**Not for Faint of Heart**

I like meat, I don't like the way we get that product in the whole, but I need to eat, I do go hunting and enjoy eating what I cull. I always tell the sheeple who are not happy about me hunting that the cow that provides your beef is a mass produced product my deer are born free and never know what hits them when I cull them.

I'd much rather die of a massive heart attack than be told that I have Cancer or some other terminal shit that kills you any how.

Tony

 

WOW, the politicians have moved into video makeing....or maybe not, politicians are generaly more honest than that. Seriously, that video is so full of BS its hard to know just where to start. While I have known folks who worked them I havent spent a lot of time in/around the large production slaughter houses but I have worked dairy farms, a small butcher shop, been around egg plants, beef cattle farms and hog farms quite a bit. Hopefuly EL will chime in and offer more prospective on the big slaughter houses but I will go through and hit some of the highlights Im familiar with based on the time I have spent around the areas discussed.

poltry meat farms- Ok, the ones I have been around do tend to be kind of nasty and there are frequently a lot of dead birds laying around BUT chickens tend to be canabalistic so they dispose of that and this will also happen in small well tended flocks to a degree. The legs breaking and such from rapid growth also happens but largly due to the breeds most commonly used for this purpose. They have been breed to grow fast and just like many of the huge breed dogs are VERY prone to broken bones when growing because they grow so fast, meat birds do have that tendancy. I would agree that poultry is the worst treated animals I have seen. As far as the farmer killing them with a rod if they are crippled or sick (failure to do so PETA also complains about) I could see that and he is probably decent at hitting the back of the neck so it kills them instantly, they flop and run even when decapitated about like shown in the video so they are most likely dead. Starved for a couple weeks before slaughter? Ummmmm that would cause weight loss and IIRC on large scale operations even chickens are sold by weight so that would take money out of the farmers/slaughter houses pockets, how many business folks you know that intentionaly lower their profits just to be mean?

Turkeys after the accident- PULEASE...its not like haveing trucks crash is a standard part of the industry or could even be complained about reasonably as a lack of concern for the animals. 6 hours to get them back on the road while they tend to wounded people and clear the highway....point being?

egg plants-These are even worse than the meat bird farms and conditions arent to far off. One thing I would mention is that the 'shocking their systems' is called putting them through a molt and is usualy more like 2-3 days, without doing so from time to time most chickens will drop WAY down on production and after it they are healthy and laying again. So far as starveing them to death, again, this would be killing the 'chicken that laid the copper egg' (not that high of profits) and lose the farmer money, they tend to try to avoid that since loseing money means loseing their business which also tends to be their home, often for several generations. The egg layers at the slaughter house? Some of them probably send them out when they get to old to produce but they are not the same breeds you normaly get for meat and would be going to slaughter only when old. Scaulded and such while alive, again I figure this is almost exclusivly the nerves. I do KNOW animals move after death, I have totaly removed the heads of animals and still had them thrash around, and on more than one occasion even been creped out when as much as an hour after removeing the head and organs from a beef then while skinning it the muscels would still twitch when touched but there was no doubt they were dead.

beef cattle-some still casterate with a blade but most I know band them which consists of putting a heavey rubber band on the sack to cut off the blood supply and the sack falls off in a couple weeks. This is generaly done when they are very young. Some also burn off or cut off horns but mostly the folks concerned with that just get 'polled' stock where they have been bred to not have horns, again if they do it it tends to be when very young. On the electric cattle prods at the auctions, of all the auctions I have been to I dont think I have ever seen an electric prod used yet. Even the whips and stick type prods they have are mostly waved to heard the animals through. Skinned and dismembered while still fully concious? I want to SEE the man big and tough enough to make a 1000-2000 lbs animal hold still while he peels its skin off and chops it up wide awake, oh and dont forget got to hold it still enouph that can peel the hide without sliceing it up to bad since a significant part of their profit margins generaly comes from selling the skins to tanneries to make leather from. Again the video tries to 'prove' this with shots that show nerves and animals swinging like most things do when hanging freely. They dont pay enouph to get folks to try to put a hook in a beefs hind leg infront of the tendon (the way they are hung up) while the critter tries to kick them with hard hooves on legs strong enough to carry that 1500 lbs animal.

Dairy cows- '40% of dairy cows are lame by the time they reach the slaughter house', what % of people are lame by the time they reach the retirement home? Cows have to be raised for 2-3 years before they give their first drop of milk (got to be old enouph to breed to get pregnant then got to have the claf to milk and first week or 2 of milk cant be sold as it has colostrum and such and if it goes in the tank with the rest of the milk then into the truck that picks it up, the farmer that added that milk gets to buy the entire tanker truck load from the bottlers and it is dumped out on his land, same if he milks a sick cow into the tank, one on antibiotics, etc) and so they have plenty of $ tied up in her by the time she starts milking and they keep her milking as long as she produces into old age if not up to their standards she will often be sold to other dairy farmers. Also stressed or mistreated cows dont tend to produce milk so farmers do all they can to keep them calm and healthy or again go out of business. 'hooked up to machines a few times a day that often injur them', I even saw one of their videos that claimed they were kept hooked to the 24/7 and milked until they bleed LMFAO, NOOOOO, again if they bleed and it gets in the milk it can cost the farmer thousands of dollars AND if it happens repeatedly then the bottlers will refuse to buy from him and he is out of business. I have heard that a FEW dairies milk 3 times a day now but have personaly never known one to milk more than 2 times a day and even that takes a big part of the day since most can milk no more than 10 or so at one time unless real big and then they have more cattle to work through. The machines produce suction that isnt overly strong and is in spurts to suck the milk out and would be WAY less painful/tramatic than a calf (with teeth from birth) chewing/sucking them and they (calves) also ram mama in her udder to make it flow better. Notice they complain both that they are so decrepit (old ones) AND that they are sent to slaughter at a fraction of their natural life span. 'impregnated anualy', umm NO, I dont remember at the moment the gestation period on cows but IIRC its a bit short of a year but longer than people and they dont milk through most of pregnancy (any of it on most dairies I have been around). They are milked after calving untill they slow down a good bit (generaly a couple years) then weened off being milked and bred. Veal comments about dairy cattle, I havent been around viel farms and most of the dairy farms I have been around either raise the males to some age (either to started with is a few months or market size around a year-18 months) dependent on the farm OR sell them at the auction shortly after birth. The ones I have been around or worked at milked the newly 'freshened' mama cows last and into a seperate container then mixed the milk from all the new mamas (so it had the imunities from ALL of them not just from one) and gave it to the calves to get them at least a couple weeks to a month old so they brought more at auction and so they had something to do with the milk from those cows. I MAY be wrong and they MAY use those calves a lot for that but a cow isnt a cow, milk cows in the US are mostly all holestine (sp?) and the few that are not are still milk breeds. Milk breeds have a lot larger bone structure and lower quality meat. Other than utility grade hamburger you dont see the milk breeds in the meat department of the supermarket much and I doubt that changes much when talking veil but like I say Im not sure on that point.

pigs- It may vary from farm to farm but at the BIG pig farm near us (ships 50-100 per week to market on average and often more) the pigs are kept indoors on concrete from birth untill sent to the truck to go to slaughter but the pens are considerably larger and hold a full litter of pigs (a dozen or more) per pen. ears, tails, teeth and testicals cut off with no pain killers- well as far as the testicals, baby people dont generaly get pain killer when their foreskin is cut off either, as I recall the ones I got from the pig farm still had their tails, I know they had their ears and know they still had fangs though may have been lesser ones. Most have sen pics of wild boar with huge tusk/fangs sticking out of their mouths, many breeds at least of pigs get those if they arent removed early and can shread each other or people with them so I know for the saftey of the other pigs and the people many do take out the tusks/fangs. fall behinds (aka culls) are killed by being slamed into the floor- by the time they know they are falling behind they would already be likely in the 40+ pound range, how easy would it be to swing 40 lbs of floping pissed off critter over head to do that? The one localy keeps a .22 on hand and yeah if a pig isnt growing like it should be then they cull it with a .22 to the head. A friend on here who's husband and son have worked the local pig farm can correct me if Im uninformed but I havent heard about problems with the pigs breaking up under their own weight like some breeds of poultry do. On the sick animals not being put down, if they can be easily treated with antibiotics or some such then they are treated, if they get beter they keep growing then go to slaughter (after all meds have passed out of the system) if they dont or it cant be easily treated then they are culled. Buyers dont take sick animals and if they keep it they have to feed it (not to mention it may infect the rest of the heard and cost them millions) so it is killed either by a captive bolt gun or by a .22. Again the video contradicts its self pointing out that 'fall behinds' are culled rather than pay for feed for a lower profit animal and lose money but try to claim farmers are going to throw away good and expensive feed on sick cripled animals that they wont be able to sell in the real world. 'Beating them with gate rods', gate rods, basicly pieces of rebar that hold gates closed would some times be used as a convenient prod to poke or tap an animal to get it to go where it needed to (and maybe as an expedient defensive weapon of oprotunity depending on the breed if the pig got agressive since 'babe can bite through the bones in your legs if pissed and given the chance) but again, if they beat the animal then the meat is damaged, risk of loseing the animal to infections from cuts/scrapes and other issues becomes a lot higher and if any of that happens they loose money. Again, farmers farms tend to be their homes and profit margins are slim, lose money and your business goes under and you lose it which means loseing the farm likely built by great grandpa. 'packed so tight on trucks crushed by each other, freeze to side of truck blah blah blah' again throwing away money since they get paid by weight of critters and if dead they dont get paid and may lose buyer, if bones break the meat get lots of blood in it and is useless. They deliver a animals with broken bones commonly and the buyer will NOT continue to do business with them since that costs him money. Kind of neat also how there are so many pigs on the truck that they cant move and they are supposedly unventalated (am I the only one who has driven behind to many of these trucks and endured the smell of pig shit to know better on this?) and yet live animals generating body heat that in an enclosed nonventelated trailer would make it flat HOT but they freeze to the side of the truck. Pigs have hair but not generaly a thick coat that would insulate well enouph to let anything freeze on them while they are alive. '100,000 arive dead each year' wow that sounds like a lot, lets see, there are 2 of the big bone in hams per pig (hind legs, front are picnic hams), now think about the last time you saw these at the grocery store and how many there were at THAT store, if they set on the shelf for a week or so they are a loss, now think of how many grocery stores are in the country with that many in all of them on average, mow many millions of pigs is that per year? I would imagine that number pales as a percentage in comparison to the number of truckers that die each year in the line of moveing food around the country its so low. Again, dead, sick or injured animals mean lost money in an industry with low profit margins. Again on the cutting, scaulding and carving up of live animals, for one IIRC ELs coworkers spot that and the plant gets mega fines if not shut down even if its an accidental one that slipped through, more to the point just like the cattle, Im a big boy and I aint to easy to scare off from a fight, may even enjoy it but unless its that or be killed you would have to be paying me BIG $$$$ per critter to take on a live 250-300 lbs (common market size) with just a knife, particularly to get close enouph to them jaws to try to cut its throat with a butcher knife PARTICULARLY given that to do that very well you will have to be in the pen with it and may be in with several of them in that type situation. They are shot in the head with either a gun or captive bolt gun and their brains scrambled before they are hit with a knife or scaulded.

Short version, PETA and most similar/afiliated groups were created so there would be someone to make politicians look honest.

 

We had a house guest last week, that refused the rack of lamb that I spent a small fortune preparing, because she had watched a documentary on slaughtering them. Just left more for me when I couldn't convince her that the lamb died of natural causes.

 

Anyone ever read "Fast Food Nation"???? Ugh....I haven't eaten at a fast food drive thru place since 1996...and I love meat!

I miss going to my Aunt Athleen's house back in Oswego...on the Farm. Man.... that lady could cook!