illegal activities…” (Society, 2011) to me reads that they will do anything that they can to disrupt anyone who gets in their way of saving marine life. The rules and laws don’t seem to apply to them as much as they do to anyone else. They  believe that they are in the right no matter what illegal act they commit and it’s pathetic.

                In the show “Whale Wars” Captain Paul Watson blindly sails his crew down to the southern ocean to hunt for Japanese whaler ships and disrupt the Japanese from conducting legal activities by harvesting a number of whales that is legal for research. Now, with this argument I am not saying that the Japanese are harvesting over or under the number of whales legally allowed because I am not arguing that, but I will assume that the Japanese fleet is keeping within the quota of whales allotted to them each year because I feel that international authorities would take over and shut the whaling fleet down if they were not following the law. With this said, the Captain and leader of the SSCS still takes action. But I thought that they weren’t supposed to take action if it wasn’t illegal right? I mean it’s stated in their mission statement. I guess those are more of guidelines than actual rules. If you have seen the show you have seen the activists do some amazingly bold acts against the Japanese Fleet. They have thrown stink bombs, shot projectiles out of an air cannon, and tried multiple times to prop-foul, or disable the prop of the opposing ships. These are acts that I would feel are acts of violence and pirating toward my vessel if I was Captain of one those ships.

                I would like to use the example to try and understand what I feel is happening in the sea. This example is only a generalized version of what is happening. So imagine you are driving down the freeway looking for your favorite steakhouse. View your car is a ship, the freeway is the ocean, and the juicy steak you are about to order are the whales. Bare with me this example is just to put it into terms that people may be more familiar with. So you are cruising down the freeway minding your own business when a black truck with big skull and crossbones painted on the side rolls up next to you with a number of people with masks on, inside the passenger compartment and in the bed of the truck. All of a sudden the start hurling objects at your car and try and force you to get over by ramming you. Now are you going to pull over and see what they want? No, because chances are, you think that they are nuts, Right? You are going to do whatever you can to get away from them and save yourself and hopefully you can grab your cell phone and call the police to arrest the idiot in the truck. So say the cops come pull the people over and arrest them. You finally feel safe right, even though you were scared for your life and your car has been vandalized and is barely drivable? This was all because you wanted to go do something perfectly legal and get your steak. Now I know it might be a stretch but apply this to how the Sea Shepherds tactics aren’t any different on the ocean. They throw objects onto the deck of the other ship along with ramming them and firing projectiles out of cannons at the ship trying to get them to stop legally whaling. However, the Japanese do not have the cops to take care of the problem so they take care of it on their own accord.  

                If someone were to do that to me on the freeway they better be prepared for quick justice because I would feel that my safety is in jeopardy and would take action on them, whether it would be ramming them back or whatever I would have to do to make them stop. I have the intention of being able to go home at the end of the night whether they do or not. Some may say that this is a harsh approach to the situation but I feel that the Japanese and I are on the same side. They will make sure that they get their ship home and we saw that when one of the Japanese vessels ran over the Ady Gil, a Sea Shepherd vessel, in one of the episodes. This was justified in my eyes, since the Sea Shepherds are the ones taking the illegal actions by threatening the safety of the crew members on board the ship.     

                How is the safety of the crew members being jeopardized by the Sea Shepherds, I can see someone asking? That’s easy because when you hurl a glass bottle at someone or shoot an air cannon that has hundreds of foot pounds of force behind it, the objects have the potential to critically injure or kill someone.  I found this on CBS News website “Berry was shot in the face, looking down the barrel of a home-built contraption called a spud gun. When it fired a frog, it blinded him. "If it would've been anything else it would've killed me," he says. Spud guns fire potatoes like light artillery” (Holguin, 2003). Now this is just a homemade spud gun that uses an accelerant to fire the weapon, an air cannon is the same principle but uses compressed gas to fire. This link is a YOUTUBE video of the Sea Shepherds firing such a weapon at the Japanese. http://youtu.be/nYkeH32maDo  This is illegal because you are firing a WEAPON off of a moving vehicle at a person or vessel which would constitute me, if were involved to fire a weapon back at you in self defense.

                I believe that I have adequately shown that the logic that these people think is right and lawful is actually not. There is still more evidence that can be seen on the web about how the Captain and leader of the SSCS builds his own world that has no regulations or needs to follow any law except his own.  They use tactics that I feel would constitute the Japanese taking lethal action against the Sea Shepherds. So are we handing criminals the funds necessary to keep up their illegal acts to stop legal acts? These additional links are to prove my point even further and will show on video that Captain Watson has his own reality that he works under.

               

Additional Links

http://youtu.be/nesMtzS2q3w

http://youtu.be/BOSpiKXZgys

[1]

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[1]

Holguin, J. (2003, May 8). Jaime Holguin. Retrieved April 2011, from CBSNews.com: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/08/eveningnews/main552978.shtml

Society, S. S. (2011). Who We Are. Retrieved Febuary 2011, from Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: http://www.seashepherd.org/who-we-are/

Is PETA Just Ethical Towards Animals?

            I have already given a glimpse of what side I am on for the topic of animal rights groups and how they illogically go about their doings to get people to stop eating and killing animals for that matter. The group that I am going to focus on for this blog is PETA or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and how they are blinded by their own biases and continue to push their beliefs on people.

            I have recently inquired a question into PETA’s website on the questions and answers page to get a number on how many pounds of meat an average American consumes each year and here is the response to that question: “We don’t count animals by pounds, but we do count them each as individuals. In 2009 alone, 59 billion animals were killed for consumption by Americans… each person in the US consumes 198 animals per year.”[1] Now once I received this information I was set back a bit, I didn’t really know what to think except on how big the number actually was. 198 animals per year per person, I thought to myself. That is outrageous, I consume meat often in my house and in no way have I ever come close to that figure. That means I would have to consume a half an animal per day or 15 animals per month to accomplish this goal. Now I am not saying that it can’t be done. People who go out to KFC and get a bucket of chicken is like eating a whole animal in a sitting but what about the tri-tip that I just barbequed up last night, there is no way I would be able to eat the whole steer in 2 days let alone in a month. Another example is that I went caribou hunting in September of 2010 with my father in Quebec, Canada. It was a great time and both of us bagged a pretty big animal say a little bigger than the average size steer when it goes to market. So that is a count of two animals and my whole of four family and other friends we gave some meat to are still working our way through it. This tells me that the count for animals consumed each year are skewed somewhere along the lines. Even though I asked the question for how many pounds of meat are consumed they still responded with how many animals were consumed..

            Now does that give a suggestion to the fact that they have a blind fold on or what? I mean they seem to not understand the simple fact that one person in the US cannot eat 198 steers or lambs or pigs in a year no matter how morbidly obese this country is getting. The aspect of credibility I may give for the answer they gave would be that one person could potentially eat 198 animals if they ate things like chickens, fish, and rabbits but they would have to stick with those meat groups in order to do so. Who wants to eat at least half a chicken every night for a whole year? I know I would get tired of it no matter how many different ways it was cooked. So I dare you to actually count how many WHOLE animals you consume in a year, let it be known that one steak does not equal a whole steer, and report back to PETA so there is some hard and honest evidence on the average Americans consumption of meat

            PETA in logical sense stands for just ethical treatment of animals much like the Humane Society and how they don’t want to see abused and mistreated animals. They also have an underlying idea that everyone should be vegan and if not they are the enemy, hence the videos on their website and stories of celebrities that are so successful and don’t consume meat. They push their agenda by showing that you can be hot and sexy by not eating any animals. I also tried to get some of this information on maybe some statistic that showed any improvement towards PETA actually being successful in their quest to turn everyone vegan but the response was “We don’t have statistics for how our organization has influenced that number.”[2] Even though there must be some stat out there I mean they could even run it off of the number of people that comment on their website or on Facebook saying that they went vegan because of PETA’s cause. It’s not that I do not see and understand their cause it’s more the fact that they do not see how to go about persuading people to eat vegan and understand it. I actually side with them in some of my personal views but a very limited amount. I don’t want to sound like a psycho animal killer that thinks its fun to torture animals, because I side with the aspect of getting pets out of abusive situations that aren’t healthy for the animals. Another facet that I support with them are some views on commercial farming and how sometimes there are mistreatments that happen. I feel that home grown farm animals along with harvesting wild game animals, if it is possible for one to do so, is the way in which we should go about getting meat for the family. I think they go over the top in trying to show you the sickest of the animals or in the most horrible conditions that some of the animals have it. I noticed in one video clip about the chickens in being in such small cages that they little to no room to move they drag on about that but if they had more room to move the chickens would end up killing each other by fighting to the death in which more chickens would die. http://bit.ly/f7AQNf

            To conclude I have tried to show that PETA has desired for years to drive a point across to turn everyone to veganism and turn away from meat with some success, now we don’t know how much success because there are no stats on it but needless they have supporters because of their campaign. However, PETA has a blindfold on when it comes to understanding the situation that animals are actually in. they continue to show us the most gruesome and horrible actions that occur in America for pushing their point. I think however they should but never will actually give the whole truth in that they should actually give information on what the reasons behind the farmers tactics are and how in a lot of the animal processes the animal does not go to waste, even though if it did it would just become fertilizer for some patch of earth somewhere, but instead they only show half the story. They cannot show the whole story, because that is not ethical at all, and let people decide what they feel is the moral in deciding between eating or not eating meat. This is the part that rattles my chains about PETA the most is the lack of view on the individual and their decision making and an emphasis on everyone should be the same and be like PETA.     

                                                                                                                                      

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[1] Freeman, C. (2011). (US consumption of animals) .

[2]Freeman, C. (2011). (US consumption of animals) .

Animal Rights?

Today there are many television shows and advertisements all around pointing at saving animals and how they are suffering. They also show the horrible conditions that some animals live in to make you really think about how you can help save and nurture animals back to life. The advertisements tug at your heartstrings as the image of a poor seemingly defenseless chicken is stuck in a tiny cage and not allowed to move more than a foot in either direction. Some images of a deceased, mutilated pig flashes on the screen and that feeling of disgust comes down upon you. These are meant to jumpstart a feeling of “Am I actually eating that when I fry up the bacon in the morning?” That’s how these big organizations get their supporters they recruit people which feel the same way about those pictures.

            PETA or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is one of the largest and most powerful pro animal organizations in the world. PETA has over three million fans on Facebook  (1). They are a leader in forces behind getting companies to stop using animal products and stop any cruelty to animals they can. Many advertisements are funded through PETA in order to try and make people aware of cruelty to animals and animal rights. They have a tendency to show only the worst of the worst conditions that animals endure.  Another member in the fight against animal cruelty is the SSCS or the Sea Sheppard Conservation Society and their main object is marine life and the quality in which it should have. You may have heard of the show Whale Wars on the station Animal Planet before and yes they are the same organization. “Established in 1977, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) is an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organization. Our mission is to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the world's oceans in order to conserve and protect ecosystems and species.” (2). The last and final organization that I will bring up is the Animal Liberation Front ALF who have been in many scandals in the past years for their tactics used to stop animal cruelty. Their mission is to “To abolish institutionalized animal exploitation because it assumes that animals are property.” (3).

            These are just some of the organizations that are out there saying that they are helping animals and giving “justice” that they supposedly deserve. I am writing this in opposition to these corporations because of the unwillingness to accept common practices in the harvest of animals. These people do not understand that humans have been eating meat and harvesting animals so it is common. The animal rights groups are blinded by their own ignorance and they try to push it on anyone who passes by into a life of vegetarianism. So if you have not noticed I will be ranting and raving about the topic of animal rights and how absurd it is to have these multimillion dollar corporations out their thinking they help everyone by doing this.

 

1. Animals, People for the Ethical Treatment of. Community of PETA. peta.org. [Online] 2011. http://www.peta.org/community/default.aspx.

2. Society, Sea Shepherd Conservation. Who We Are. Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. [Online] 2011. http://www.seashepherd.org/who-we-are/.

3. Front, Animal Liberation. Mission Statement. ALF. [Online] 2011. http://www.animalliberationfront.com/ALFront/mission_statement.htm