Party Vibe

@thelog 528554 wrote:

I’m sitting here hoping that UK slaughter houses are better than the US but somehow I doubt it.

they are marginally better but only because we have more regulation and government agencies watching over them. Even so the extra cost of dealing with this and spiralling consumer demand for meat is why we have all ended up eating horse recently (TBH that might even be kinder as a horse usually is treated as a fairly valuable animal and well cared for)

Unfortunately you need a tolerant, equal society for humans before the societies even think about looking after animals. Neither USA nor China has reached the level of tolerance and equality of Northern Europe, in spite of both countries being very prosperous and full of resources. Even Southern Europe, due to anger, inequality and poverty has slipped badly.

in USA and China (and a fair few other countries) folk are competing so hard for resources they will and do often torture and kill one another, their societies are both horribly divided between rich and poor, to the point where only soldiers and guns stop both of these nations going up in flames from civil war.

Though Northern Europe isn’t perfect, our public healthcare and relatively good treatment of middle aged and elderly people means that these older people whose kids are usually grown up (or they may not even have had any) do a lot of good work looking after stray pet animals. Also many who did work on farms now realise that cruel practices caused by greedy factory farming is wrong and they want to stop them, plus they are old enough to remember that food cost a lot more but people didn’t starve as they were prepared to forego other luxuries (such as not having 24/7 television etc).

Also the bulk of them who have worked hard have been rewarded by a middle class lifestyle with free time to get involved in community work. In many other countries these important older people (if they live to that age at all) are too busy trying to survive to have time to think about stuff like environmental activism (or are still having to support kids and grandkids) I have noticed that on all the eco-groups which are actually achieving anything (rather than just protesting and trying to disrupt another business) that the main participants are now in their 50s and above)

@thelog 528575 wrote:

The savage castrations were pretty awful too, but watching those baby chicks beingt fed into that meat grinder was just enough to make me want to punch someone.

this practice is rarer in the UK than other countries but only because of surveillance from animal rights activists, and the meat industry is getting better at stopping covert infiltration and/or turning the surveillance back on people who try it (they can still do it but if they do something like go to a rave or take drugs will be stalked and grassed up). Though at least here same as the horsemeat scandal the companies know that if found out they will lose a lot of business. In other nations folk simply do not care enough.

I eat meat and enjoy it, but I’ve always found it slightly disconcerting that many livestock farmers and butchers actually do distinctly resemble the livestock they are processing. And in the region I live I do encounter a fair few.

I also genuinely think that if there was a real shortage of meat in some parts of East Anglia, folk who strayed too far into unfamiliar areas (especially vulnerable young females) would soon go missing even quicker than they did in 2006, and yet there would not be many bodies found for a good few years. Already happened with a pig farmer in Canada a few years back. 20+ girls, some of them went into the mincer along with normal pigmeat and RCMP have no idea how much was resold back into the food chain. Be glad we in Europe have just been eating horse..

a young vegetarian girl I know actually said she would not want to be stranded on an island when everyone else were carnivores as she would fear for her own safety and TBH I can fully understand why she feels that way.

Even the butcher round our way who is a decent chap (he deals with all the pigs from the pig club) looks distinctly porcine.

And I saw on the film of the meat my friend who for two whole years I had thought was a veggie (as he is into every sort of hippy new age thing you can imagine) holding up a pork joint and grinning like a lolcat.