In a recent study, [Criminology professor Amy] Fitzgerald crunched numbers from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database, census data, and arrest and offence reports from 581 U.S. counties from 1994 to 2002.

“I have a graph that shows that as the number of slaughterhouse workers in a community increases, the crime rate also increases,” she says. [...]

Fitzgerald compared slaughterhouse communities to those with comparison industries — dangerous, repetitive work that did not involve killing animals. These were not associated with a rise in crime at all, she says. In some cases, they seemed to bring the crime rate down.“The unique thing about (abattoirs) is that (workers are) not dealing with inanimate objects, but instead dealing with live animals coming in and then killing them, and processing what’s left of them.”

You can read the whole article here >>

And for further reading on this same topic, consider reading these previous Vegan Soapbox articles:

• Let People Care
• When Visitors Come
• Workers Suffer Alongside Animals
• Overworked, Underpaid Turkey Killers
• Race, Class, And Industrialized “Food”
• Resources For The Human Animal Rights Discussion
• Animal Rights Violations Beget Human Rights Violations
• Slaughterhouse Workers

Got more to add to the discussion of the link between violence to animals and violence to humans? Say your piece below in the comments!

Utilize the Power of Social Media

• To share Farm To Fridge on Facebook, click the “Share of Facebook” button found on MeatVideo.com . Also consider sharing on other social networking platforms such as Twitter.
• Place a link to MeatVideo.com in your email signature, exposing the truth behind meat, dairy and egg production with every email you send.
• Comment on web articles and blogs about factory farming with a link to MeatVideo.com.
• Email the MeatVideo.com link to friends and family.
• Embed the YouTube video of Farm to Fridge in your blog or website.

Get more ideas of how to share the video >>

And if you haven’t seen the video yet, here it is:

I’m not going to comment on the alleged lunacy or the alleged wisdom of the animal rights group that released hidden video of an Ohio veal farm last week.You can read all about Mercy for Animals online at www.mercyforanimals.org and make that judgment for yourselves. Some of you will think they’re nuts, others will think they’re spot on in their call for vegan lifestyles. [...]

you can make that judgment for yourself. Some of you will gasp in horror at the sight of Holsteins crated in assembly line fashion, others will say it’s the price we pay for a safe [sic], affordable [sic] food supply.

To the people who would say that inherent cruelty in animal agriculture is simply “the price we pay,” I’d like to point out that the ones who “pay the price” are not the consumers, they’re the animals:

And speaking of the price we pay, factory farming costs us far more than the amount shown on the cash register. Factory farming destroys the environment and poses human health risks. For details, please read:

• The Costs Are Passed Onto Consumers
• Protect Public Health By Eliminating Battery Cages
• FDA Says Factory Farm Antibiotic Use Is Public Health Threat
• Drug Resistant Bacteria Sources Include Factory Farms
• Reduce Meat To Save The Environment
• New Study Shows Link Between Meat-eating And Some Cancers
• Vegans: Lower Cholesterol, Lower Blood Pressure, Lower BMI
• Another Reason To Go Vegan: Less Food Poisoning Risk
• Factory Farming: Bad For Humans, Too
• The Price Of Meat

Not that lying about meat is anything new, but the source of this particular kind of meat is particularly troublesome for children to… er… digest.

From the article:

Rabbit is also becoming popular among those with an interest in raising farm animals but without much space or experience. Sure, rabbits can be fragile. They get scared and have heart attacks. Heat or the cold can knock them off. They can be bad parents, abandoning their babies or worse.

But they breed like, well, you know. That means they produce a lot of meat for not much money. And they’re clean and quiet — especially welcome traits in the suburbs.

“I always say rabbits are the new chickens,” said Novella Carpenter, who built a farm on an abandoned lot in a poor section of Oakland, Calif.,

Why in the world would people be interested in eating rabbits?

Well, the simple answer is that there are even fewer laws protecting rabbits than there are protecting cows and pigs. And the laws protecting cows and pigs aren’t many and they aren’t well enforced. So, raising rabbits in your back yard, torturing them, and killing them cruelly is basically 100% legal. That’s not about to change any time soon.

Many routine animal “husbandry” practices these days would be illegal if inflicted upon cats or dogs, but farm animals are subjected to enormous amounts of cruelty. It’s absurd to suggest we ought to extend that cruelty to other species and suburban environments by raising and killing rabbits.

More from the article:

When the French food revolution changed American dining in the 1960s, rabbit in mustard sauce would turn up at the occasional dinner party or restaurant. But the country never quite got past the pets-or-meat problem.

Ever since the Victorians began keeping them as pets, the relationship between the rabbit and the table has been uneasy.

“Uneasy” is putting it mildly. The whole thing is just sick. Sick and wrong.

(Thanks to Mimi for the link.)

Most of the meat industry’s pain was from a faltering economy that was creating countless “recession era vegetarians.” An August USDA report showed that beef, pork, and chicken production had all dropped substantially. [...]

Nowhere was animal agribusiness’ pain more keenly felt than in the milk industry. American dairies were failing at such a rate that one observer predicted that a third would go out of business in 2009. To deal with the glut of milk, government and industry combined to organize a mass slaughter of more than 100,000 cows. Dairies spent 2009 looking for every excuse to cut herd sizes, and keep only the most productive cows. Overall, it appeared likely that more than 1.5 million cows would be slaughtered in 2009. The dairy industry’s pain was borne disproportionately by organic farmers, as cash-strapped consumers switched back to cheaper factory farmed milk.

To read the whole thing, please go here: http://www.vegan.com/articles/yim/the-year-in-meat-2009/

Some people ponder about how best to “manage” animal agricultural waste:

“[A]s the increasing incidence of environmental and health problems linked to agriculture makes clear, when manure is mismanaged the nutrients in it can foul streams, lakes and aquifers; the pathogens in it can contaminate food products; and the gases it produces, including ammonia, methane and bad-smelling volatile compounds, can upset neighbors and pollute the atmosphere.”

“Even with best practices, manure can cause environmental headaches. So researchers are working on ways to improve its handling, to modify the nutrients in it and to develop alternative uses.”

Or… maybe we just shouldn’t produce the waste in the first place. Maybe we shouldn’t eat animals. Then the problem of ‘how to manage animal agricultural waste’ isn’t a problem at all.

See the rest of the images from the accompanying slide show of modern dairy farming here >>
(Stop and ask yourself if this looks natural, normal, or healthy.)

Jonathan Safran Foer said in an interview:

“Look, someone like Glenn Beck could not have a turkey and that’s fine, but what I would so strongly prefer is that he had a week-long series about animal agriculture in America. I have no interest in prying a turkey from his hands. Frankly, he could do so much more good in the world then his individual choice.

I was on Martha Stewart the other day and she did a whole show devoted to the problems with the meat industry. It was so incredibly brave. She got on television and said, ‘The meat industry is bad. The meat industry is secretive. We don’t want these products.’ She said she’s having a vegetarian thanksgiving. This issue’s going to tip by people acting like that.

You know, Glenn Beck already cares about this stuff, he does. I mean these are very traditional American values—they’re even conservative. I would love to engage him in a conversation where that became apparent, where he left not feeling angry with me, but angry at this [meat] industry that’s taking advantage of his values. It’s all about finding ways to mainstream this and to make all these alliances visible, and then maybe one day we’ll have the luxury of getting into arguments over that one percent.

Emphasis added.

Read more at Ecorazzi >>

h/t Bea

“If we can’t do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused,” says Adam Shriver, a philosopher at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. In a provocative paper published this month, Shriver contends that genetically engineered pain-free animals are the most acceptable alternative (Neuroethics, DOI: 10.1007/s12152-009-9048-6). “I’m offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering.”

There are lots of obvious problems with this “solution” to the problem of animal suffering on factory farms, but let’s start with the positives:

• Years ago the factory farming videos that came out were just as horrifying and just as shocking as today’s, but the animal exploiters just denied, denied, denied. They said it didn’t happen, the videos were staged ,or that the images on the videos were a rare circumstance. Today, they know that’s a losing battle. There are too many videos, too much evidence. At least people are acknowledging the problem of factory farming.
• Even though animal suffering may have increased in the last twenty years or so (because the meat-eating population reproduces faster than the vegetarian population and the meat-eating population eats more meat per person today than they did twenty years ago) at least they’re no longer denying that animals suffer. They’re no longer claiming that animals don’t sense pain and that it’s just “overly sensitive animal rights activists who anthropomorphize them.” Nope, there is no doubt that animals suffer when humans torture them.
• And finally, even though this proposed “science” is fueled by a stubborn refusal to go vegan or reduce meat-consumption, at least Adam Shriver isn’t simply apathetic. Shriver is, in fact, trying to do something to help prevent animal suffering. Sadly, that’s light years ahead of the general population.

However, there are some MAJOR problems with animals who are genetically incapable of feeling pain. Here is a short, incomplete list:

• Pain-free factory farming will still damage the environment. Animals who don’t feel pain still defecate.
• Pain-free factory farming will still pose a significant risk to human health. It spreads disease (think: swine flu, e coli, salmonella) and it causes disease (think: cancer, heart disease, diabetes).
• Pain-free animal agriculture is still inherently inefficient food production. Feeding grain to animals and then animals to people is wasteful.
• Animals who can’t feel physical pain will probably still suffer emotionally, socially, and intellectually. A sow who can’t feel the physical pain of being confined in a tiny gestation crate will still suffer when her babies are taken away from her. She’ll still suffer when she hasn’t got anything interesting to do (mud to root around in, other pigs to play with). She’ll still suffer loss even if she doesn’t feel physical pain.
• Pain protects. Animals need the sense of pain in order to survive. Humans who are born with congenital insensitivity to pain (CIPA) do things like accidentally chew off their own tongues. A life without the sensation of physical pain is inherently dangerous.
• The experiments to create animals with insensitivity to pain are immoral. All animal testing is wrong, but the kind where so-called scientists create new or altered mutants (and then patent these animals) is particularly problematic.
• The laws that allow this are immoral. The property status of animals is immoral; they are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, etc. The laws that allow patents on life are, in my opinion, one of the most gruesome and dangerous codifications of speciesism. Furthermore, these life patent law problems seep over into oppression of humans. (Think: seeds).

Bea has an alternate solution: “But wait… why don’t we genetically modify humans so we don’t feel empathy? Sounds reasonable enough. This way we can continue to abuse any and all who are weaker than us without a single bit of remorse.” Haha!

What do you think?

—

UPDATE - Shriver has written more. Here are the links and my responses:

• The Least We Can Do?
• Failed To Outpace

The Center for Consumer Freedom and its unscrupulous mouthpiece are fond of pretending that they do care about at least basic animal welfare but that they’re just “normal” about it, as opposed to those of us who are extreme–that is, those of us who really care about eliminating unnecessary suffering rather than just occasionally pretending to care for sake of PR. Well, here’s one of those great examples of how much they care: