My awareness of the incestuousness of the American meat and dairy industries are what finally led me to cut out all animal products from my diet for two years in college. Since then, I have, somewhat reluctantly, reincorporated a minimal amount of dairy, egg, and honey, mostly in the interest of social ease, into my food regimen. But the video above, distributed by Mercy For Animals, forces me to recall the reasons that I became vegan in the first place.
Many animal rights-conscious vegans cite raise the points that calves born to dairy cows are immediately directed to veal production, that dairy cows that are too old or infirm are often slaughtered for meat, and that the living conditions and levels of hormones given to dairy cows are incredibly inhumane. This video, for me, points to a larger federal issue that ties animal agriculture to the current threat facing the coasts surrounding the Gulf of Mexico.
That issue is government regulation. in Slaughterhouse, Gail Eisnitz discusses the tragic inefficacy of the USDA and the FDA to oversee meat and dairy production and how squalid and morbid work environments breed aggression and violent behavior in the employees that can then lead to domestic abuse or incidents like those in this video. I, like many of my leftist compatriots, hoped that when Obama took office, his administration would impose firmer regulation in all the areas, both public and private, that needed it. Impotence on the part of the SEC and an autonomous Federal Reserve allowed the economic crisis to occur and a high level of prurience and drug abuse has been corrupting the MMS for years. Government inaction is an appropriate ideal only for the psychos who believe that businesses operate best with no oversight and will naturally conduct themselves in ways that benefit themselves and the American populace and the environment. The response to this video seems to have been that this man was personally deranged and a poor representative of factory workers, but the same attitude was adopted concerning the events at Abu Ghraib when a culture of torture within the U.S. military was positively fecund during the Bush years.
As a final caveat, I would like to warn you that this video is extremely graphic, and that one Geoff Ball, DVM said this: “This has to be the most shocking and malicious video of animal cruelty that I have seen … There is no need to explain how the actions shown are unusually cruel and [show] amazing levels of stress and neglect unto these animals.”
