I felt it was important to myself to watch it all the way to the end even though I cried thru most of it. I feel as a human race our consciousness needs to change if we and our fellow earthlings will survive.
ditto. It was hard to do. Very.
Earthlings(Animal Cruelty)
by frankiespeakin 15 Replies latest jw friends
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Sparkplug
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PrimateDave
This was a most difficult documentary to watch.
"They are earthlings. They have the right to be here just as much as humans do."
"The systematic torture of sentient beings, whatever the pretext, and in whatever form, cannot achieve anything more than it already has, to show us what is the lowest point of debasement man can reach, if that's what we want to know."
"Isn't it enough that animals the world over live in permanent retreat from human progress and expansion? And for many species there is simply nowhere else to go. It seems the fate of many animals is either to be unwanted by man, or wanted too much."
"Human beings should love animals as the knowing love the innocent and the strong love the vulnerable. When we wince at the suffering of animals, that feeling speaks well of us, even if we ignore it. And those who dismiss love for our fellow creatures as mere sentimentality overlook a good and important part of our humanity, but it takes nothing away from a human to be kind to an animal."
Dave -
tetrapod.sapien
homo sapiens confuse being at the top of the food chain with being at the top of some evolutionary pinnacle, even though there is no such thing. Jains are on to something with their respect for *all* living things.
i mean, life cannot survive without feeding on other life. such is the way of nature. perhaps if there were a creator, we would all be eating magical manna. not living, not dead. like nutritional water.
and since we are ourselves ANIMALS, i do not think we will ever have peace with ourselves unless we again bow to the animal powers. they are within us, and yet are dormant until we behold an animal. when we treat them with disrespect, we are treating ourselves with disrespect. this furthers the separation between "ourselves" and nature, psychologically. and the violence gets worse. we treat nature with contempt because we think we are not nature.
thanks for the trippy vids frankie!
tetra
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purplesofa
I watched this entire video. My daughter watched the last part of it with me.
The pigfarm in North Carolina is run by the company Smithfield, and has bought land in the UK and doing the same thing over there. Those lagoons showed on the video are pig feces and pigs have the largest amount of feces per animal. A truck ran into a lagoon and it took two weeks before it was found. Children in schools are sick from breathing the contaminated air. When workers stop working at these farms, they reek with the stench for months afterwards, it infiltrates them.
Smithfield is the largest pork supplier in the world and what they do is disgusting. They are contaminating the rivers and land around them and as the video brought out all along the eastern coast.
Pfeisteria 3, ebola 4, Aids 2
My first knowledge of Smithfield was in a recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Then more research online.
I have seen pictures of rivers red from the blood of slaughtered dolphins. Boats floating in rivers of blood
Recently there was a thread of what did we think aliens would say coming here to Earth. I would think this one documentary is all they would need to see to get the hell out.
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greendawn
It's a very sad video. The Chinese are probably top for animal cruelty not only do they eat cats and dogs but beat them to death in the belief that in this way their meat will be more tasty. Also they skin fur producing animals alive.
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purplesofa
America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.
JEFF TIETZ Posted Dec 14, 2006 8:53 AM
S mithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.
Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.
A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.
Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.
From Smithfield's point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.
The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.
Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.
Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands of football fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.
Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.
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