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Thursday, December 29, 2011
Fast Food Nation...The Truth About Beef
If we think that how we are killing cows is humane and clean, we are sadly mistaken. The people that work in these slaughter houses do disgusting things to the cows. "I see: a man reach inside cattle and pull out their kidneys with his bare hands, then drop the kidneys down a metal chute, over and over again, as each animal passes by him; a stainless steel rack of tongues; Whizzards peeling meat off decapitated heads, picking them almost as clean as the white skulls painted by Georgia O'Keeffe. We wade through blood that's ankle deep and that pours down drains into huge vats below us. As we approach the start of the line, for the first time I hear the steady pop, pop, pop of live animals being stunned. Now the cattle suspended above me look just like the cattle I've seen on ranches for years, but these ones are upside down swinging on hooks. For a moment, the sight seems unreal; there are so many of them, a herd of them, lifeless. And then I see a few hind legs still kicking, a final reflex action, and the reality comes hard and clear." (171 Fast Food Nation). The way we treat cows is unacceptable. Cows deserve to be treated nicer if people are going to kill them. It's mass extermination and that's wrong. Would we kill millions of people in this way? I hope not, so why should we kill cows this way?! A cow is living...it's a life we can't just take the life of anything and treat it this way. I would like to take the head person of each fast food corporation, give them a gun, put them eye to eye with a cow and see if they can kill an innocent cow. Personally I couldn't, so I don't think that they could either.
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ReplyDeleteFor this class, I also read a book about food: The Omnivore's Dilemma. I see what your book is saying about the way cows are treated in massive slaughterhouse operations. If the things workers say about it are true, then it truly is a call for change. However, I do condone the slaughter of cows and feel that comparing cows to humans is like comparing apples to oranges. They are just too different to merit a comparison. Cows in no way have a comparable sentience to humans and slaughtering a cow for sustenance is not the same as say a genocide, which of course is unnecessary and has no positive outcome or respectable reason. Also, cows are a domestic animal, so we are not exterminating them. On the contrary, there are more cows now than there would be in nature if we hadn't domesticated them. However, our intention of having so many cows is, indeed, questionable. A cow has a life, a cow may not be able to defend itself against slaughter but you can’t personify a cow's experience because it is not a person. And personally, I believe I could slaughter a cow and eat it later. Cows are not shot either, when stunned and slaughtered humanely it does not seem like such an overwhelmingly violent act-and that is why I think cows are rarely shot as means of slaughter.
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