It is said in the Bible that man was given dominion over animals. Unfortunately, what we see today is not dominion which comes with a responsibility to care for animals but utter domination of the animal world. The result is large scale destruction, waste, and cruelty towards animals in general (with the exception of cats and dogs who we oddly have a profound love for) and farm animals in particular.
Livestock Cruelty: Brief Description
Here’s an except from Health in Flames:
Chickens… often times are so top heavy that they are unable to stand. To save space, the birds are cramped into cages on top of one another and cannot even spread their wings.Pigs, which are intelligent and sensitive animals, live their life in confinement without fresh air or sunlight, much less windows. They can barely…
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations
But imagine now that at least that some of the workers at these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs were financially independent of their employers. How many of them would continue to work there? My guess is very few. Its not a pleasant job and that alone would justify quitting for most. Sure, some make so little that financial independence is never an option. And yet, if only 20% were to attain that level, we’d suddenly see a real impact. Among the issues impacted would be: deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, chronic diseases, and of course animal cruelty.
How to Reduce Meat Consumption
Less meat would be produced. Since demand would stay the same, prices would increase. Thereby consumption of meat would likely go down. Americans today consume twice the amount of meat that we did a century ago. We are the top meat consumers per capita in the world. Most of the evidence to date suggests this is putting us at risk for a growing number of health problems. In part that is due to consuming processed meats. In part it is probably also due to the quality of the livestock we raise. Hormone injected, grain fed, industrially produced meat differs in quality from the meat our ancestors consumed before the industrial era.
Whatever your stance on eating animals (full disclosure: I eat meat), as one activist notes, “I think we agree that making their lives hell is too high a price for cheap food.”
BOTTOM LINE: THERE IS A BETTER WAY!
- As John Maynard Keynes said a century ago, people of our time ought to be largely independent of our employers for our income – unfortunately, due to “mindless consumerism”, we are not.
- Mindless consumerism is the underlying reason leading to the rise of chronic disease for 3 major reasons:
- It ties us to dependence on our employers and modern day employment is a health hazard for most (in part due to the sedentary nature of most jobs).
- It has led to environmental changes toxic to our wellbeing:
- (a). We evolved in and are best suited to natural environments and instead we live in increasingly artificial environments.
- (b). Overconsumption has lead us to engineer out the need for meaningful use of our legs for ambulation.
- Finally, it transforms workers to work with blinders on – instead of working for the product or service and receiving money as a side effect, workers focus on making money and the product or service is instead the side effect. The results (with respect to health) is that “food” is no longer food but changed to maximize pleasure and extract profit in spite of the toxicity to our health.
- Based on the science of wellbeing one can derive the philosophy that once basic needs are met, “The best things in life are free” therefore —>
- Most people can live far below their means without sacrificing happiness AND by investing the rest, they can become financially independent of their employers enabling them to be —>
- Happier. Healthier. Wealthier. More engaged. Simply better.
