[Skybird]

Many herd anbimals, sheep for example, can see one of theirs being eaten nearby by some predator, and watch it calmly, eating their own grass. You aloso see it in Africa, with gazelles etc. Many naimals cannot link that view with their own fate, they are unaware of "me" and "death". Hens, however, can become angry or distrustful of humans. Not becasue sometimes some of them disappear and never get seen, but becasue ever ymorning that human guy walks in and steals their egg. Farmer can tell you that Hens sometimes have learned to somewhat hide their eggs, therefore, store it in a corner far away inside their box, etc.

The animals we talk off are highly developed to be able to feel basic emotions like panic, fear. Whether they get humanely treated or not is not decided by their emotional or intellectual capacities, but by the views of man by which he judges his own behavior. that's why your comments on the word "humane" is just meaningless wordplay, Haplo. animals may not "know" the difference between humane and inhumae ways of dealing with them, they still feel panic or pain. If you think different, then you never have dealt with animals closely yourselve! And their indocrinal system reacts to their emotional arousal states, with hormones oumped into their blood cycle where you can measure it, and that can make their butchered meat even a health hazard if not giving it time to reduce. The watchword here are stress hormones.

I once saw a film about a butcher travelling the land from farm to farm, and the way he killed animals on the farms. He had a way to deal with the animals and to treat them that they did not fear him, nor were suspicious of anything. They were calm and relaxed, lived happily one moment, and a minute later had peacefully brought from life to death. So, it is possible to kill an animal without terrifying it first. but that is not possible with long transports, mass farming, and butcher factories. And that's why I am against the meat industry. Needless to say that stress hormones are no issue in this example.

And on nature, I still need to see any predator out there bringing so much misery and terror over his prey and letting it suffer needlessly, like we can see it in the meat industry. sometimes, ther additon of a small electronic control, or an additonal human control step already could prevent many of the failings that I described before. They do not get implemented, becasue they would cost a damn little bit of money.

In past times, having meat was luxury. it happened rarely only. The poor sometimes never had it, the rich landlord only on festivity days. These days, sociological studies show, it has become different. Their is a statistical link between social class, and meat consumation. The mor eunedcuated the class, the more meat they eat. Because education correlates with social class, social class correlates with financial income, food habits correlate both with income and education. There is a strong trend for reduced meat consumation amongst better educated, middle and higher social classes. Today's poor", the lower class, consume more meat, and very often unhealthy lots of it - because meat has become so damn cheap, thanks to industrial mass production. the price wars between supermarkets that dump the prices even more, is telltaling. The rpices gets dumped. So gets the quality of our food.

Next time you pass a farm, hold for a while and watch the animals, and try to figure out if you could kill one of them with your own hands, and then deal with the cadaver until you got the steakl you desire so much for dinner. If you cannot do that yourself, if it is too hard a thing for you, then stop eating meat immediately. If you can do that, buy at a local source wehre there is no factory involved as far as possible, but the butcher does his job right in place, whereever possible. Admitted, that steak will cost you a bit more than in supermarket.

But the cause is worth it.

Today, milk cows are so "hightuned" that they tend to be kept in a constant pregnancy all live long - with the result that thos coindition eats their physical substance fromwmithin, theis skeleton, their mineral homeostasis, their organic system gets destroyed more and more just so that they proiduce that endless stream of milk. Turkeys get tuned to weigh twice as much as naturally, and more, so that they produce more meat, but their movement apparatus is not fit for that, giving them leg-related diseases, broken legs, and all kind of problems due to unnatural body posture and themselves being seriously handicapped to move around the way they would in a natural, healthy condition. for many industrailly used animals, most of their life is suffering, not only during transport and processing in a factory.

Help to reduce this. Eat less meat. Watch out for the quality of your supplier. It's good for your conscience, for your ethical authority, and for your physical health. That makes it a triple win decision.

P.S. I love the taste of a good steak. I die for a good goulash. And still I have meat just twice a month, and fish also twice or three times a month.