Take the Swine Flu, for example. Total American swine flu deaths leaped from 4000 last month to 10,000 this month:

“Federal health officials said Thursday that almost 10,000 people had died of swine flu since April, a significant jump from mortality numbers released last month.”

“A month ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that only about 4,000 had died.”

source: NY Times

Make a difference! Wash your hands, clean surfaces, stay home when you’re sick, cover your coughs and sneezes, and… stop eating animals! For more on that last topic, please read:

• Affordable meat = human health threat
• Who cares about the swine (flu)?
• Pork and the swine flu kill people

hat tip: vegan.com

One of the first things I learned was that goldfish bowls are unsuitable environments for goldfish. Goldfish are pretty “messy” fish who dirty their water quickly. They need some form of filtration. Moreover, goldfish can grow up to about a foot and live as long as 20-40 years! But when they’re kept in a tiny bowl, goldfish ‘only grow as big as the bowl.’ That is, they develop curvature of the spine and the goldfish die from the deformity. Think: foot binding.

So I bought a large 30 gallon tank with filtration for my little goldfish, whom I named Othello. I learned all about water chemistry and how to keep the tank safe for him. Goldfish need clean, aerated water. If the tank’s filter breaks or isn’t set up correctly, fish in the tank can literally suffocate to death. I cleaned the tank once a month with my Python fish tank cleaner and while I cleaned, Othello would swim by my hands and let me “pet” him.

Goldfish eat all kinds of things and, like pigs and dogs, often don’t know when to stop. They can gorge themselves until they’re sick. So fish-care requires small, regular feedings. Othello knew when it was dinner time because he’d come up to meet me at the surface. But when other people came up to the tank to admire his beauty, he ignored them.

I really think Othello knew me. I think he trusted me. But regardless of his mental state, he literally relied on me for his entire survival. I was his care-giver, his only care-giver. His life was in my hands.

Then my boyfriend and I broke up and I moved out. Othello was about the size of my hand by then and of course he came with me. I carefully moved him and all his tank equipment to my new apartment. But I made a mistake when I was setting it back up. I turned the filter speed down. The next morning I awoke to find Othello dead. He suffocated.

—

Last Thursday night someone – probably an angry former farm worker – turned off the airflow to one of Iowa’s pig barns. Because modern pig barns have similarities to fishtanks, the lack of fresh air caused nearly 4000 pigs to suffocate in the fumes from their own waste.

Farm workers know what these fumes are like. And what they can do. From the Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology. 2006; 1: 10:

Swine barn workers suffer from higher incidences of impaired air flow and lung inflammation, which is attributed to high intensity and interrupted exposures to pig barn air. The air in these barns contains gases, dust, microbes and endotoxin with endotoxin being the major suspect as the cause of lung dysfunction.

From one news story about the pigs’ deaths:

“It was a pretty terrible thing to see,” Deputy Jim Landau said. “We looked in and there they were. Snout to snout.”

Another story claims: “The loss is expected to be more than $200,000″ as if the monetary value of these animals is all that matters.

Most people don’t even know these intensive pig farms exist. Most people have no idea that their pork, ham, or bacon comes from cruel factory farms. Most people have no idea of the damage that these farms do to the environment, animals, and people.

What if these farms were more like fish tanks? What if they had glass walls?

Find out more at Meat.org.

More details here: http://www.vegansoapbox.com/undercover-pig-farm-video/

UPDATE: more info at http://mercyforanimals.org/pigs/

“A disturbing video released exclusively to Fox News by the animal rights group Mercy for Animals (MFA) shows a string of alleged abuses at one of the nation’s largest pig farms, including footage of employees picking up baby pigs and tossing them like footballs.”

When I watched the video, here’s what I saw:

The footage was taken at “a large pig-breeding farm in central Pennsylvania owned by Country View Family Farms (CVFF).”

“What we documented is standard and largely accepted by the pork industry and as a civilized society it’s our moral obligation to make sure animals don’t suffer needless cruelty. It’s important we look at these animals the same way we look at dogs and cats because there is no difference. They feel the same pain, the same joy our beloved animals at home do,”

~Daniel Hauff, MFA Director of Investigations

Read the Fox News story here >>

From “Swine CAFOs and Novel H1N1 Flu: Separating Facts from Fears” comes this quote:

one potential source of the original outbreak—swine farming in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—has received comparatively little attention by public health officials. CAFOs house animals by the thousands in crowded indoor facilities. But the same economy-of-scale efficiencies that allow CAFOs to produce affordable meat for so many consumers also facilitate the mutation of viral pathogens into novel strains that can be passed on to farm workers and veterinarians, according to Gregory Gray, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health.

“When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, they have continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort, and recombine into novel strains,” Gray explains. “The best surrogates we can find in the human population are prisons, military bases, ships, or schools. But respiratory viruses can run quickly through these [human] populations and then burn out, whereas in CAFOs—which often have continual introductions of [unexposed] animals—there’s a much greater potential for the viruses to spread and become endemic.”

More bits from the article, emphasis added:

• “workers exposed routinely to livestock can pass these zoonotic infections—which transmit readily among humans and animals—on to the wider public.”
• “Scientists can’t conclusively say if humans first infected pigs with the H1N1 virus or vice versa, Richt says. But what is clear, he adds, is that pigs have been a reservoir for the virus ever since.”
• “Swine CAFOs generate vast amounts of fecal waste, stored in onsite lagoons that can breach and pollute local watersheds during heavy rains. The facilities emit a piercing odor that can be detected up to 6 miles from its source”
• “OSHA typically exempts facilities with fewer than 11 employees from routine inspection unless otherwise requested by employees or other agencies. Yet, like many other modern production facilities, CAFOs are largely automated, so a typical factory farm housing 2,000 sows requires a crew of just 7 people“
• “If we find a high prevalence of viral infection with a given strain in January, why do we see it again the next January if the pigs live only six months before slaughter? We need to study the pigs, the workers, and the environment to understand how the viruses get around, and what sort of interventions we can take to limit transmission.”
• “Untreated hog wastes are also routinely sprayed on crop fields as fertilizer.”
• “research is biased to generate more industry profit.”
• “this much is clear: the current pandemic shows that viruses of animal origin can pose a substantial human health threat. And if CAFOs were to accelerate the evolution of these viruses, Gray says, then the public has a right to know how those viruses evolve and what steps can be taken to limit their spread. ‘If we find something new,’ he says, ‘we need to heighten surveillance to track it—not sit on it and pretend nothing’s happening until the problem explodes.’”

Animals, particularly pigs, have a lot in common with humans. That’s why some viruses spread between species, from pigs to people for example. This much scientists understand. They try to convey this through news articles, like this article about the origins of the Swine Flu, which says:

“there is a small but steady traffic of virus between America’s 110 million pigs and the 120,000 people who care for them.”

Sure, that’s one way to describe zoonotic disease transmission.
Except that “care” isn’t quite the right word to describe what pig farmers do:

“Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won’t bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He’s fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he’ll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population.”

Twenty years ago, people would flat-out deny the existence of factory farming and the routine animal abuse in slaughterhouses, laboratories, and other places of animal exploitation. They’d say the videos from animal rights investigators were “faked.”

Now, they don’t deny it, they defend it.

As great as this TIME article is at pointing out the atrocities of modern animal agriculture – the danger to human health, the animal suffering, the environmental consequences – it concludes in much the same manner as Food, Inc: laying all the blame and responsibility on the consumer. It basically concludes that if Americans weren’t such penny-pinchers, there’d be no such thing as factory farming.

What’s worse, rather than suggesting a truly sustainable alternative: veganism (that also happens to be cheap!), the article implies that if only consumers spent a little more money on dead animal flesh then everything would be OK. Nah, no need for government intervention or real activism, the so-called “free market” can fix everything. If everyone were just like The Omnivore’s Dilemma‘s style hero, Niman, we could have our cow and eat it too.

Only, there is no omnivore’s dilemma. There is only the omnivore’s stubborn refusal to go vegan.

Drastic times call for drastic measures and these are drastic times. Paying a few more pennies for free-range chicken won’t solve today’s urgent animal welfare, environmental, and diet-related health problems. Save your pennies and opt for beans and rice rather than the flesh of dead animals. That, and only that, will make a truly significant difference for you, the planet, and for animals.

—

Hat tip: Mr. Marcus.

The article continued:

“We sent Big Girl off to heaven with kind words and a gentle lethal injection. We wished we could have ended her misery much, much sooner. Those who condemn open-admission animal shelters and organizations like PETA for having to euthanize sick, injured, dying, and unwanted animals must look closely at the source of the overpopulation crisis—people who breed animals, those who neglect and abuse them, and consumers who choose to buy animals from breeders and pet shops instead of adopting from their local animal shelter.

“No one hates the ugly reality of euthanasia more than the shelter workers who hold the syringe. Sometimes, especially when animals have known no kindness and are suffering, the best that we can offer an animal like Big Girl, Asia, and others is a painless and dignified release from a world that showed them no love or compassion.”

Here is the trouble with what  Jeff Mackey, from PETA, wrote:

1. The phrase, “we sent her off to heaven” could easily be used by ANY animal killer in ANY context. It is not a justification or explanation for euthanasia;  it’s just something that makes some humans feel better about killing animals.
2. The euphemism that euthanasia is “a dignified release” is yet another phrase that does NOTHING for animals; it just makes humans feel better about killing animals. Animals don’t care more about dignity than death. No animal would choose a dignified death over a pain-free life.  If the animal is in pain, talk about pain. Euthanasia’s purpose is to provide a pain-free release from a pain-filled world, not a dignified release from an undignified life.
3. The “overpopulation crisis” doesn’t exist. And even if it did, it wouldn’t justify killing animals. It would justify building more shelters, encouraging more people to adopt rather than buy, changing the laws, or doing other things to stop so-called overpopulation. To make this point more salient, say there was an overpopulation crisis among humans. Would that justify killing homeless humans? No, it would not.

But the real trouble isn’t the few animals that PETA kills. The real trouble isn’t that PETA kills animals like Big Girl.  The real trouble is that the term “euthanasia” is being co-opted by animal exploiters. If animal advocacy organizations like PETA don’t defend the definition of euthanasia as in the animals’ interests,

“the act or practice of ending the life of an individual suffering from a terminal illness or an incurable condition, as by lethal injection or the suspension of extraordinary medical treatment,” (source: The American Heritage Dictionary via Alley Cat Allies)

they become part of the problem. Refusal to define euthanasia as in the animal’s interests helps justify things like the pork industry’s definition of euthanasia:

“Euthanasia is the humane process whereby the pig is rendered insensible, with minimal pain and distress, until death. For the euthanasia process or method to be considered humane, it must be quick, effective and reliable.” (source)

Notices how the pork industry’s definition does not say anything about the animals’ interests. In fact, the industry says “It is inevitable that on every swine farm, situations that require pigs to be euthanized will arise. These situations include, but are not limited to, illness and injuries.” I’ve added emphasis to point out the fact that the pork industry calls virtually any pig killing that’s not for profit “euthanasia.” (Killing for profit is called “slaughter.”) In fact, here is just one of the many acceptable methods of so-called pig euthanasia, “pithing,” a back-up method:

“A wire or polypropylene rod is inserted through the hole in the head made by gunshot or penetrating captive bolt. The rod is pushed into the brain and slid back and forth and rotated to cause maximum damage to the brain and upper spinal cord. Initially, the pig may show muscle contraction and twitching, but muscles will relax and movement will be inhibited shortly thereafter.” (source: American Association of Swine Veterinarians)

Blunt trauma to the head is an acceptable way to kill runt piglets. They call smashing in piglets’ brains “euthanasia.” This isn’t done just for piglets who are ill or injured, this is done to piglets who are deemed unprofitable.

And let’s not forget, these methods were ruled “euthanasia” by a court of law:

The animals don’t need our rationalizations, our feel-good rhetoric, or our paltry excuses. They need our compassion. And they need it now. Nothing else will suffice. Any justification for euthanasia that doesn’t centralize animals’ interests, isn’t in the animals’ interests.