I know by now most people have had their fill of “Year in Review” postings, but too bad. This is one of them.

Last year saw many advances in the world of animal rights and veganism. I think it’s essential they be quantitatively revisited and acknowledged, to realize the enormity of change being affected as a movement, one small step at a time.

The first review I’d like to highlight is from Mercy for Animals, my favorite animal rights group.

Last year was chock full of accomplishments for MFA, and somehow they’ve managed to fit a whirlwind review into a 6.5 minute video. If you want to see what effective activism looks like, please watch. In the time it takes you to watch the video, 661,920 animals will have been killed (worldwide) for the meat and dairy industries. The numbers are heartbreaking and staggering— all the more reason to get involved NOW.

Mercy For Animals Year in Review: 2009

Vegan.com’s The Year in Meat: 2009

The other notable year-in-review I’d like to feature is a collection of media highlights compiled by Erik Marcus at Vegan.com.

Admittedly, it’s a lengthy read (over 5,000 words), but that’s because it was a busy year for the meat industry. And not in a good way. For anyone involved in the animal rights movement, this compilation is the best way to get up-to-speed with where things stand, and what battles lie ahead of us in the coming year.

If either (or both) of these postings strike a chord with you, please don’t let it stop there. Repost the links wherever you can think of— Facebook, Twitter, your blog, email, etc. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you want support/ideas for how to get involved, I’ll do everything I can to help.

Raising compassionate awareness throughout our own social circles will only accelerate the overall societal awareness we’re after. Every person that wakes up to the horrors of the meat/dairy/egg/animal industries is one less person buying into the cruel system, and that equates to many lives saved.

Cheers to another big year for vegan activism… the animals are counting on us.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The latest undercover investigation by Mercy For Animals uncovered:

• Workers grabbing piglets by their fragile ears or legs and throwing them across the room and slamming them into transport carts.
• Workers tattooing sows by repeatedly driving sharp metal spikes into their flesh.
• Sows with untreated rectal prolapses and deep, infected sores and scrapes from constant rubbing against the bars of their stalls.
• Workers cutting off piglets’ tails with dull pliers and castrating them by ripping out their testes with their bare hands – all without anesthesia.
• Thousands of pregnant pigs confined in two-feet wide metal stalls so small that they could only take one step forward or backward and could not turn around or lie down comfortably.
• Injured, sick and runt piglets being tossed into overcrowded gassing kill carts, slowly suffocating from CO2.
• Workers firing steel rods into sows’ heads, sometimes as many as four separate times, before the sows fell and died.

Does that mesh well with your vision of a traditional family farm?

Believe it or not, the company has an “Animal Handling Philosophy”:

“To be responsible stewards of the animals placed in our care, educating and training our pork producers and transporters to constantly maintain the highest level of integrity in animal welfare and bio-security, while reinforcing our commitment to safe, wholesome product our consumers can trust.”

It seems as though gas chambers, tossing of babies, extreme confinement, agonizing slaughter and overall hell is now part of being a “responsible steward.”

This investigation is but another nail in the coffin of the “humane meat” myth. Consumers are frequently duped into thinking they aren’t supporting cruelty if they buy their meat from Whole Foods, a family farm, or look for a “humanely raised” sticker on the packaging.

But there is no such thing as humane animal consumption. Factory farmed or not, ALL those animals die, some just have less hellish lives than others. The word humane is a facade, like “family farm“, unregulated labels designed to fool consumers into paying higher prices for the same tortured animal products.

As is always the case with animal cruelty investigations, words will never fully convey what raw video shows. Some parts are so horrific, Fox News will not show it on the air.

(Can’t see the video? Click here.)

If this video is hard to watch, makes you cringe, makes you cry, makes you angry, or all of the above — I strongly suggest you opt out of this disgusting food system and go vegan. It’s easy to get started, click here to order a FREE vegetarian starter kit.

If you can afford it, please also consider making a donation to Mercy for Animals. They need our support in order to keep doing critical undercover investigations.

No doubt, American holidays are very meat-centric. Rather than participate in this mass slaughter, why not celebrate a compassionate holiday and serve a vegan dinner this year?

“Are You Insane?! What’s Wrong With Turkey?”

GentleThanksgiving.org provides a great overview of the life and death of most Thanksgiving turkeys:

The nearly 300 million turkeys killed each year in the U.S. spend their entire lives crammed in large sheds with little room to move. Artificially inseminated and selectively bred to gain enormous amounts of weight, they suffer heart attacks, broken limbs, lameness, and death from their genetically-induced accelerated growth rate.

Factory farm conditions are so harsh that the turkeys must be pumped full of antibiotics just to stay alive. Shortly after birth, they have their snoods and parts of their toes and beaks cut off with hot blades, without the use of anesthetic, to reduce damage from from stress-induced aggression. They are then delivered by conveyer belt to a carousel where they get a power injection, usually of an antibiotic, whacked into the back of their necks.

The rest of their lives they are forced to endure crowding, living in their own waste, and ravaging diseases. As many as 25,000 birds may be housed in a single shed. Their eyes and lungs are burned by toxic fumes emanating from their excrement. Conditions are so severe that about 9% of turkeys raised for food (or over 26 million) didn’t survive long enough to make it to the slaughterhouse.

After 16 weeks of misery, they are hung on a conveyer belt, their throats are cut, and they are dumped — sometimes still fully conscious — into scalding water to strip their feathers.

(Can’t see the video? Click here.)

What to Make Instead?

A Google search for “vegan Thanksgiving recipes” yields approximately 8,860,000 results. There is no shortage of delicious vegan Thanksgiving recipes! Here are some of my favorites:

• Vegan Thanksgiving Recipes 2009 – A Feast by Robin Robertson
• Mercy for Animals’ Thanksgiving Vegan Mealplan
• Vegan Yum Yum Thanksgiving
• Field Roast Grain Meat Company’s Celebration Roast, I LOVE this stuff! (Even better than Tofurkey, shhh.) You can find it at Whole Foods, and possibly your local grocery store.

Adopt-a-Turkey

Olive

For people who want to do even more than just prepare a vegan meal, The Farm Sanctuary has a wonderful program for people who choose to help turkeys, rather than kill them. The Adopt-a-Turkey Project “seeks to end the misery of commercially-raised turkeys by offering a compassionate alternative for Thanksgiving. Since 1986, Farm Sanctuary has rescued more than 1,000 turkeys, placed hundreds into loving homes through our annual Turkey Express adoption event, educated millions of people about their plight, and provided resources for a cruelty-free holiday.”

Top 10 Reasons NOT to Eat Turkeys (from GoVeg.com):

1. They’re Begging Your Pardon
   Turkeys are “smart animals with personality and character, and keen awareness of their surroundings,” Oregon State University poultry scientist Tom Savage says. Turkeys are social, playful birds who enjoy the company of others. They relish having their feathers stroked and like to chirp, cluck, and gobble along to their favorite tunes. Anyone who spends time with them at farm sanctuaries quickly learns that turkeys are as varied in personality as dogs and cats. The president “pardons” a turkey every year—can’t you pardon one too?
2. Get Rid of Your Wattle
   Turkey flesh is brimming with fat. Just one homemade patty of ground, cooked turkey meat contains a whopping 244 mg of cholesterol, and half of its calories come from fat. Research has shown that vegetarians are 50 percent less likely to develop heart disease, and they have 40 percent of the cancer rate of meat-eaters. Plus, meat-eaters are nine times more likely to be obese than vegans are.
3. Can You Spell ‘Pandemic’?
   Experts are warning that a virulent new strain of bird flu could spread to human beings and kill millions of Americans. The Bush administration is trying to deal with the problem, but experts warn that current factory-farm conditions, in which turkeys are drugged up and bred to grow so quickly they can barely walk, are a prescription for disease outbreaks. Eating a turkey carcass contaminated with bird flu could kill you, and currently available drugs might not work. Cooking should kill the virus, but it could be left behind on cutting boards and utensils and spread through something else you’re eating.
4. Recall Process Doesn’t Fly
   The U.S. government is the only government in the Western world that does not have the power to recall contaminated animal products. Instead, American consumers must trust the profit-hungry meat, dairy, and egg industries to decide when recalls are necessary. Dan Glickman, secretary of agriculture under President Bill Clinton, explained that this limit on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) power to protect consumers from tainted animal products is “one of the biggest loopholes out there.” There are all sorts of killer bacteria found in turkey flesh, including salmonella and campylobacter. The Center for Science in the Public Interest found that 28 percent of fresh turkeys were contaminated with bacteria, primarily with campylobacter, for which the USDA does not even require testing.
5. Let the Turkeys Give Thanks!
   Let’s face it: If you’re eating a turkey, that’s a corpse you’ve got there on the table, and if you don’t eat it quickly enough, it will decompose. Is that really what we want as the centerpiece of a holiday meal: an animal’s dead and decaying carcass? Thanksgiving is a time to take stock of our lives and give thanks for all that we have, so why not let the turkeys give thanks too?
6. Want Stuffing With Your Supergerms?
   Dosing turkeys with antibiotics to stimulate their growth and to keep them alive in filthy, disease-ridden conditions that would otherwise kill them poses even more risks for people who eat them. Leading health organizations—including the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association—have warned that by giving powerful drugs (via animal products) to humans who are not sick, the farmed-animal industry is creating possible long-term risks to human health and will spread antibiotic-resistant supergerms. That’s why the use of drugs to promote growth in animals used for food has been banned for many years in Europe.
7. Without a Wing and a Prayer
   On factory farms, turkeys live for months in sheds where they are packed so tightly that flapping a wing or stretching a leg is nearly impossible. They stand in waste, and urine and ammonia fumes burn their eyes and lungs. At the slaughterhouse, turkeys have their throats slit while they are still conscious. Those who miss the automated knife are scalded to death in the defeathering tank.
8. Foul Farming
   Anyone who has driven by a farm has probably smelled it first from a mile away. Turkeys and other animals raised for food produce 130 times as much excrement as the entire U.S. human population—all without the benefit of waste treatment systems. There are no federal guidelines to regulate how factory farms treat, store, and dispose of the trillions of pounds of concentrated, untreated animal excrement that they produce each year.
9. Blood, Sweat, and Fear
   Killing animals is inherently dangerous work, but the fast line speeds, the dirty, slippery killing floors, and the lack of training make animal-processing plants some of the most dangerous places to work in America today. The industry has refused to slow down the lines or buy appropriate safety gear because these changes could cut into companies’ bottom lines. In its 185-page exposé on worker exploitation by the farmed-animal industry, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” Human Rights Watch explains, ‘These are not occasional lapses by employers paying insufficient attention to modern human resources management policies. These are systematic human rights violations embedded in meat and poultry industry employment.”
10. A Cornucopia of Turkey Alternatives
    Give up the giblets and carve out a new tradition this Thanksgiving—Tofurky Roast and UnTurkey, savory soy and wheat-based roasts with stuffing and gravy. Give animals and yourself something to be really thankful for this year: give up the turkey and better still: Order a free vegetarian starter kit full of tasty recipes today!
    *BONUS: Here’s a coupon for 55 cents off a Tofurkey.

Mercy For Animals proudly presents a special Columbus premiere screening of Fowl Play, an award-winning documentary that exposes the plight of factory-farmed egg-laying hens through interviews with people who are fighting to save them. Fowl Play leaves viewers with a ground-breaking message of personal change and community outreach.

From FowlPlayMovie.com: National surveys show that the majority of Americans are opposed to the inhumane treatment of farm animals. In fact, Americans are in opposition to the very treatment animals face every day on factory farms. This disconnect that people have between the food they buy and the industries they support is exactly what agribusiness counts on to maintain its bottom line.

However, a growing movement of people are opposed to factory farming and the commodification of animals. They are organizing, documenting the living nightmare that animals face, and speaking out against animal agriculture.

Fowl Play illuminates the plight of factory-farmed laying hens through interviews with people who are fighting diligently to save them. A story of hope emerges as footage recorded inside battery cage and other facilities is balanced with personal accounts of the individuals working to protect the often-forgotten victims of the egg industry.

The film also introduces us to animals who survive the system: Hope, a hen left to die in a garbage can but then rescued by activists; and Consuela, a hen gassed on a farm when she was no longer useful but who survives to be rescued at a landfill.

The suffering that animals face on factory farms won’t end until enough people are motivated to change it. Fowl Play connects the dots between consumers and the practices they support, and leaves viewers with a groundbreaking message of personal change and community outreach.

(Can’t see the video? Click here.)

Date: Sunday, November 8, 2009
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Location: Studio 35 Cinema, 3055 Indianola Ave., Columbus
Tickets: $2

Screening to be followed by a Q & A session with several of the filmmakers and individuals featured in the film, including MFA’s Executive Director, Nathan Runkle.

For more information, please visit FowlPlayMovie.com.

The two I’m sharing below were created by Mark Middleton, an artist, web developer, and animal advocate who’s posted them for public use at his website: AnimalVisuals.org.

The first makes use of statistics from the USDA NASS Livestock Slaughter 2008 Summary, showing how many animals were killed PER SECOND in the United States last year:

The second visualization is a “Virtual Battery Cage” which gives you the perspective of a “layer” hen (the ones who supply with cheap eggs for omelets and McMuffins) in a factory farm. Press play and you’ll become one of those chickens, crammed in a wire cage with no space to open your wings, no room or material on which to comfortably lay down, no windows, no natural light, sick and/or dead chickens next to you, and the deafening noise of suffering is all you can hear.

There is NOTHING natural about the way these chickens live, it’s pretty much hell:

Thank you to Mark for creating these visualizations, I hope other activists find and use them on their own websites and outreach projects.

* Thanks to @veggietweets and @liberationbc on Twitter for directing me to this.

People keep asking me what I’m doing for Easter this weekend. I’ll tell you what I’m NOT doing — I’m not gonna eat a plate full of ham. Here’s why:

• As babies, piglets are subjected to painful mutilations without anesthesia or pain relievers. Their tails are cut off to minimize tail biting, an aberrant behavior which occurs when these highly intelligent animals are kept in deprived factory farm environments.
• At 2 to 3 weeks of age, the piglets are taken away from their mothers, by which time, approximately 15% will have died. The surviving piglets are crowded into pens with metal bars and concrete floors.
• The air in hog factories is laden with dust, dander, and noxious gases which are produced by the animals’ urine and feces … respiratory disease is rampant.
• Modern breeding sows live a continuous cycle of impregnation and birth, having more than 20 piglets per year. After being impregnated, the sows are confined in small pens or metal gestation crates which are just 2 feet wide. At the end of their 4 month pregnancy, they are transferred to farrowing crates to give birth. They barely have room to stand up and lie down, and many suffer from sores on their shoulders.
• Prior to being hung upside down by their back legs and bled to death at the slaughterhouse, pigs are supposed to be ’stunned’ and rendered unconscious. However, ’stunning’ is terribly imprecise, and this results in conscious animals hanging upside down, kicking and struggling, while a slaughterhouse worker tries to ’stick’ them in the neck with a knife. If the worker is unsuccessful, the pig will be carried to the next station on the slaughterhouse assembly line, the scalding tank, where he/she will be boiled alive.
• And more…

Watch the video below. The WHOLE thing. If you can’t stand to watch it, how can you stand to EAT it?

I’ll be honest, I hope that made you lose your appetite. I hope you look down at your plate stacked with ham on Sunday and a queasy feeling quells up inside your stomach and you opt for seconds on the pasta salad instead. This would be a good sign, it means you have feelings! It also means it’s time to examine what happens to your food before it arrives beautifully packaged on Easter Sunday. There is nothing honey-baked about the path on which your cruel and inhumane feast traveled.

If you wouldn’t get up from your computer right now and go inflict all this torture on a pig directly, why is it okay to have somebody else do it while you’re not looking?

Also, there’s every reason to believe that Jesus was a vegetarian:

The Garden of Eden, God’s perfect world, was vegetarian (Gen. 1:29-30). Immediately, God calls this ideal and non-exploitative relationship “good” (Gen. 1:31). There follow many years of fallen humanity, when people held slaves, waged war, ate animals and committed various other violent acts. But the prophets tell us that the peaceable kingdom will be nonviolent and vegetarian; even the lion will lie down with the lamb (e.g., Isaiah 11). Jesus is the Prince of Peace, who ushers in this new age of nonviolence. When Christians pray, “Your will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven,” the one prayer given to us by Jesus, this obligates us to change our lives, to make choices that are as merciful and loving as possible. There will be no factory farms and slaughterhouses in heaven.

Jesus’ message is one of love and compassion, yet there is nothing loving or compassionate about factory farms and slaughterhouses, where billions of animals live miserable lives and die violent, bloody deaths. Jesus mandates kindness, mercy, compassion, and love for all God’s creation. He would be appalled by the degree of suffering we inflict on animals to indulge our acquired taste for their flesh.

Christians have a choice. When we sit down to eat, we can add to the level of violence, misery, and death in the world, or we can respect His creation with a vegetarian diet.

The choice is up to you. I hope you choose compassion, otherwise you might be missing the point of Jesus’ teachings, in which case — should you really be celebrating Easter?

“As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal… All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return…”

- Ecclesiastes 3:18-20

P.S. Don’t even get me started on Easter eggs…

Want a cheap and natural way to protect yourself from cancer? Ever heard of apricot kernels and vitamin B-17?

A bit of research will reveal that societies that include eating foods rich in B-17 don’t get cancer: Eskimos, Hunzas, and the Hopi and Navajo Indians, for example. And when you combine B-17 AND a vegetarian diet (as Seventh Day Adventists do) — look out!

Why haven’t you heard of this before? To put it simply: the FDA, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, doctors, and other groups that claim to be looking out for your health don’t want a cheap and natural way to prevent cancer to get much attention.

How dare I say such a thing! Keep in mind the FDA, NCI, and NIH are government organizations, and we all know how resistant the gov’t. is to bribery and corruption… NOT. The big pharmaceutical companies LOVE to bribe the government and doctors. After all, cancer treatment is a great way to make money. So, rather than advocate a healthy lifestyle and proper nutrition, they’d prefer to tout a treatment that includes some profit for the HMO’s, pharmaceutical companies, and the banks who have to loan you money in order to pay your hospital bills.

My final argument against mainstream health advice: the FDA and all their friends are the same guys telling you to:

• drink 8 glasses of fluoridated water a day
• consume 2-3 servings a day of fattening and diseased meat from animals that lived torturous lives and were slaughtered in the most inhumane ways possible
• …or you could eat 2-3 servings of eggs instead of meat. “Cage free” and “free range” means the chickens are frolicking on a farm somewhere, happy as can be
• use aspartame (rat poison) and saccharin (carcinogen) instead of sugar if you want to lose weight
• consume at least 2-3 servings of hormone and pus-laden cow’s milk a day and don’t worry about the tortured dairy cows that gave it to you
• keep eating mercury-filled fish, it’s perfectly safe and healthy, especially for pregnant women
• accept genetically-modified corn as a modern marvel that will save the planet from starvation
• consume 3-5 servings of fruits and vegetables sprayed with pesticides a day
• keep using high-fructose corn syrup because it’s “fine in moderation” and better than natural alternatives like stevia or xylitol

You really think they’re telling you the truth about cancer?!

Now the good news: Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s carry apricot kernels!

I’ve shopped at both places for years but only very recently discovered they carried them, so I want to get the word out. You won’t see anything on the label about B-17 or its cancer-prevention benefits, but it’s the same thing you’ll find for sale online for way more. So instead of paying $13/lb., just head over to one of these stores and get the same thing for about half the price: $7/lb @ Whole Foods or $4/lb. @ Trader Joe’s.

One last note: apricot kernels are not the only source of B-17, these foods are also good sources:

Apple seeds, alfalfa sprouts, apricot kernels, bamboo shoots, barley, beet tops, bitter almond, blackberries, boysenberries, brewer’s yeast, brown rice, buckwheat, cashews, cherry kernels, cranberries, currants, fava beans, flax seeds, garbanzo beans, gooseberries, huckleberries, lentils, lima beans, linseed meat, loganberries, macadamia nuts, millet, millet seed, peach kernels, pecans, plum kernels, quince, raspberries, sorghum cane syrup, spinach, sprouts (alfalfa, lentil, mung bean, buckwheat, garbanzo), strawberries, walnuts, watercress, yams.

Wouldn’t that be a dream come true!

Unfortunately, over 5 MILLION turkeys will be slaughtered for this gluttonous tradition. I think if everybody watched this video though, they would think twice about eating turkey (or any meat) for Thanksgiving.

No Turkey on Thanksgiving?!

Yes, it can be done. A Google search for “vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes” gave me 283,000 results. I promise it’s possible.

In support of a Gentle Thanksgiving, PeaceChicken.com is asking you to pardon YOUR Thanksgiving turkey this year!

270,000 is the official quota. This makes me sick. Physically sick. This disgusting act of cruelty and complete lack of feeling is incomprehensible to me. I wrote about this last year, hoping I wouldn’t have to ever again.

They beat them, mothers and their babies, with clubs so as not to damage the pelt with a bullet hole. And we call ourselves civilized? Still running around like cavemen, killing animals and skinning them for their fur?

You think people would still wear it if they saw the bloodied and skinned animal it came from? Where’s that marketing campaign? Don’t believe me? Think it’s a painless and beautiful process? Go to images.google.com and do a search for “seal hunt.” See how luxurious that fur really is.

If this is turning your stomach, good– that means you have a heart. And that’s a pretty good sign you should do something, anything.

“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
- Gandhi

First Seals Killed in Canada’s Commercial Hunt

by Loren Drummond

In the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence today, a handful of sealing boats searched out some of the only surviving seal pups in the area to kill and skin for their fur.

The killing marked the start of the multi-stage, commercial seal hunt in Canada. In the area where the Canadian government authorized sealers to begin hunting this morning, catastrophic ice conditions already led to the deaths of as many as 90 percent of seal pups in March.

The HSUS’ Rebecca Aldworth, who is located in Newfoundland to observe the hunt for the ninth straight year, condemned the sealer’s actions. She said that ice conditions would mean a cruel death for the seals killed.

“We know the sealers are shooting at these pups as they cling helplessly to tiny pans of ice floating in the sea. Some are still not yet old enough to survive in the water—they have no way to escape,” she said.

Canada’s annual hunt will occur in several phases over the coming weeks. Officials will allow 270,000 seals, most of them pups, to be clubbed and shot to death for their fur. Journalists, scientists and observers who were denied permits to observe the hunt in the southern Gulf will be issued permits for observing the next stage in the hunt tomorrow, officials said.

Sealers based out of the Magdalen Islands and the east coast of Quebec have been moving into position for the hunt in the northern Gulf, where thousands of seals are expected to be killed.