Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

The film Partitions (running time: 14 min) by Audrey Kali gives an intimate glimpse of the ethical struggles that five small-scale meat farmers face when their animals are slaughtered. In this film, we see farmers interacting with the animals they will eventually transform into food (chickens, pigs and cattle).

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Animal Person

FEBRUARY 26, 2010

I've been having a difficult time blogging both here and at Animal Rights & AntiOppression lately because I feel like my thoughts are like " Groundhog Day." There are few animal rights stories in the news. Not the day, the film, where Bill Murray experiences the same day over and over again. People are talking. And acting.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 5, 2009

Twice in the past 24 hours (once here and once on Stephanie's blog, in the comments )I have come across the following statement: "[insert animal here] are safe from predators, get fed regularly, and are better off on farms than if they were in 'the wild.'" The animals on farms are created for the sole purpose of human consumption.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 17, 2008

The plea that animals might be killed painlessly is a very common one with flesh-eaters, but it must be pointed out that what-might-be can afford no exemption from moral responsibility for what-is. Henry S.

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Animal Person

NOVEMBER 13, 2009

But the message remains the same, and it's the only such message available in film to my knowledge (and please let me know of any others): there's simply no way to kindly, politely, "humanely" take someone's life when you don't need to. The storytellers are (with two exceptions) people whose livelihoods came from using animals.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 12, 2010

The marketing of an operation of breeding and slaughtering sentient nonhumans as a family farm (here, Bell straddles the line) is supposed to trigger some kind of compassion for the humans. It's the one that matters most to beings who simply want to live their lives without betrayal, disrespect, enslavement and slaughter.

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Animal Person

MAY 30, 2009

Bea directed me to an interview with Dr. Elizabeth Parker , the "chair man " (my emphasis) of the Animal Agriculture Alliance at CattleNetwork, which apparently is "The Source for Cattle News." If any "drastic measures" are employed, they are to remove animals from suffering, not to impose our dietary choices on others.

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Animal Person

MARCH 29, 2010

I finally read SPECIESISM , by Joan Dunayer, which was published a couple of years after ANIMAL EQUALITY , which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Whenever the media report that someone has killed "an endangered animal" or "an endangered species," they too confuse an individual with a species. To be consistent (and nonspeciesist).

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Animal Person

MAY 9, 2009

My self-appointed job in this blog is to think critically about how our human lives intersect with those of sentient nonhumans, in action and thought. The message I hear is: tormenting animals before you brutally torture and slaughter them is wrong, but brutally torturing and slaughtering them without the preceding torment is okay.

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Animal Person

JANUARY 27, 2010

I've been blogging here less partly because I've been blogging at Animal Rights & AntiOppression (check out my latest post " On Corporate Personhood and Animal Rights " and the better-than-the-post comments) but also because I've been feeling like a broken record and I don't want to bore anyone. Where do people get that idea?

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Animal Person

JUNE 22, 2009

Their claim is that what has become the customary way to take sentient nonhumans from babyhood to untimely death is not humane. It's impersonal and hideously ugly and the animals suffer greatly. No factory farms, no large-scale operations where animals are crammed together under a roof, never to see the light of day. It's cruel.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 23, 2009

His passion and compassion for humans is immense, but he appears to have some kind of mental block with nonhuman animals. I suppose speciesism/human exceptionalism is at the heart of the matter. He just doesn't believe that other beings lives might have a purpose all their own that is entirely unrelated to humans.

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Animal Person

JUNE 26, 2009

People in South Florida are still in an uproar over the mutilation and slaughter of 19 house cats (allegedly) by 18-year old Tyler Weinman, who was declared mentally competent and not a danger to himself or others (!). The four counts of burglary he is being charged with carry a heftier sentence than the animal killing.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 17, 2007

citizens have been struggling to bring an end to the inhumane practice of slaughtering horses for human consumption. For previous posts on the ethical issues surrounding the slaughtering of horses for human consumption, see here , here , and here. For several years, conscientious U.S.

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Animal Person

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I do not believe that our war can be won by vegan education alone and that some day, the oppressors of humans, nonhuman animals and the planet are going to see the error of their ways and transition to a nonviolent, non-exploiting way of life. Tags: Activism Economics Ethics. Because I don't take enough of a stand.

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Animal Person

APRIL 14, 2009

There is a profound difference between what Sea Shepherd does and what the Animal Liberation Front does, but there are also similarities, and those similarities increase in number if a direct action by the ALF (or anyone else) is an open rescue and therefore a direct defense of sentient nonhumans being attacked by humans.

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Animal Person

MARCH 30, 2009

Responsible Policies for Animals Members & Friends! Today, March 30th, at 3:00 East Coast time, Susan Soltero of Puerto Rico will interview me live on the air at WALO Radio about Responsible Policies for Animals' 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign to get our universities out of the meat industry! Let me know if you hear the show!

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Animal Person

MAY 24, 2009

But though the pigs weren't originally destined for a mass grave, weren't they destined for slaughter nonetheless? CIWF wants to "halt the brutal killing of these animals, and to ensure that they can be assured of a humane future." Here's my question: What is "a humane future?"

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Animal Person

AUGUST 10, 2010

I'm not one of those people who thinks family is composed of only humans or humans who are biologically related. Families, so the commercials go, don't engage in untoward aspects of animal husbandry that might hurt the cows. Families are just as capable of horrendous policies toward animals as anyone else.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 18, 2017

Yesterday, the world lost its most powerful voice for animal rights, Tom Regan. No one has done more to explain what "animal rights" means and why animals have rights than Tom Regan. As Regan expressed so simply and straightforwardly, what animal rights advocates want is for "people to stop doing terrible things to animals."

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Animal Person

NOVEMBER 21, 2009

Here's today's question: When a group of omnivores begins the inevitable round of jokes about veganism and even about slaughter ("I love turkeys--with sweet potatoes," or my cousin this week on Facebook, "I love the cow, therefore I eat her cheese," or something equally insensitive and ignorant), what do you do? Not humans, not animals."

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Animal Person

NOVEMBER 21, 2010

Here's the good news: This is a very readable explanation of how animals in the Hundred Heartbeat Club (there are 100 or fewer individuals in the wild today) got to be in the club. This is irksome, as the premise is that we need to save the animals (and which ones is an interesting discussion) because we will suffer if they are gone.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 19, 2009

For me, the focus on culture and tradition is basically an excuse for "anything goes" when it comes to animals. I wonder how much they learn about the animals other cultures eat. (In The site says food production factories are included , but I doubt that means those involving the slaughter of animals.).

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Animal Person

MAY 11, 2009

Yesterday's " Do Small Victories Affect Big Picture in Animal Rights Debate? Both, of course, were seen as victories, but the article's author, Richard Foot, asks: Do such successes mean the animal rights movement is winning its long, controversial campaigns to gain the same legal protections for animals as those ascribed to humans?

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Animal Person

JUNE 29, 2009

Other than being a vegan, the most important actions you can take to help animals who are used for food are: Give generously to organizations that help those sentient nonhumans directly, such as Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary , Maple Farm Sanctuary , Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary and Eastern Shore Sanctuary.

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Animal Person

DECEMBER 5, 2009

People whose careers involve creating, fattening, transporting and slaughtering sentient nonhumans whose parts and secretions will then be used as food are having some financial difficulties. First let's deconstruct: The recession has caused a decrease in demand for animal products. Along with the rest of the country. Translation?

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 20, 2008

Ethical vegetarianism is the thesis that killing and eating animals is morally wrong whenever equally nutritious plant-based alternatives are available. The case for ethical vegetarianism starts with several uncontroversial premises. It is not just a few outspoken animal rights fanatics who hold this view. We all do.

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Animal Person

MARCH 17, 2009

Responsible Policies for Animals Members & Friends! The meat industry is inherently destructive and inhumane, there is no way to make it otherwise, and much of the harm it does to ecosystems is by inflicting suffering and death on billions of nonhuman animals, farmed and free-living, each year. Another went out last Friday.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 14, 2009

To the so-called ethical, no less than to the political school of thought, the question of Vegetarianism is unwelcome, obtruding as it does on the polite wordiness of academic discussion with an issue so coarsely downright: "You are a member of an Ethical Society—do you live by butchery?" Can you say "cognitive dissonance"?

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 12, 2008

The land ethic, it should be emphasized, as Leopold has sketched it, provides for the rights of nonhuman natural beings to a share in the life processes of the biotic community. as is the humane ethic. On the top, from left to right, distinguish between (nonhuman) animals and plants.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 6, 2007

A column entitled "Ag Industry Threatened by Animal Rights" appeared in today's High Plains/Midwest Ag Journal [ HPMAJ ]. The column, which you can read here , is a call to arms to factory farmers to fight back against those individuals and organizations working to protect farm animals from the abuses inherent in factory farms.

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Animal Person

JULY 6, 2009

You can't pull the god card to claim superiority over the rest of us so you demonize the consumption of animal products. It's an especially ridiculous concept because the vegans in modern western society would not be able to maintain their living standards without the exploitation of dirt-poor humans in third world countries across the globe.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 19, 2007

that slaughters horses for human consumption. Since it is illegal to sell horse meat for human consumption in the U.S., you might wonder how it is that Cavel has been able to brutally slaughter horses for human consumption right here in the U.S. One can't kill horses for human consumption within the U.S.,

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Animal Person

AUGUST 3, 2009

Bea directed me to the Animal Welfare Special Report at TheHill.com , in which Rep. David Scott (D-Ga), who is the chairman of the Livestock, Dairy and Poultry Subcommittee of the House Committee on Agriculture draws a line in the sand regarding the animals we use and how we use them. Translation? Let the games begin.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 16, 2009

To the Editor: Re “ Humanity Even for Nonhumans ,” by Nicholas D. Animals raised for food suffer miserably. April 9, 2009 To the Editor: In making the personal decision of where to place ourselves in our ethical relationship with animals, it is important to evaluate the reality of our words. Laura Frisk Encinitas, Calif.,

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Animal Person

JUNE 8, 2009

There's a vague sense that perhaps he cares about the dogs or thinks that what he does to them might present an ethical dilemma, but the overwhelming feeling is that it's all worth it. You can buy some extra time by presoaking the animal in a basin of ice water.)" How long should one animal be used in the lab before it is euthanized?"

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Animal Ethics

MARCH 30, 2007

Horses destined for inhumane slaughter in the U.S. Because animal flesh sold for human consumption abroad must be inspected by a USDA inspector, the court ruling may mean that the few remaining horse-slaughtering plants in the U.S. A previous post on the "Horse Slaughter Bill" (H.R. is available here.

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