“The earth is 4.6 billion years old. Lets scale that to 46 years. We have been here 4 hours. Our Industrial Revolution began one minute ago. In that time (that would be one minute mind you) we have destroyed 50% of the worlds forests”.
Posted by Awakened Mind from Facebook.
I really don’t intend for any shaming purposes here to be a Debbie-Downer. In writing for this group and in my broader life in general I think it very counter-productive to attempt to get people to greatly reduce or give up entirely on animal product by casting moral shade in any form. I do believe all the evidence though that indicates if one is concerned about climate change there is nothing you can do that has more impact on a personal level than giving up the eating of animals.
Part of the reason I try not to be an obnoxious asshole in this area is based on my own background. I was raised on a Midwestern farm and helped raise countless animals for slaughter. I put strangulation bands of lambs tails, castrated pigs and killed chickens with the best of them. I watched with morbid curiosity dairy cows being artificially impregnated by the local vet, a process that gives a whole new meaning to fisting and in this case without consent.
Awareness is slowly increasing particularly about the horrible cruelty of factory farming and some animal product consumption is slowly decreasing especially with dairy products. This is why the dairy industry has their panties all in a wad because the word milk is tied to rice, almond and soy beverages and is suing the makers of these non-dairy products to stop them from using the word “milk”. Hopefully the 1st amendment will prevail here but nothing is certain with the current political climate and a President who seriously binges almost daily on cheeseburgers with the occasional KFC thrown in.
The evidence is slowly building that eating meat in particular, and especially at U.S levels is harmful in many ways to our health. I have provided a link here to a short piece from the John Hopkins School of Bloomberg Public Health on the dangers of being carnivorous. We in this country manage to eat three times the world average of meat.
With a significant amount of the western U.S. on fire, large parts of the east coast flooding, sea levels rising and being well on our way to the hottest year ever recorded world-wide it really is now or never around climate change. I do fear though that our human hubris will prevail and we will go the way of the dinosaurs though it may take a few more years than it did for them to totally vanish. Banning plastic straws is certainly a good idea but really folks we need to go much further.
I’d like to close though with a bit of encouragement on the power of individual change acknowledging that it might all be too little to late but still the same worth the effort I think. I happened on a piece at the web site Salon.com featuring an article by Matthew Rozsa and how his recently meeting a pig named Esther at the Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary in Canada had made him reconsider eating meat.
Esther the piglet was initially rescued by Derek and his life partner Steve in 2012 thinking she was miniature pig. Turns out she was not and now weighs 650 lbs. and is an Internet star of some renown. In 2014 Steve and Derek founded their farm sanctuary with the mission to inspire kindness and compassion for farm animals everywhere.
Even if you do not share my concern that we are at the point of now or never when it comes to climate change do visit the Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary web site link provided here: https://www.happilyeveresther.ca
And maybe the next time ham, bacon or pork chops happen on to your plate the disconnect between the slab of animal flesh and the real previously alive animal will be broken down just a bit.