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

The Dilemma of Work / 173
mals who arrive frozen to the sides of the livestock trucks, and hanging
conscious and panicked animals on the line to endure being skinned and
boiled alive. Since it’s very conservatively estimated that at least five to
ten percent of the land animals slaughtered are not stunned properly, a
staggering 500 million to one billion mammals and birds per year are
skinned, dismembered, or boiled while still conscious—in the United
States alone. 13 This is a terrible load for workers to bear emotionally, on
top of the already grisly work they do. It’s a load not just for the workers,
however. We are all responsible. (In fact, in courts of law, the one
who wills the death of another and pays an assassin is more heavily
accountable than the assassin.)
Of course, it’s not just at slaughter plants that animals suffer at our
hands. The workers on the factory farms where animals are imprisoned
for their eggs, flesh, and milk enforce an almost unbelievably cruel system.
In fact, if we took our most celebrated scientists and asked them to
devise a system, simply as a scientific experiment, that maximized terror,
pain, cruelty, and misery, it seems they would be hard pressed to
devise anything more effective than the one that has evolved through
corporate domination of the lucrative business of supplying the body
parts of hapless animals to millions of people who have been indoctrinated
to eat them.
On factory farms, workers have to imprison animals in unimaginably
toxic and restrictive environments, and mutilate them as well, without
anesthesia. The Animal Welfare Act, which protects dogs, cats,
parakeets, and other animals from abuse by humans, specifically omits
all animals who are raised for food from its provisions. Any practice, no
matter how cruel, that is considered standard in the industry is allowed,
so chopping off the beaks and bills of chickens and ducks, for example,
or starving chickens to force a molt, or mutilating, shocking, confining,
and crowding animals is permitted by the government because these
have become accepted industry practices. Baby pigs scream loudly with
the torment of having their ears “notched” for identification, patterns
of flesh cut away, and their tails “docked” (cut off) and teeth painfully
clipped, so that under the stress of overcrowding they cannot bite each
other’s tails or damage each other. It is also common practice to break