Factory Farms and their impact.

[Stardares]

meatvideo.com
Please only visit the link and watch the video if you have a sick bag handy.
I'm seriously considering a vegan diet now, honestly, that's the sickest thing i've ever watched.

[chubbsman7]

Is the meat-packing industry disgusting? Absolutely. Is it wrong that cattle spend their whole lives in a single space just to be butchered in a few years? Absolutely.

The problem is, it's a cycle.

First, the Industrial Age came upon us like a nasty old prostitute from last night. Then we whored her out and abused her like no other. Now we want to go back to our wife, or small business's and home-style cooking with healthier alternatives and things, but then we get tired of the expense of that out of our pocket book, so we'll satisfy for crap again.

Either choose expensive, healthy, maybe not that great tasting food, but healthy food, or cheap, meat packing industry, filthy, chemical contaminated food.

This is the dilemma of many college students such as myself. We want to do what's right and not bad for our bodies, and stop animal abuse, but then again, we can't afford that plus a decent schooling plus gas plus everything else that bites our expenses. It's a vicious, awful cycle.

Of course, don't go around supporting PETA all of a sudden. Meat is meant to be eaten, you just need to find better ways of ethical treatment for animals.

Raise your own chickens. Its actually a lot cheaper for eggs. A LOT.

[Mephistopheles]

A few notes:

While not exactly false the video does show only the very worst of the worst. That level of overcrowding is the norm throughout industrial meat production but the instances of severe abusive beating and non-stunned exsanguinatory slaughter are exceptions and accidents rather than the rule. This is not true for some forms of halal and kosher slaughter, where the bleeding out before being killed or stunned is essential to the ritual slaughter.

If you have a problem with those, don't blame the ranching industry. Blame the explosive growths in meat consumption over the past 50 years. It isn't the case that ranchers are malicious abusive folks who create mass factory farms because they get off on torturing animals. Rather, these factory farms are the only way to provide enough meat for what Western consumers demand.

Wanna change it? Get people to eat, say, 1/3rd the amount of meat they currently do. That'll be a start.

[nellybell]

While, I can't watch the video above because I have terrible internet, I have seen similar things I'm sure. Like Mephistopheles said though, for the most part, terrible conditions are the exception and not the rule. (As far as I know) There are government regulations on the ethical treatment of animals that are going to be slaughtered. While most slaughter animals do grow up in what we would consider to be terrible conditions, it isn't as cruel usually as I assume the video showed. It just isn't what we would consider to be ideal or natural.

As much as we would like to change the way the system is, there really isn't much of a chance. Most people can't hold onto keeping a vegitarian or vegan diet, so meat will always be in demand. While that demand stays up, they will have to continue factory farms. In many cases the unsavory conditions and processes will continue or possibly get worse as the population increases.

You would litterally have to convince hundreds of millions of people to either eat less meat and spend more on free range farming or not eat meat at all. With so many people unwiling to pay more in this economy or unable to, these practices will continue indefinetly.

Sad but true.