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101 Reasons Why I'm A Vegetarian
contd.
16. So called "redskins" are those chickens
which, on the conveyer belt to their deaths, missed not only the brine-filled electrified stunning trough, but the knife that was to cut their throats. Their deaths occurred in the scald tank where feathers are loosened before plucking. Piles of them are thrown
aside every day. 17. Chicken feed today is routinely laced with
hormones and antibiotics. Only by maintaining the birds on drugs, a practice which began about mid-century, is agribusiness allowed the luxury and efficiency of massive flocks and intensive confinement. Today's medicated feed also pumps out market weight birds in half the time
from two-thirds the feed of 50 years ago. 18. Meat-centered diets are linked to many kinds
of cancer, most notably cancer of the colon, breast, cervix, uterus, ovary, prostate, and
lung. 19. Livestock in the U.S. produce 20 times the
excrement of the entire U.S.population. Since farm animals today spend much or all of their in factory sheds or feedlots, their waste no longer serves to fertilize pastures a little at a time. Eighty-two tons of waste per week is produced in a hen house of 60,000 birds; it will be carted away by the truckload. The livestock operator may properly store, disperse or degrade animal waste. Or he may simply flush it away, dangerously raising ammonia and nitrate levels in our drinking water. Becoming a vegetarian does more to clean up our nation's water than any other
single action. 20. The human intestine is not designed to digest
meat. Where a natural carnivore's bowel is relatively short (3 times the length of its body) and smooth inside, a human's bowel is 12 times the length of the body and deeply twisted and puckered. Having no fiber of its
own, meat quite arduously inches itself through the long convoluted human digestive tract. Before it gets to the end it has become
putrid and toxic to the body. 21. In the words of John Robbins, author of Diet
for a New America, a dairy cow living in today's modern milk factory "is bred, fed, medicated, inseminated and manipulated to a single purpose-maximum milk production at minimum cost." She lives with an unnaturally swelled up and sensitive udder, is kept inside a stall her entire life, is milked up to 3 times a day, and is kept pregnant nearly all of the time with her young taken from her almost immediately after birth. "Contented" is the characteristic most often attributed to the cow. However, cows in factories are fed tranquilizers to calm their
frazzled nerves. 22. Calorie for calorie, spinach has 14 times the
iron of sirloin steak. Iron requires vitamin C for absorption, of which animal products are
totally deficient. 23. Male cattle in the beef industry are castrated
to make them more docile. Castration also promotes a fattier (more profitable) animal. Castration can be done radically, all at once, or over a longer period of time with a ring, causing the testicles to eventually fall away.
Anesthetics are rarely used. 24. The typical egg factory may hold 80,000
hens per warehouse. It is not unusual in the factory farm for 4 or 5 layer hens to be squeezed into a 12" x 18" cage. It is standard procedure for poultry producers to de-beak their chicks with hot-knife machines. Debeaking prevents most of the harm from the crazed pecking the birds will inflict upon one another in response to their intense
confinement. 25. The National Cancer Research Institute
found that women who eat meat on a daily basis are almost 4 times more likely to get
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