WORDSCRUELTY, CLIMATE, HEALTH
Animals As Food
- An Inconvenient LunchSeriously fat. That describes one in four adults. Americans average 3,700 daily calories. Most come from meat and dairy. But the bloated nation faces more than heart disease and diabetes. It turns out the last thing on anyone's mind is the first thing to alter climate…
- Companion Or Cuisine?Red rivulets flow past a cage where he and others huddle in airless heat. Hands pull him through metal slats. They bash his head with a pipe and shove an electric prod against him. He is a carcass, but awake. Finally, everything goes black…
- A Vegan WeddingWatch slider about the first vegan wedding featured in VegNews Magazine! Kinship Circle founder Brenda Shoss married Grady Ballard inside the People Barn at Farm Sanctuary. “If you could get married anywhere in the world, where?” a then procrastinating fiance asked. “I want to get married with the animals…”
- Life Contained: The Pig IndustryAn automated hum defines daybreak inside a dark shed. Grunts and squeals rise from narrow stalls. Each row contains over 100 pigs. At times, snouts and hooves align symmetrically. One 600-pounder rubs against bars in a vain effort to turn around…
- Dairy Is Healthy, If You're A CalfHumans are the only species to drink another's milk. Though 75% of the global population is lactose intolerant, demand for cow's milk sustains huge dairy factories. How do you get a cow to produce unnatural amounts of milk? You keep her pregnant. What about all those babies? Males are taken within 24-48 hours of birth, for life in 2-feet wide crates and slaughter by 20 weeks as veal…
- Consider The Birds We ConsumeAt Thanksgiving, Americans express gratitude with the carcass of a genetically mutilated and tortured bird. I propose a day of empathy. To consider the 290,000,000 turkeys annually heaved through stunning tanks. The birds who blink as automated blades slice their necks. Modern poultry factories do not resemble the picturesque farm…
- Horton Hears…A Cow!Their world on a dust speck was clearly in tatters, till Horton proclaimed: Every voice matters! Hollywood's Horton Hears A Who paints a world like our own. This reminded me of animals in society. Specifically, my mind drifted to cows, who in a Horton-esque twist recently stole headlines. A video exposed brutalized cows too weak to stand…
- MO Lawmakers: Kill Horses & Harass ActivistsWhen lawmakers tried to open a horse-kill plant, and renew slaughter on U.S. soil, Kinship Circle issued an alert. Then it got weird. Menacing calls. Neighing like a horse. Chanting. Singing A Horse Is A Horse. KC filed a police report for harassment and called press…
- Our Vegan Sons & DaughtersAs a vegan, I encounter misconceptions. I'm a protein starved bunny-hugger who doesn't shave. Huh? I grew up as a middle class, mall-hopping brat. Now I'm a mom, open-minded perhaps, but not granola crunchy. I do not find meat repulsive. I just prefer live animals…
- Mad Cowboy And His MovieAuthor Howard Lyman (Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat), doesn't mince words. During his Oprah Winfrey gig, Lyman argued an outbreak of mad cow disease in America could make AIDS seem like the common cold. This Mad Cowboy's movie further condemns the disastrous agriculture we call food…
- The P In Premarin Is PeePremarin = PREgant MAres uRINe. PMU horses are pee machines for Pfizer's Premarin line of HRT drugs. Equine estrogens don't fare well in human bodies: cancer, stroke, heart attack. Still, PMU horses live in cruelty, die by slaughter…
- Meat-On-A-Stick For Earth Day?Dawn arrives as mist. Signs of renewal abound as my husband and I haul Kinship Circle materials across the grounds of Earth Day. Booths beckon us to Go Green! Recycle! Conserve! Meat-on-a-stick! Meat-on-a-stick? I stumble on the paradox even as grilled burgers…
- When Animals Suffer, So Do Weby Kelly Overton – Do the animal rights nuts know something we don't? As we observe growing avian flu cases worldwide, we bide time until the eventual large-scale outbreak of mad cow disease in the U.S. and hope what the world experienced in 2004 wasn't just a dress rehearsal for SARS…
- Paradoxical Burgers For Lunch?May the jaws of Hell pulverize all slimeballs who roast kittens and behead puppies. Our pets are sacrosanct. But say you stumble upon some dewy-eyed calves, roped inside veal crates. Or you bump into their dairy cow moms. By now they're meatloaf, stamped with the pledge that you, gentle reader, will never hear their screams…
- Wendy's Demo, Washington DCSome saw a hen locked inside a lightless box, her beak amputated. Others saw a pig crammed into a crate, her entire life segmented by just pregnancy and death. Such portraits compel animal advocates to persevere in a society with complete moral ambiguity about nonhuman animals. Activists protested outside a Wendy's in Washington DC…
