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Vote with your dollars

It may be good to get grossed out and scared for our health once in a while because our consumer dollars are where we put our vote.

Our family just took a cruise to Alaska to see the coastline before the worst of the debris field from Japan hit those beautiful shores and before any oil tankers start to ply those pristine waters.  One of the passengers we met was a fellow who worked for years at the XL Food Plant in Alberta and he happily boasted that they processed approximately 4,000 cows a day, which totally grossed us out.

My hubby watched a black and white, silent documentary years ago on the processing of animals in a slaughterhouse and got so grossed out that he went off beef for five years.  Those are just our stories.

We drove by a pig farm near Enderby once and were pleased to see that each sow and her piglets had a little home and pasture all to themselves.  They were allowed to live out their short lives at least in a decent and humane way and it was so much better than the fate of those animals that live in tiny, concrete pens or horribly crowded cages.  Most of us are still meat eaters to some degree, but if we can reduce our consumption just a bit and also seek out and support those farmers that care and raise their meat animals as naturally as possible, then the existence of those massive factory farms will at least diminish in size.

It may be good to get grossed out and scared for our health once in a while because our consumer dollars are where we put our vote, so to speak.  It’s important that our government bodies know that we want to keep our small-scale farmers in business too, so take the time to let them know.  Gandhi said that you could judge a society by how they treat their animals.  That’s good food for thought at the dinner table.

 

Margo Westaway