The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

170 / the world peace diet
on slaughterhouses, factory farms, and fishing operations well hidden,
lobbying for laws to make it a crime for anyone to take pictures or video
footage of the conditions in these places. Seeing the ugly truth behind
the curtain helps to rid us of the illusion that our culture is based on
kindness or caring. We see clearly the hidden dark side of our society,
the vicious and unrelenting cruelty that permeates the foundations of
our culture, and we begin to understand. It is our ongoing refusal to
look behind the curtain that keeps the cultural chains and illusions firmly
in place.
To meet the enormous demand for animal flesh, the huge transnational
corporations that now dominate the meat, dairy, and egg industries,
like Cargill, ConAgra, Tyson, Perdue, Swift, and Smithfield, construct
ever larger animal prisons and slaughterhouses. At the slaughterhouses,
some of which run twenty-four hours a day, living animals are
forced into a line and disassembled, and the various parts of their bodies
come out at the other end, all shipped for profit to a diversity of destinations:
flesh and organs for human food; skin for clothing, jewelry,
furniture, and accessories; blood for fertilizer; bones and connective tissue
for beauty creams, soaps, glue, and gelatin; some organs for the
pharmaceutical industry; offal and scraps for the renderer to be cooked
and made into livestock feed, pet food, and other products. The faster
the disassembly lines run, the more profit is made in a given time.
Workers are constantly pushed to work much more rapidly than they
should, and this causes improper stunning of the animals and increased
cruelty and danger because many animals are skinned, scalded, and disemboweled
while still conscious and struggling.
Most people do not realize that, as discussed earlier, the animals are
not actually killed before their throats are cut. Their hearts must be
pumping when the large arteries in their necks are cut, so that the blood
is actively pumped out of their bodies; otherwise the flesh is soggy with
too much blood. Therefore, they are simply stunned, not killed, prior to
being bled. If they are properly stunned, the animals bleed to death.
How long does it take to bleed to death? From twenty seconds to several
minutes, which could feel like an awfully long time, especially if an
animal is not properly stunned, which occurs all too often.