Hi
Today was my "consumer's day". I went to my organic shop, to buy food... and now i am about to cook a Miso soup. If you are wondering what a Miso soup is, here is the recipe, it's a very healthy dish!
http://starburst.cbl.cees.edu/~tara/miso.html
It's one of my basic principles: i am vegetarian for around 8 years, and i am a vegan ( i don't wear leather, and buy only cruelty free products (not tested on animals for cosmetics, by ex) and stay away from dairies and pet shop!). The animal rights are one of my causes... because i think it's so selfish to kill other beings or to injured them just because it's a good taste, or because i wanna look different... to my opinion, every being (humans and animals) want to avoid suffering, so why should we inflict pain, fear and suffering to innocent beings, unable to defend themselves against us??! to me, it's so cruel!! and too easy because animals can not do nor say, nor pursue anyone!
And i've decided to stop dairies, because i am really shocked by the way, we, human race, treat animals in farm houses! it's really so unsane! and today's farms are billions miles so fare away from the one most of us learned about in school : they are mechanized factories where an animal's welfare is of little concern compared to profit: production is the only word:
"On today's factory farms, animals often spend their entire lives confined to cages or stalls barely larger than their own bodies. Death for these animals doesn't always come quickly�or painlessly. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee member George E. Brown has written that to keep production lines moving, slaughterhouse employees "often find themselves resorting to unbelievable brutality. ... Slaughter workers admit to routinely strangling, beating, scalding, skinning and dismembering fully conscious animals."3 Every year, nearly 9 billion animals are killed for food in the United States alone."
http://www.peta.org
I am maybe too naive, but i've learnt only recently how comes from milk... i thought cows were made to produce milk... that it was their "speciality"... as i was told at school, but the truth is so different from that!
"As with any mammal, cows produce milk only when pregnant and stop after their calves have been weaned. When a dairy cow delivers a female calf, the calf becomes a dairy cow herself, born to live in the same conditions as her mother. But when a dairy cow delivers a male calf, the calf is sold to a veal farm within days of birth, where he is tethered to a stall, deprived of food and exercise, and soon slaughtered for meat. Life is only a few years longer for the mother. Because it is unprofitable to keep cows alive once their milk production declines, dairy cows are usually slaughtered at 5 years of age. Thus, a cow's normal lifespan of 25 years is cut 20 years short just to cut costs and maximize production."
www.vegan.org
So despite the common belief that drinking milk and eating eggs does not kill animals, commercially-raised dairy cows and egg-laying chickens, whether factory-farmed or 'free range,' are slaughtered when their production rates decline. The same factory farm methods that are used to produce most meats are also used to produce most milk and eggs. These cows and chickens live their short lives caged, drugged, mutilated, and deprived of their most basic freedoms.
Although chickens can live up to 15 years, they are usually slaughtered when their egg production rates decline after two years.(www.vegan.org)
To me, that really sucks!!! so i beg you to do everything you can to avoid suffering to animals. I think that our only real force is to be "consumers", in this "consumer society". That's the only power we have to make the difference. So we must use it on purpose, to try to make things change. That's why it's important to buy organic vegetables, and to be conscious that "meat is murder" and that "fishing hurts".
thanks for taking on your time to read that!
