Sunday, May 12, 2013

Humane - what humane

When I first started about changing up my diet after reading a few things here and there.. I gave up meat and then I went about trying to find more "humane" options.. cage free eggs. Milk from Pasture fed and happier cows.
Then after finding out more and more about those farms and reading stories on vegan food blogs, I decided to replace each of the products which used animal ingredients one by one..

Whenever I read a detailed post, the questions that would come to my mind were "what the heck.. Why are these people doing all this." and not questions like " Where will I get my protein and nutrition" or " Omg I love cheese, I have to give it up?" Or "surely this is all made up information by hippies and I cant care about each and every extreme post out there"(Real questions by people in discussions).  

I just knew that I couldnt cause that much pain and suffering and there would be ways to either substitute some or just change up my taste buds.. It took a while to sub out everything especially the milk in our tea, mainly because I was not cooking breakfast for a long while. Once my health improved enough to take that over, milk was out the door. 

As for "Humane". to this day I dont understand the meaning of the term. By definition it means having or showing compassion and inflicting the minimum of pain.

Who decides how much compassion and how much pain?

Are cage free eggs "Humane" because the hens have some space to move around, even if their beaks are cut off so they dont peck at each other?

Are low calf cull rate dairy farms "humane", because the cows are not impregnated every few months and their calfs not killed(they all grow up and end up in the beef industry instead).

If there any such thing is "humane" slaughter. How about humane murder.. the notion of "humane slaughter" is at odds with the physiological reality of concussing, electrocuting, slashing open the veins of, and/or violently decapitating an animal, the idea that one can be "humane" while killing for profit is self-contradictory.

I just dont get the usage of the word humane. It seems like a band-aid term to band-aid our conscience and continue eating whatever we want to. 

Read more from a farmer's perspective here
http://www.humanemyth.org/haroldbrown.htm

and more here
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sue-cross/humane-slaughter-a-contra_b_2220480.html