Monday, November 17, 2008

Cow prisons

Why should we care about cows living on prison farms? This question is at the nub of things. Surely cows are the living example of how we’ve made a machine out of Mother Nature. We’ve harnessed Nature to supply our own vast needs, and insured our future survival by having so many animals ‘on tap’. This is victory achieved! We can guarantee our major food supply. We’ve done it by using our brains.
Again, illustrated best by the cow, with our useful knowledge of the biology of this animal we have taken control of her, body and soul. Keeping a cow as a milk-producing machine involves forcibly impregnating her, letting her carry a calf to term, letting that biological process take its course, to stimulate her mammary glands to produce maximum milk. We also very cleverly manipulate her genes too.
By disposing of the newly birthed calf, in order to draw off milk for us, we arrive at a perfect example of slavery. Certainly in Nature ants enslave aphids and terrible predatory things happen between creatures, but everything, predator or predated, is always allowed its sense of being part of the natural world. But not cows nor any other farmed animal. They are enslaved, shut up in cages or enclosed by concrete, and in constant contact with cold hard steel. They’re attended by cold hearted humans who, at their convenience have the animal executed.
Something in our instinct should tell us this is profoundly wrong. But for most of us it doesn’t say anything. Our instincts, in this regard, have been cauterised, so we see no wrong in it.

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