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Gimme Some Truth

Someone asked me recently whether Thanksgiving will be “hard” for me, considering “all the turkeys that are killed”.

I replied that Thanksgiving is no “harder” than or different from any other day as billions of innocent non-human lives are brutally taken every year (six million per hour each day in the US alone) for no more substantial reason than the satisfaction of personal pleasure.

When people advocate for animal welfare (bigger cages, better treatment, more “humane” slaughter, whatever that is) rather than educating the public unequivocally about why veganism is the absolute least we can do for non-human sentient beings, this is what we get: ever-increasing numbers of dead animals sold for human consumption under the banner of all sorts of misleading, feel-good marketing terms that amount to nothing more than ways for consumers to continue being complicit in unspeakable atrocities they would likely find completely unacceptable were they simply told the truth.

And for those non-vegans who are bothered by the notion of animal “cruelty“, such euphemistic labeling allows them to continue consuming animals while under the comforting yet erroneous belief that they are discharging their moral responsibility toward non-human individuals by only choosing the ones who weren’t overtly brutalized before being butchered.

This is why I define marketing as “lies designed to separate people from their money and their morals“.

I submit the following from the above photo of packaged animal parts for your consideration:

“Grateful Harvest” – the decapitated, de-feathered, disemboweled remains of an exploited individual is nothing for anyone to be grateful about.  This is not a harvest – it is a life cut short for no justifiable reason, as is the life of any sentient individual taken for palate pleasure or other selfish human conveniences.

“Organic” – seriously, who cares?  Dead is dead, and decomposition of flesh begins immediately upon death.  Does it really matter if the corpse one is putting in one’s mouth is “organic”?

“Raised without antibiotics… added hormones or steroids” – what’s not mentioned here is “killed with a sharp knife across the throat while struggling for her life after having endured unimaginable torment and misery from birth to blade” which, while accurate, would probably be frowned upon from a marketing perspective.  The truth usually is.

“Fed no animal by-product” – well that’s a relief, ‘cos no one wants to eat an animal who’s eaten an animal… right?  It’s always ironic that so many humans, who as a species are biologically and physiologically herbivores, choose mostly to consume members of other herbivorous species in a misguided effort to meet their nutritional needs by eating animals who we feed plants… rather than just eating the plants directly and leaving the animals to live their lives autonomously and free from exploitation and premature death.  A whole foods, plants-only diet is a win-win for everyone – we get our nutrients directly from the source with optimum bioavailability (as they’re not filtered through another animal’s digestive system, which is like asking someone to eat and digest your food for you and then killing and eating them so you can eat and digest the food you asked them to eat and digest for you.  Does that make any sense at all?  If you answered “no”, then ask yourself why, if you consume animals, you’re doing exactly that) and no individual is condemned to death and dismemberment to become someone else’s food.

“No preservatives” – again, who cares?  This is a corpse; it’s only slightly removed from roadkill.  I would think that eating rotting flesh ought to be considered far less appetizing than consuming “preservatives”.

“Free-range” – if whatever passes for that “range” (usually a giant warehouse crammed wall-to-wall with thousands of turkeys awaiting execution – just Google “free range facility” to put that myth to rest) was truly free, this turkey and his/her relatives would still be intact, alive and enjoying their freedom.

Bottom line – no matter how much one polishes a turd, it’s still gonna stink like shit.  In this age of readily-available information, there is no excuse for believing this kind of shit.  To paraphrase a line from Steve Martin’s brilliant L.A. Story, one of my favorite films:

Free your mind and your body will follow.

This Thanksgiving – and every day – please stop pretending there’s nothing morally repugnant about having an autopsy on your dinner table… and ask yourself whether you’d so willingly accept that if the victim on the plate were human instead of non-human.