Pigs and Pets

[midcan5]

Malraux once wrote 'people who love animals haven't lowered their pride enough to love humans.' That line always remained with me as we were a scruffy bunch of children, and relatives would treat their pets nicer than us. But still mom would take in a stray animal as quickly as a stray human. Years ago I read something about how calves were locked in a cage so that veal could be created. I haven't eaten veal since. David Foster Wallace writes, consider that we toss a living thing into boiling water, a lobster, for the pleasure of the moment. So today I see pigs get screwed too. But watching TV ads for animals foods, or listening to people talk about their animals strikes me as another one of those complex paradoxes in which we classify things based on some arbitrary value. So why is it OK to treat animals differently. Can one imagine an advanced space alien casting their line on earth, hooking a human, commenting on size and shape, and throwing them back?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_vqIGTKuQE]YouTube - Undercover at Smithfield Foods[/ame]

 

[Douger]

I'm a farmer. I treat my animals far better than I would a "stray" human.
Smithfield, like all things murkin, is a piece of fucking shit.
That's why I grow my own and kill my own. They never suffer, eat well, roam, are kept clean, and never know the final moment.
"Humane" is bullshit terminology. Humans are sadistic fools.

 

[Pseudo Rob]

The way these pigs are cooped up like that is obviously wrong.

I think that we can agree, though, that it is not correct to equate these animals to humans. We are a lot more self-aware and conscious than they are.

I have, for a long time, considered becoming a vegetarian but its hard to know where to draw the line. Do we only eat non-animals? Do we only eat things that are not made artificially dead? Is it ever ok to eat a human being?

We will inevitably have to eat things which used to be alive. Where do you draw the line?

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Had a pet pig when I was very young. Thing lived with all our dogs and thought it was one. When we moved to Germany we had to get rid of it. Mom gave it back to the farmer that gave it to us with the deal he would not eat it.

First night back it broke out of the pig pen and slept with his dogs. We left after that.