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

174 / the world peace diet
the pigs’ noses, according to the logic that this makes overcrowded
boars less likely to fight! Calves endure the agony of being branded with
hot irons and of having their young horns either cut off, which often
causes profuse bleeding, or burned off with acid or hot irons. Sheep
undergo the excruciating process of mulesing—having the flesh around
their rumps cut away to reduce fly infestation—and the shearing itself is
often a brutal process, resulting in painful cuts and rough handling that
sometimes kills the sheep. They are, of course, sent to slaughter anyway
when their wool production declines. Young male sheep, pigs, and cows
are virtually always castrated as well, and anesthesia is never used as
they are cut and their testicles ripped out.
Geese and ducks are debilled as chickens are debeaked, and are forcefed
to produce foie gras, an expensive delicacy that is the product of an
unnaturally enlarged and traumatized liver. It is often called the cruelest
food in the world, and for this reason its production has been outlawed
in South Africa, Israel, and seven European countries. 14 The bird’s liver is
forcibly enlarged by inserting a metal pipe down the throat and pressuredriving
much larger quantities of corn into his or her stomach than it can
manage. This often causes “blowout” or rupture of the animal’s internal
organs. When the duck or goose’s liver is inflated to ten times its natural
size, he or she is killed so the diseased liver can be eaten.
It is hard for us to imagine the trauma factory farm workers inflict,
and on an enormous scale, with billions of creatures involved. Most of
us have had the experience of receiving pain at the hands of doctors or
dentists, yet the hands that administer the pain are, we feel, ultimately
well-intentioned. The fact that they are doing these painful things for
our own good makes the infliction of pain tolerable and gives it a meaningful
context. To imagine those same hands performing painful procedures
on our bodies with the sense that these hands do not care at all
about our good, but are causing us pain simply because it profits them
or they enjoy doing so, is horrifying in the extreme, particularly if we
are powerless in their hands. When we put animals in this position by
purchasing their flesh, fluids and eggs, we must bear responsibility not
only for their suffering but for the hardening of the human hands and
hearts that inflict this suffering.