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My wife is a vegitarian on the grounds that if she can't kill it herself she won't eat it. She reasons that she can kill fish and seafood so these are OK to eat.
Like most urban dwellers today my meat comes in packages from the grocery store or the butcher. I have no contact with the animals prior to eating them. I have no issue in general with eating meat but I do take issue with cruelty to animals. What constitutes cruelty? This line is drawn in different places by different people but I would argue that "uneccessary pain and suffering" is pretty safe as a point upon which we can all agree.
While the folks at PETA are rather extreme in their positions, there is a lot to said against the industrialization of our food supply. Animals are treated like parts on an assembly line that starts at massive feed lots or barns, where the animals do not live anything close to a "good' life and ends at the slaughter house where, in the desire to speed the process, many are not killed in the most humane of ways (let alone rendered in the cleanest or safest of ways).
These are the negative externalities of our industrial food supply. We get cheap affordable food at the expense of humane treatment of animals, worker saftey in the slaughterhouse and the health risks of poorly rendered meat.
Similar issues and practices that upset people (or not) about the availability of cheap goods at places like WalMart are at play in the food industry as well.
Not surprisingly these large corporations have deep pockets. They use this money to lobby for legislation in their favour, make sizable campaign donations and engage in aggressive PR campaigns to change public opinion.
On the paranoia side of things, I wouldn't be surprised to find that PETA was created by these corporations so they could hide in plain sight. We spend time talking about how crazy PETA is and patently ignore the more agregious realities of this industry.
I have personally killed a few animals and am never happy about it. The most recent was a squirrel that ran into the street as I was driving by... I heard the crunch. Looked in my rearview mirror to see that I had only run over its head. The rest of the body was flapping madly in its death throes. I was torn between leaving it there, going to help it and reversing over it to finish the job. It stopped moving while I made up my mind.
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"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke
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