A Whack Job?

So are we as tough to defend as the bunch of whack jobs that we get portrayed as? Sometimes we might, and today I find that disheartening.   We get painted into corners by people who wish us gone from the planet, that’s rough enough, but what really is their agenda? In some cases it is tough to tell. But never fear, they care about animals.

But do they understand animals?

Mike Roe, Dirty Jobs Mike Roe, recently posted a video on YouTube about questioning what you’ve been told. He tells of a job, early on in the show, where he needed to castrate a lamb. With his teeth. It went against everything that he’d been told by the HSUS, PETA and the SPCA, but in fact, he discovered it was the least painful and most humane way to do the job. The video on YouTube is pretty entertaining, and well as educational. A link is provided below. Thanks Ann.
But what other things might Ag opposition be getting wrong. Let’s talk about sow gestation crates for a bit. HSUS vilifies factory farms for the practice, and even uses it in their fund raising video. So have we ever discussed why we do it? Well there are several reasons, and to really understand them you need to spend time with sows. Has anyone fed sows in a group setting? I did in my younger days, and inevitably the big sows got bigger, and the small ones went hungry. The fact that they have been reported to have the intelligence of a three year old, didn’t make them any nicer to each other. In fact they tended to be brutal. Individual crates allow keepers to feed them without fear of them injuring themselves or each other. Ever try to handle a 400 pound sow? Safety for the people handling them is important as well. But the opposition looks at them through human eyes and values and says we are wrong.
Have you heard about the animals being cut up while still alive at the processing plant? Or watched the videos? Wonder why that happens? Well, as the story was told to me some years ago, a group of animal rights activists got the hog industry to use an electrical stun on hogs. Not enough to kill them but enough to render them unconscious. In fact, only enough so that they would revive after just a few minutes. If not perfectly placed, this amount would indeed allow an animal to revive too soon. But the industry can’t use enough to do the job right every time, so here we are.

Chickens and turkeys are killed by having their heads removed. No pain killers are used because the administration would hurt more than the act that causes of their death. But because they aren’t part of the Humane Slaughter Act, something must be wrong with it. Did you know that the guillotine was developed by the French as a painless method of execution? At least they got that right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-udsIV4Hmc