01/31/19 All Consumed Meat is Disease-Ridden
Animal Friends react to the case of sick cows being slaughtered in Poland
- All farm animals are born and live in disease-ridden conditions, whilst the slaughter of downer cows is routine
Animal Friends Croatia pointed out the absurdity of reporting on the case of diseased cows from Polish slaughterhouses, whereby consumers are being reassured that the disease-ridden meat has not ended up in Croatia, that people do not have to worry and can continue eating meat available on our market carelessly, because it is "safe" and "health approved". At the same time, media outlets warn that the photos and the footage of sick cows that workers drag around the slaughterhouse are "disturbing" and that consumers are viewing them "at their own liability". How is it possible for human beings to look at the suffering of animals only from the perspective of benefitting off their dead flesh for human needs? Isn't that most "disturbing" and ethically defeating to the human race and isn't it precisely what we should, both as individuals and as a species, bear the greatest responsibility for?
Luka Oman, Animal Friends president, warns us: "Currently, farms worldwide annually raise and then kill more than 60 billion animals in slaughterhouses. It is impossible to ensure the health of such an enormous number of animals. They survive horrific conditions of intensive farming until the time of slaughter only because of the mass use of antibiotics in the industrial production. The industry only cares about the profit, soeverything will be done to maximize the use of animals and to bring them to the slaughterhouse alive at any cost, because that is the only way they will beuseful. Does anyone really think that sick animals are a rarity in the industry and that such animals do not end up in slaughterhouses? Any farmed meat, and all of it is farmed, is sick."
"What is also sick is human indifference to the suffering that all farmed animals endure", Oman points out, inviting us to ask ourselves why it is normal for us to separate calves from their mothers to drink their milk, and to draw as much as up to 50l of milk daily from those mothers; why it is normal that cows do not graze grass, but rather eat fish and other animals and, at best, grains and soybeans; why it does not disturb us that they usually see the light of day only when leaving for the slaughterhouse, overcrowded in transportation trucks.
He adds that it is devastating that most people fall under the influence of the system which treats living beings as walking steaks and presents something like that as normal and healthy. What is concerning in the case from Poland is human apathy to the suffering and pain of living beings, as well as to the injustice happening daily to those with whom we need to share this planet, rather than turning them into biological machines, which is what we are doing.
The video footage shows a living being who feels pain just as we do. This living being is dragged away to slaughter, even though they haven't done anything wrong and their meat is not a necessity. Animal Friends say that if scenes from Poland showed dogs instead of cows, perhaps we would start also worrying about the animals, not just their meat. That is exactly why they are reminding us that, nothing healthy and humane can come out of this unnatural human attitude towards animals. They wonder whether consumers are really new to seeing the collapsed sick cows, which is a common occurrence in the milk and meat industry, or to claim they don't know what the suffering-filled concentration camps called farms, the transportation trucks and slaughterhouses look like. It's really just a collective self-denial that meat not filled with disease even exists.
Animal Friends invite everyone to watch the short film "Croatia's Invisible Animals", "Earthlings" and others on Animal Friends' YouTube channel, which show routine treatment of animals on meat, milk and egg production farms. They are also inviting us to ask ourselves why birds lay eggs, why mammals produce milk and in which kind of sick ways do we exploit the biological processes of other animals' mothers, when we also have mothers of our own.
They are telling us to take another look at the footage from Poland and pay attention to the living being, not the meat. While investigating the case in Poland, we should start with ourselves and our eating habits, which are the cause of all sickness that farmed animals experience and which returns to us like a boomerang. More information can be found here.