EXPAND FEDERAL AND STATE ANIMAL WELFARE LAWS

75% of people would like to see government intervention in CAFOs.

Reading talking about how laws can be applied into improving foods and condition of animals. Animals that are raised under good conditions are healthier than the ones raised in cruelty.

Talks about the EU methods and how they banned or are still trying to phase out cruelty.

Goes on to note that citizen provisions to the laws should be added more enforcement power to the laws.

Minimum federal humane farming legislation that acts as floor and not a ceiling.. Meaning that the laws should act as a foundation and not something that can be ignored by choice.

State anti-cruelty legislation that quickly phases out the cruelest farming practices.

SEE CAMILE'S BLOG FOR ADDITIONAL INFO

Bibliography

"The Real Crooks." America. 22 September, 2008: 199, 1-3
  
        When Homeland Security agents raided a slaughterhouse run by Agriprocessors Inc. in Iowa last May, authorities arrested 389 suspected illegal immigrants. The dramatic raid included hundreds of agents, and over 300 detainees were held for hours in a cattle exhibition hall before being charged. Worker’s rights advocates also pointed out that while arrests of undocumented workers in the United States have risen 1,000 percent in the past six years, to almost 5,000, few company owners have been arrested for hiring undocumented workers.

       Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest producer of kosher beef, was in the news again recently. Employees at a small Agriprocessors plant in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been trying for three years to unionize, with Agriprocessors fighting them every step of the way, claiming that because the employees were illegal immigrants, the company was not obligated to recognize them as workers under the National Labor Relations Act. Agriprocessors has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit a 1984 decision that recognized the right of illegal immigrants to join unions by declaring that such workers “plainly come within the broad statutory definition of ‘employee’.”
          Proof of turnover rate in Slaughterhouses and how the corporations view the immigrants.


Greenhouse, Steven. "Immigrant Crackdown Upends A Slaughterhouse's Work Force." New York Times [New York, N.Y] 12 Oct 2007: A.1. 
           
            Employee turnover has long been a problem at Smithfield and other meat-processing plants, but the problem has grown worse recently. Dennis Pittman, a Smithfield spokesman, said 60 percent of the new workers quit within 90 days of being hired, compared with 25 percent to 30 percent two years ago when many new employees were illegal immigrants.
        
           The Tar Heel workers voted against unionizing in 1994 and 1997, but the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Smithfield had broken the law by intimidating and firing union supporters.

Kadeshia, Javed, and Chris

Kadeshia

words are happiness and manipulation.  Everybody wants to be happy so the companies manipulate the truth of the words. Programmed in us for a young age for,  young age  things are impressionable. Easily intrigued. Ex McDonalds a happy child makes a happy mother. “

Benefit:  profit over punishment! Connection to worker

Workers prefer to do whatever it takes to make profit. If the coop makes profit they make profit- paycheck! Coops do whatever it takes to eliminate competition for profit.  Eating Animals – factory farming eliminates competition by eliminating its main resources. A company needs it resources and if they don’t have it companies would deteriorate.   Punishment is less than they would make without the fine: violations) make ten times more than fine no matter punishment. Customers would rather be happy and forget environment. Customers made to think that their happiness matters more than the environment.

Chris! Section here!

Organized chaos; cafo looks organized but destroy everything around them; humans people who consume products. Basically they try to make and destroy it at the same time; (rapidly) can relate to holocaust, wars, and genocides and apocalypse for the animals and the environment.pg 12 Organized in a way that they are being FUELED by our own tax payer’s money without us even knowing. We are inadvertently destroying our environment, degrading people, materializing animals; making them seem disposable. In addition, we are advocating this with our own money.

A correlation between the increase of violence towards humans and the connection to cruelty towards animals.PG4

Javed Najhafeez

Pages 131 the first two paragraphs and page 135 the first three paragraphs.

The first page gives a untrue statement about a cow the age of 17. However in reality and modern day LIFE PRODUCTION of animals, no cow lives to see the age of 17, not even half the age, especially the DAIRY COWS. The main purpose of these cows are for the production of milk, and as a result suffer the worst when being killed. While the second portion of the reading connect to this by explaining the GENETIC MANIPULATION aspect of production. The reading explains some key terms that are very important. The connection between these two passages is that the constant feeding of GENETICALLY MANIULATED foods to the animals being grown at these factories causes the life of an animal to be manipulated and altered aswell. Cows are no longer HEALTHY, in any way because they are constantly being fed CONCENTRATED also known as HIGH ENERGY FEEDS. These include foods for the animals such as cows, that are unfit for the cows stomache.

Blog 5: The CAFO System

Genocide, this term is used to describe the extermination of a race or the absolute control of it. In present day genocide is normally related to a war in a foreign land, from the Holocaust to the Darfar genocide, but what if genocide was closer to home than we thought. The CAFO system's view of life is nothing more than disposable, from the animals that have antibiotics showered on them to the people who eat the left over of the antibiotics in the meat. This system is a modern day replica of the Holocaust in the sense that the animals in these systems are mercilessly abused and killed.

Blog 4: From Farm to Fridge

This video is very disturbing and very graphic. I would say as a former carnivore I am taken aback about the routines and procedures in which these animals go through. The video 'From Farm to Fridge' begins with quick flashes of scenes that foreshadow the basis of the film. The films narrator guides the viewer through various different displays of slaughters that involve chickens,turkeys,pigs/piglets, and cows. The video displayed turkey getting their heads stomp in and another one getting its neck snapped, it was still flapping around. The next was about chickens, how they're confined into battery cages to lay eggs and how they are aggressively handled, hung upside down, electrocuted and then have their necks cut by machine. To add on the previous it was visible that some of the chickens were still conscious. The pigs are confined to pens that are no bigger than themselves and at times die from giving birth because of complications. Piglets from birth are castrated and have their tails cut off or "docked". The runts of the litters are literally banged head first on the floor they call this process 'Thumping'. If the piglets are still alive they just do it again. With the cows the narrator goes on to explain that they are mutilated and the video goes as far as to showing a cow getting its tail forcefully cut. All these procedures were done without the use of anesthetics the narrator describes and shows in the video. I found this video extremely disturbing, just thinking about it makes my stomach curl. Knowing that these grotesque things take place in the making of foods shines a new light on the situation.
         This video, I believe, goes hand and hand with the video project my group is conducting. We want to find out if the food carts on the streets acquire their foods from factory farms. I believe if more people were aware of what occurs in factory farms in the visual aspect, instead of the literary, they would be more cautious about their choices and start looking for more humane sources of foods. If students are more aware of the foods they take in then I believe students would be more aware of their choices.

Blog 3: The End of Overeating

In present day America the obesity rate is rising every year, it has been in a steady increase for the past forty years or so. America has earned the label 'fattest' country on the planet for this steady rise. In the book 'The End of Overeating' by David A. Kessler, MD, he goes into detail about why Americans are gaining so much weight, other than the obvious overeating. Kessler goes in depth in how the brain functions when certain foods are consumed, how psychologically connected food is with our mental functions, and as well as describing different experiments where the outcomes were valid evidences of what people and animals prefer, which are fats and sugar. Kessler provides the evidence of a study in which the reinforcing attributes of fat and sugar were tested on rats, the person who conducted these experiments was a scientist by the name of Sara Ward. In an experiment Ward demonstrated how much a rat would work for a reward by giving it a task, and it was usually a repetitive task. She was later asked,"The breaking point at which the animals will no longer work for the reward, she told me, is slightly lower than the breaking point for cocaine (Kessler, Chap.6, page.31)." This right here means that sugar and fat can be as addictive as drugs. I believe that this passage is extremely important because it does not only make a connection between food being as addictive as drugs, but it also points out that since children are exposed to all these addictive foods and such a young age it is obvious to why obesity is rising. Obesity in America is rising because we're allowing children access their own drugs, drugs that make they're health unstable, drugs that make them most likely addictive for life, and those drugs are candy, fast food, soda, anything that is loaded with sugar, loaded with fat, or even loaded with both.

Blog Two

The turnover rates in the fast food industry is about 300 to 400 percent. This is described in Fast Food Nation on pg. 73. It's Ironic how a company that fires so many employees demands as many in return. It's very interesting to know that the fast food industry has some of the highest homicide and robberies, and yet there are no reports on the crimes and barely any evidence shown in the news unless its in a small community. "In 1998, more restaurant workers were murdered on the job... than police officers (Fast Food Nation, 83) ." How is it that these statistics aren't being given to the public to aware us of the possible dangers of this line of work? When you enlist for the military, becoming a doctor, flying a plane, or even becoming a cop you're told of the risks and dangers of your work field. So why are future employees unaware of the potential risks that their jobs may contain?