Saturday, March 17, 2012
On Animal Rights "wackos" by Jim Powlesland of the University of Calgary
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~powlesla/personal/hunting/rights/index.html
Lots of pathetic "research" gathered here by an avid hunter.
The best one is about how "mentally ill" animal-rights people are.
Oh yes: it's perfectly mentally sane to endorse the locking-up of animals in the 1000s and the dealing with foaming manure pits and the constant bullshit of "biosecurity."
It's perfectly sane not only to endorse meat-eating but also wide-scale, environmentally destructive meat-eating.
It's perfectly sane to resist all expressions of compassion.
It's too bad that we have to deal with such stupidity and its combinations with money and repression. Such Stupidity.
Mentally ill? "Much madness is divinest sense," says Emily Dickinson.
You guys might want to read some books once in a while. You know, put down your guns and your bacon double cheeseburgers and just read some interesting shit from outside your frames of reference.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Manitoba Pork offering a job
HOG BARN WORKER needed for immediate full time employment near Roblin, MB. Some experience with hogs would be an asset. Duties include record keeping, general farm duties, pressure washing, etc. $11-15/hr based on experience.
----
Pressure washing.
"Some" experience with hogs "would be an asset."
That's what hog "farming" has come down to in Manitoba. Pressure washing and record-keeping.
Words from Temple Grandin. I hope Canadian agriculture students are reading her books. Given their hostility toward our Quit Stalling campaign, it seems unlikely.....
This email just sent to me:
Hi everyone,
Just some hi-lites from Temple Grandin's "Animals Make Us Human." Her view on sow stalls, stock people and especially take note of the first paragraph. It discredits the nonsense that pigs don't need to turn around.
Does anyone recall during the debate when the angry barn contractor stood up and said that any 'science' telling us that sow stalls are not the greatest is pseudo science. Then read what Temple said about building contractors. This is where she states sow stalls are "horrible for pigs"
"All animals need to move and are motivated to move, including pigs. Jim McFarlane and Stanley Curtis at the University of Illinois put two groups of sows in stalls large enough for them to turn around. One group of pigs had it's feeder and waterer located at the same end of the stall; the other group had it's feeder and waterer placed at opposite ends of the stall. Both groups turned around about the same number of times every day, even though one group didn't have to turn around at all. "
"Most commercially farmed pigs are bored and lack stimulation, but sows locked up in the sow stalls are in the worst condition."
"The sows go lame at very high rates inside the stalls and their bones weaken. They go lame partly because they don't get any excercise, and partly because they move so little that stockpeople can't see the first signs of developing lameness. There's no way to tell that an animal is going lame if you can't see the animal walk."
"When an animal is kept in a box, breeders forget about breeding for important traits such as strong feet and legs. I am appalled at the foot and ankle defects I've seen."
"The industry needs to get rid of sow stalls."
"Keeping sows locked up alone saves on labor and training because it takes fewer employees and a lower level of skill to manage sows in sow stalls than it takes a good stockperson to manage sows living in pens. For years I've said it takes a good stockperson to manage sows in pens, but any idiot can manage sows in stalls."
"Canada has plenty of straw because it grows so much wheat."
Page 200 Animal Welfare, Technology, and Building Contractors
The tragedy of sow stalls is that they might never have become an industry standard if the first electronic sow feeders developed in the 1980's hadn't failed. .............(electronic feeders were improved - but, too late for sows)........................
A huge amount of blame for the spread of of sow stalls throughout the pork industry goes to the building contractors who built sow stalls in the 1990's when there was a gigantic expansion phase. Sow stalls became the new industry standard when two start up hog companies hired contractors who specialized in swine facilities to build hundreds of new barns.
The contractors advised the new companies to build sow stalls. The stalls are horrible for the sow but good business for the contractor because he gets to sell five times more welded steel to build individual stalls than he does to build pens.
When hundreds of new farms opened up after that, there was a huge shortage of skilled stockpeople, and the contractors touted the labor savings and ease of management as a selling point for sow stalls.
By then there was an improved electronic feeder on the market but few people were interested because the early adapters had failed, and of course the building contractors were quick to tell their customers that electronic feeders did not work so they could sell sow stalls.
The building contractors were running the show, and they built what was good for building contractors, not animals. That happens with cows and chickens, too. No company or organization should allow a contractor to dictate design.
Some Wittgenstein for a sunny friday afternoon
If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Such as hog-blogging; wearing pig costumes (which my friends have done to bring attention to the pig traps that professors of animal science call "sow housing");
wearing bear costumes and playing tambourine (which I did once in the opening act at a concert here);
and, of course, the silliness (grin) of rescuing a pig from the scene of a trailerspill,
getting all 300-pounds of him in the backseat of your car,
calling your friends to help you lure him out,
naming him Wilbur,
putting a dog leash around his neck for a collar, and then waiting --without ever knowing it-- that he'd symbolize everything we stand for:
compassion
risk-taking on behalf of farmed animals' lives
giving a flying shit about our planet
noticing that each animal is distinct and singular
that they suffer as individuals in the 10000000000s
that allies arise in the most interesting places, including people who would one day say, "Oh, a vegan bakesale for a rescued pig! I love pigs."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Such as hog-blogging; wearing pig costumes (which my friends have done to bring attention to the pig traps that professors of animal science call "sow housing");
wearing bear costumes and playing tambourine (which I did once in the opening act at a concert here);
and, of course, the silliness (grin) of rescuing a pig from the scene of a trailerspill,
getting all 300-pounds of him in the backseat of your car,
calling your friends to help you lure him out,
naming him Wilbur,
putting a dog leash around his neck for a collar, and then waiting --without ever knowing it-- that he'd symbolize everything we stand for:
compassion
risk-taking on behalf of farmed animals' lives
giving a flying shit about our planet
noticing that each animal is distinct and singular
that they suffer as individuals in the 10000000000s
that allies arise in the most interesting places, including people who would one day say, "Oh, a vegan bakesale for a rescued pig! I love pigs."
Thursday, March 15, 2012
The CBC report on the taxpayers' 4.5 million to Hog processing, anti-union corporation
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/story/2012/03/09/mb-maple-leaf-money-120309.html
The comments are helpful. We're not the only ones paying attention.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Piglets and dog playing like mad, over on cuteoverload. Please go to cuteoverload.com and do two things:
http://www.cuteoverload.com/
Scroll down and watch the hilarious video of the piglets and the doggy.
Scroll back up and sign the HSUS petition against sow stalls (aka gestation crates, pig traps, "the wors thing that ever happened to pigs," in Temple Grandin's words, or, as the pork-production university students are taught to call them, "independent gestation accommodations.")
Please.
From today's Winnipeg Free Press. On cruelty to pigs and 26 million dollars to industrial pork production's manure lagoons (from us, the taxpayers).
Cruelty to pigs
I'm a farmer. I raise food animals, including pigs. And I'm fed up with the NDP government's untenable positions around the pork industry.
At a recent meeting, Agriculture Minister Ron Kostyshyn assured us that "morally the province doesn't agree with sow stalls," is "working with the Manitoba Pork Council" on the problem and anticipates that market conditions and public demand for stall-free raised pork will force the industry to change without government direction or intervention.
In 2011, the pork council committed to "encouraging" producers to phase out by 2025 the hundreds of thousands of two-foot-by-seven-foot crates that pregnant sows are forced to live in their entire pregnant lives. Sows can merely stand and lie down on concrete slatted floors over liquid manure pits. They are then confined in farrowing crates to nurse piglets. Without liquid manure handling systems, sows would be living on straw with the freedom to move, exercise and meet their basic needs to root, nest and socialize.
Giving $26 million to factory producers to improve their liquid manure storage systems, in the name of improving industry environmental performance, flies in the face of the stated distaste for housing sows in stalls. It shows, again, government's propensity for double-speak and misleading the public. There's always money to prop up the existing system but none to transition to a better way of doing things. Apparently, the market will take care of that.
This funding will further delay industry from moving in a better direction for both the environment and pig welfare. Any taxpayer funds should be directed to effecting a change to more humane and environmentally sustainable straw-based systems, not propping up a systemically unsustainable and cruel way of raising pigs.
RUTH PRYZNER
In 2017, pork producers in countries all over the world will be switching their breeding sows from gestation cages to group housing on straw, a method that time and science has proven better for the farmer, the pigs, the environment, human health and is economically sound. Manitobans by the tens of thousands have repeatedly asked our government to do likewise. We do not accept the cruelty involved by confining an animal inside a cage so small there isn't enough room to turn around.
But, rather than using our tax dollars to assist pork producers to switch to acceptable housing for pigs, the Manitoba government plans to spend millions to "fix" a liquid manure system used in these confinement hog barns, perpetuating the use of gestation cages. Manitoba's pig producers are lagging behind and will be at a real disadvantage in 2017. Our exported pork will be beneath other countries' welfare standards and will not be accepted. So, in just a few years from today, when our pork producers lose export markets our tax dollars will be spent to fix a problem that should be dealt with now.
Catherine King
I'm a farmer. I raise food animals, including pigs. And I'm fed up with the NDP government's untenable positions around the pork industry.
At a recent meeting, Agriculture Minister Ron Kostyshyn assured us that "morally the province doesn't agree with sow stalls," is "working with the Manitoba Pork Council" on the problem and anticipates that market conditions and public demand for stall-free raised pork will force the industry to change without government direction or intervention.
In 2011, the pork council committed to "encouraging" producers to phase out by 2025 the hundreds of thousands of two-foot-by-seven-foot crates that pregnant sows are forced to live in their entire pregnant lives. Sows can merely stand and lie down on concrete slatted floors over liquid manure pits. They are then confined in farrowing crates to nurse piglets. Without liquid manure handling systems, sows would be living on straw with the freedom to move, exercise and meet their basic needs to root, nest and socialize.
Giving $26 million to factory producers to improve their liquid manure storage systems, in the name of improving industry environmental performance, flies in the face of the stated distaste for housing sows in stalls. It shows, again, government's propensity for double-speak and misleading the public. There's always money to prop up the existing system but none to transition to a better way of doing things. Apparently, the market will take care of that.
This funding will further delay industry from moving in a better direction for both the environment and pig welfare. Any taxpayer funds should be directed to effecting a change to more humane and environmentally sustainable straw-based systems, not propping up a systemically unsustainable and cruel way of raising pigs.
RUTH PRYZNER
In 2017, pork producers in countries all over the world will be switching their breeding sows from gestation cages to group housing on straw, a method that time and science has proven better for the farmer, the pigs, the environment, human health and is economically sound. Manitobans by the tens of thousands have repeatedly asked our government to do likewise. We do not accept the cruelty involved by confining an animal inside a cage so small there isn't enough room to turn around.
But, rather than using our tax dollars to assist pork producers to switch to acceptable housing for pigs, the Manitoba government plans to spend millions to "fix" a liquid manure system used in these confinement hog barns, perpetuating the use of gestation cages. Manitoba's pig producers are lagging behind and will be at a real disadvantage in 2017. Our exported pork will be beneath other countries' welfare standards and will not be accepted. So, in just a few years from today, when our pork producers lose export markets our tax dollars will be spent to fix a problem that should be dealt with now.
Catherine King
From Thomas Paynell's 16th-century Regimen of Health
Thomas Paynell, in 1528, advised the following:
"There are 4 necessarie thynges to conerue and prolonge mans prosperite and helthe: that is abstinence from meate, abstinence from wyne, rubbyng of the body, exercise and digestion...."
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