Response to Triblocal Article:
"Taxpayers Funds Support Needless Slaughter of Baby 4-H Animals"
By Rachel Lee Allen
First, 4-H activities that involve children raising an animal for later
sale and slaughter renders those children helpless against an extremely ugly
form of emotional child abuse, as well as helpless against a bloodlust
tradition that seeks to invade their minds and smother to death their inborn
compassion, their divine spark of love and mercy. Children come to us in
newborn innocence, but then we set about making them "Fall" -- much as the
Biblical account of Adam and Eve being exiled to desert lands, humans set
about to exile the innocent, loving child into a barren land, devoid of
mercy, devoid of compassion.
I am not a city dweller or "suburbanite"; I am a grandmother living on
wooded acreage in rural Florida. I grew up in the South eating from tables
often laden with fried pork chops and collard greens swimming in bacon
grease. Many people back then had no knowledge of the harm they did to
themselves by consuming such food--and they had no idea of the damage
wrought upon the planet by the productions of that food. And certainly, most
did not recognize animals as having any value beyond filling a cook pot. But
with passage of time, consults with cardiologists, and opening our eyes, and
hearts, and minds to the suffering of "meat" animals, many of us evolved
past that place of poisoning our own bodies, as well as past moving past the
torture and killing of animals to satisfy our cravings for flesh.
I find abhorrent the wanton murder of billions of sentient non-human animals
every year by human animals; humans represent only one category of animal,
and we have determined that the highest and best use for our highly
developed intellectual prowess involves savagery, savagery against the
planet's other beautiful creatures, brutalizing and slaughtering them
without remorse; savagery against our planet, raping the forests and
poisoning our water and air, all to support breeding even more helpless
animals to torture and kill; and finally, savagery against our own bodies
and the bodies of our children, ourselves eating and likewise feeding to
them gore on a fork, decaying dead flesh which will ultimately ravage our
bodies and theirs with disease.
Some claim themselves as the head of the food chain and have no compassion
for the suffering of God's creatures--even so, they should be able to
recognize the dark enormity of what their meat consumption supports: meat
consumption not only leads to starvation deaths in many parts of the world,
not only leads to the pillaging and death of our environment, but it also
leads to diseases such as colon cancer, atherosclerosis (clogged
arteries), diabetes, hypertension, obesity, to name a few. I know this to be
true--I have numerous dead and dying relatives to prove it.
Some people argue that they have a personal choice to eat meat; certainly,
one may have the "personal choice" to destroy their own bodies and their own
health, but they do NOT have the "personal choice" to participate in the
starvation of other humans and the destruction of our earth, our water, and
our air which belongs not to them alone, but to all of us, human and
non-human.
I agree with Matthew Scully, author of "Dominion," when he says, "How we
treat our fellow creatures is only one more way in which each of us, every
day, writes our own epitaph—bearing into the world a message of light and
life or just more darkness and death, adding to its joy or its despair."
By Rachel Lee Allen.
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the Editor: Linda Beane Ljbeane1@aol.com
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