One of the charities that I support is the Animal Welfare Institute. This organization and others provide plenty of evidence that large numbers of animals are subject to unnecessary cruelty, primarily in order to reduce the cost of feeding our growing population. This situation will only improve when more people become aware of the way that animals are actually raised and killed.
In the short term, I think it would be good if high schools conducted field trips to slaughterhouses so that kids around the age of 16 could see where their food comes from. In the long term, I hope we figure out how to create artifical meat on a large scale so that we don't need to kill animals for food in the first place.
this reminds me of an SF book I once read. this guy invented something called "meatbeast." a meatbeast was basically a big pile of muscle about 3 ft high. it had a very primitive "brain" that allowed it to run its bodily functions, but not to feel pain or have any capability for higher-order thinking. no eyes, ears, sensory organs of any kind. it fed on grains that were poured into a mouthlike orifice at the top. as the owner of a meatbeast, you need only walk into your basement (where they were typically kept) and carve off a chunk and, voila!, dinner. as long as you kept it well fed and gave it time to heal, you had a limitless supply of guilt-free meat. bizarre, eh?
Posted by: -rg | Mar 25, 2005 at 08:43 PM