Posted on 08/09/2015 11:05:54 AM PDT by Kaslin
If you like eating meat, information is not always your friend. In recent years, practices at large facilities that turn livestock into food have been exposed to public view, and the public often doesn't like what it sees.
The companies that confine pregnant sows in tiny stalls or scald chickens to death don't publicize these practices. Slaughterhouses where cattle are sometimes dismembered alive don't offer guided tours.
To see what goes on in the worst operations, most of us have to rely on activists who covertly record inside and put videos online. Organizations like the Humane Society of the United States, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Mercy for Animals have posted such footage.
When such grim revelations emerged, the owners of these operations had two choices: stop doing things that would shock consumers, or stop consumers from seeing them. Many suppliers did the former, sometimes under prodding from major grocery and restaurant chains. But some decided that concealment was preferable.
Their own efforts to keep out prying eyes, however, don't always suffice. So they have enlisted the power of government on their side. Seven states have passed "ag gag" laws aimed at preventing whistleblowers from exposing farm abuses.
Idaho, for example, made it a crime for anyone to do audio or video recording inside a facility without the owner's consent. This was necessary, the bill's sponsor explained, because "extremist groups implement vigilante tactics to deploy self-appointed investigators who masquerade as employees to infiltrate farms in the hope of discovering and recording what they believe to be animal abuse." Another likened these videos to "terrorism."
Vigilantes and terrorists, it should be noted, employ violent methods, including gratuitous brutality, to achieve ends they regard as important enough to override civilized norms. In that respect, they don't resemble the people filming the abuse of animals. They resemble the people committing those abuses.
The law, however, does not apply just to activist outsiders who rely on subterfuge. It covers faithful longtime employees who feel obligated to disclose conduct they find unconscionable or even illegal.
The ban does more than shelter the public from images affecting the treatment of mere livestock. It suppresses knowledge about practices that could harm humans. It denies the citizenry truthful information about important matters.
It also gets priorities backward. If you commit an excruciating act of cruelty against an innocent beast, you will serve no more than six months in an Idaho jail. But if you film that crime, you could spend a year behind bars. You also could be forced to pay restitution up to double the amount of any "economic loss" the company incurs once consumers learn how callous it is.
But as of Monday, the law no longer applies to anyone, because a federal judge ruled it unconstitutional. In a decision that cast doubt on other state laws, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill said the Idaho ban violates the First Amendment because it "was designed to suppress speech critical of the agricultural industry."
The measure's supporters claimed to be protecting companies from dangerous impostors bent on destroying their businesses. Really? "It is already illegal to steal documents or to trespass on private property," said the judge. "In addition, laws against fraud and defamation already exist to protect against false statements made to injure or malign an agricultural production facility."
Devious infiltrators are hardly the only target. Winmill found that the law bans even filming that is "not disruptive of the workplace, and carried out by people who have a legal right to be in a particular location and to watch and listen to what is going on around them."
Chapman University constitutional law professor Ronald Rotunda says whistleblowers may not be forbidden to speak about such matters. All this law does is deprive the public of material that can substantiate what they claim.
Video footage can be exceptionally informative -- whether it documents Planned Parenthood officials talking about ethically questionable abortion methods, police confronting citizens, or Mitt Romney deriding the "47 percent" or Barack Obama's pastor preaching, "No, not God bless America. God damn America!" It's a threat only to those with something to hide.
There are facilities where animals are raised or slaughtered in humane conditions that would satisfy the vast majority of Americans. There are others whose routines are enough to make you lose your lunch. Laws like the one in Idaho are a great boon to anyone who would rather not know the difference.
Who gives a crap?
Until we stop the murder and part sale of human babies any moron who wastes time on something as relatively inconsequential deserves mockery, and nothing else.
And make no mistake, there is the only class of human being (other than the aforementioned morons) wasting time on this issue at this point are the twisted and evil.
I do. You either value life or don’t. Even the lives tat must be taken as food.
Agree with you.
Better to allow free speech than to have to rely on rumors.
Which of the three possible categories best describes you?
One notes from your posting history that while you round will comment on animals and sealing the border the execution of the unborn baby has never ever been a topic worthy of your commentary.
By your posting history especially the way your posting history dovetails with my comment and your our need to deny the validity of it, you are one of the three.
Your comment in post #2 has got to be one of the stupidest things I have ever seen anyone say on this forum.
The screams of tortured dying babies wipes out any concern for harsh treatment of mere animals.
Perhaps we should give the cows, chickens, and pigs soothing massages and hugs.
I’ve helped raise chickens before. They’re mean, disgusting animals whose only redeeming quality is that they’re freaking delicious.
Cows aren’t much better. They’re not actively mean, just stupidly docile. Thousands of years of domestication has bred out most of the violence in their survival instincts.
Pigs are the smartest and most disgusting of edible livestock, but... BACON.
Killing and preparing any of these types of livestock isn’t pretty. Anybody who expects it to be so lives in a Disney fantasy land where grocery stores are magically restocked with tasty-looking meat that comes from thin air and sparkles.
I value life. I oppose abortion. I have never had an abortion.
As an issue, I don’t believe it’s time has come or perhaps it should be fought in another realm. The realm of faith.
It’s been what over 40 years and this issue has gone no where. Even after
The most heinous crime of harvesting baby parts, the uniparty, CoC and Marxist media has done nothing. Heck, the Obama Do Jack is investigating the sting operation that brought this latest issue to light.
In my opinion we need to break the grip of the uniparty, CoC and media with the issue that propelled Trump.
Ultimately, abortion is up to the individuals who created the baby. They have free will. Their choice, their sin against God.
Isn’t there a Bible verse that states even a sparrow that falls from the sky is noticed by God?
I will fight the fight you are both too cowardly and too apathetic to fight.
My comment stands.
In three years on this forum this is the first time you have ever acknowledged that there is a problem with abortion.
Even with that acknowledgement you insist that abortion is a fight that you will not fight, but the treatment of food animals is one that you will.
How very 1930s German of you.
You are free to stand with your comments.
The rest of us will cut off the head of the snake that is the uniparty, CoC and Marxist media.
By whining about chickens and insisting that this is a more important issue to put time into than the slaughter of babies.
Yes, that will defeat the uniparty.
Their agenda hinges on chickens.
Cruelty is cruelty, no matter if the creature is an animal or a human, and makes the perpetrator a disgusting excuse for a human.
I was brought up with the belief that all living things are God’s creatures-I’m Catholic, I’m from a SW Texas ranch family, I live in the country. Small farmers and ranchers value stock animals, food or not and do not house or slaughter them in an inhumane manner-I buy my meat from a local butcher or pay to share a slaughtered animal with a neighbor-I know exactly where that animal came from, and that it wandered around someone’s property, eating grass, and hay, not grain laced with hormones and antibiotics.
The kind of extreme cruelty referred to in the article comes with large factory-style farming/ranching, not small family ranches where your stock is how you make a living, and the proper care of those animals directly affects your income...
By the way-nearly all the recent outbreaks of e-coli and other diseases contracted by eating veggies and fruit have originated on factory-style produce farms, not small operations-if it isn’t seen, it isn’t known-small wonder the dishonest don’t want the details seen...
They continue to bemoan the treatment of animals while murdering and dismembering human beings, to which they refer as ‘fetuses.’
I oppose secular humanist attempts to make animals “persons” and to grant them rights as such. I was on a liberal site recently discussing that with some liberals who support “animal rights”.
But I believe that the Bible shows us another side, too. It does speak of how we should regard and treat animals - though, in keeping that God does not regard animal life to be comparable to life “made in His own image,” any discussion of animals is given in the context of the worth of humans.
One verse like this is Proverbs 12:10:
“A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”
This is a revelation on how we are to treat animals, but it is given in the context of comparing the righteous person to the wicked. It actually does not speak directly or foremost about animals yet I believe in it that God is saying we’re to have regard for the lives of the animals in our care. That seems to be in keeping with all of His Word. Only people are made in His image, and God’s giving of His Son in order to offer salvation is for mankind only. Yet, Scripture shows that God has regard for the lives of animals, and we should too. The regard ends when their lives might be valued over the lives of human beings.
I believe God has regard for animal life in some way for its own sake. They are His creation, part of what He called “very good,” and He has given them all the qualities they have, including some awareness. Yet again, they were not created in His image, and another part of His regard for animals must be for our sake. God seems to have made them for us, and to have made them to have some qualities at least partly in common with us. We are to have dominion over them, and after the Fall of man they became food for us, but also, as Proverbs 12:10 says, we’re to have regard for their lives. That would mean not neglecting them when they’re in our care, and not needlessly inflicting pain and torment on them. While over-valuing them as secular humanists want us to do is a sin and leads to the devaluing of human life, so can under-valuing them as well. Inflicting cruelty on beings we know can feel pain says something about people who do that. I don’t read secular fiction now, but something I read years ago in J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” about animals has stayed with me. Salinger seemed to embrace some form of New Age, one-world religion, and in Franny and Zooey he talked a lot about Christ and Eastern religions. On animals, he had a character say that there was no true, but only an apparent, difference between animals and stones. That idea seemed to come from his interest in Eastern religions. I recall in recent years China was caught on tape treating dogs and cats brutally, so that their fur could be used as “fake fur” on apparel products sold to Western nations. Brutal treatment of animals, including animals used for food, can’t be good for us, especially spiritually. The people keeping the animals, including the people doing the actual physical mistreatment, are harmed spiritually, and so are we if we don’t care about the abuse they’re committing. Then you also have to wonder about the quality of the meat we’re getting. If animals experience a lot of stress, and stress has physiological effects on the body, what might that do to the meat? We really are what we eat. When pro fit is put over doing what’s right, how can God reward that?
I also believe that if we show an interest and concern for animals, and tell people that it is God’s will for us to have regard for the lives of our animals, as long as it doesn’t go too far, that will make sense to many people about God’s nature, and can be a way to turn their consideration to the lives of unborn children taken by abortion.
And at the beginning of your post was the crux of the matter.
Humanization of beasts...while not even being willing to speak out for murdered babies.
And outrage at those who point out that those created in the image of God are a far higher priority.
Enough is enough.
God’s people must not be silent while chickens are chosen over children.
Ever since God created both man and animals, and ever since He gave them to us for food, and to have them around us for us to tend, our treatment of them has been a concern. Remember, Jesus called Himself “the Good Shepherd,” and spoke of how He cares for and protects His sheep while a hireling doesn’t. If we didn’t understand taking good and adequate care of sheep from some sort of experience, and if God approved of cruelty towards them, then how could we possibly understand Jesus calling Himself the Good Shepherd? While secular humanists are off-base in their desire to elevate animals to human status, just as they are on murdering unborn children, they’re off-base on everything. They believe in secular humanism. So in their world-view, chickens are chose over children. Christians are not to oppose them by just being the opposite of what they are, but to offer our own world-view. We have to look to the Lord, for when life begins, but also, so far as we have responsibilities for the laws and the rules of the world, on something like the proper treatment of animals. Christians can, therefore, support laws making animal abuse a crime. People can do terrible things to their pets, for example, and in the light of God’s Word, I believe they should face criminal penalties for doing so, even if what they’re destroying is their own property. It’s one thing to destroy your own inanimate object, but another to destroy a beast for the purpose of making it suffer in the process.
Not relevant.
In any way shape or form.
Because I am not advocating animal cruelty.
I am chastising those who whine about it when babies are dying.
Either because they are stupid, or because they are evil.
And yes, the ten spies who would not go into the land and all of their allies who stood against Joshua and Caleb fall into one of those two categories. No exceptions. As is the parallel here.
I will stand against the evil of abortion that is consuming this land. I will chastise those wo will not stand.
And Faith, I will oppose those who use scripture to defend those who will not oppose the slaughter of unborn children whilst crying crocodile tears over beasts loudly and unrelentingly.
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