Eating animals

Words Meanings

I was waiting on my husband one day, in our local Walmart, sitting at a Subway Restaurant, located inside the Walmart, not eating but taking up their valuable table space and getting dirty looks from the employees, while reading the Word Meanings Chapter of Eating Animals. When my husband finally showed up the first thing I had him do was sit down and read the first sentence of:

Excerpt from CFE
"Common Farming Exemptions make legal any method of raising farmed animals so long as it is commonly practiced within the industry."

I had heard of this before when I was much younger and had forgotten the term. Until reading the Word Meanings section of Eating Animals it never really dawned on me again. But it definitely really made me sick to think that its not bad enough that the animal industries have the government eating from the palm of their hands. But they really are setting their own laws and regulation with this one little sentence. As long as everyone else is doing it, its fine and seen as perfectly acceptable. So the old saying your parents told you while growing up...

"If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?

and in this question yes everyone in the Factory Farming industry fines it acceptable to hold animals in deplorable conditions and deny them of every god given right that they should have. So when these people were growing up, were they never asked this question, or did they just not learn the lesson.

Just because everyone else is doing it, it doesn't make it good or acceptable.

But then again I guess most adolescents go with the crowd and jump... Ignorance, stupidity, & insanity... Which were not listed in the Word Meanings section. But I feel this law is ridicules and should be described as so.

I bet my parents regret asking me that question so many times when I was growing up. Maybe thats what gave me a mind of my own. A feature that my Dad doesn't seem to find very acceptable and tells me "You wasn't brought up that way". Meaning I will speak up for myself if I feel I am being dismissed or taken advantage of, or if I have something to say. I am not rude about anything but I will speak my mind. I am myself and thats what I am meant to be. I was never one to stay with a crowd anyways but... Who knows if they wouldn't have asked me this so many times maybe it wouldn't have stuck, and maybe, just maybe I would have never found my way into a lifestyle that is not seen as the "in" thing to be. Because I have no need or want to be with the "in" crowd just because I can. Eating meat might be the thing every one else is doing but again that does not make it responsible, respectful, acceptable, or the right thing to do.

My husband was just as annoyed as I was about this "law". "Law" because it is horrendous and any Representative who helped put this in place is really saying do what you will as long as you fund us. "Law" obviously only means pay me enough and I will write up anything you want. So you really have no responsibility for the cruelty you put onto these animals. Because every one is doing it and getting paid not only from peoples pockets but from subsidies... So sad and embarrassing to live in a country were this is acceptable.

I really liked going through the Word Meaning section and I thought it was going to be boring and just stuff I already knew. But it was more than just definitions and really put a new look upon certain things I thought I really understood. Not that I didn't understand, but gave me a new way to think about certain topics. Like the Small elevator comparison to Battery cages.

There are some statistics listed. I really haven't learned alot about fishing/dredging/ etc. And the amounts of fish. But some statics in this book opened my eyes more to how much bycatch there is in the industry.

Excerpt from Bycatch
"Shrimp account for only 2 percent of global seafood weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global by catch."

There is also a list of what sea animals are considered "Bycatch". A long list...

Good section of the book.
."~C