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This is a machine.
At least, that's the view of a typical Korea farmer, according to this article: http://blog.ohmynews.com/vjmars/142348.
When interviewed by the reporter of the article, the farmer who owned the pig farm called this female pig a "machine."
What pigs do out of frustration and boredom, when confined to gestation crates with barely room to move, is obsessively chew on iron railings. That's what you see here--an intelligent animal under stress and chewing on the iron that imprisons her. Sows can spend most of their lives in this kind of confinement, day in day out.
The sad eyes of this pig look out from another tiny enclosure, as it stands on a hard and filthy concrete floor. It has never known anything natural. The railing here bears the worn signs of chewing, too. Pigs have to endure these conditions their whole miserable lives and yet they are as intelligent, if not more intelligent than dogs.
The Ohmy News article on this farm is not focusing on the abuse of animals or inhumane treatment by farmers. But what it illustrates in completely ignoring these issues is the typical attitude of farmers in Korea. Worse still, it gives us an insight into a kind of industry standard, something that has wide acceptance without questioning.
Pigs noses are very sensitive and not desgned for concrete floors.
We cannot blame the farmer entirely for his ignorance. He's a follower and knows no better. What is truly at fault here is something larger--the cruelty of industrial factory farming that has become a norm and the meat eating that supports it.
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Facts on Animal Issues Menu
Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reaching
consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is
ethical; that it logically involved a re-adjustment of altruistic morals
by enlarging as a necessity of rightness the application of what has
been called “The Golden Rule” beyond the area of mere mankind to
that of the whole animal kingdom. Thomas Hardy
They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston
The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?
Jeremy Bentham
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
Henry David Thoreau
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Frederick Douglass
I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It's like...you're just eating misery. You're eating a bitter life.
Alice Walker
As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.
Pythagoras
Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals.
Theodor Adorno
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
William Ralph Inge
In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.
Peter Singer
A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.
Leo Tolstoy
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Mahatma Gandhi
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
Thomas Edison
Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.
George Bernard Shaw
The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
Charles Darwin
I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
Albert Einstein
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