EAT YOUR WAY TO HELL

Click the header. ******************************** Did you know that the chicken you're about to dig into has never had its feet on the ground? And its very thin shell has never seen a nest? It's modern farming. The big suppliers (and the bigger, the more they practice this) jam chickens into a roost with no chance of them falling nor getting down to walk on the floor. It's called "high density stocking". Meat suppliers do the same with cattle and pigs. I can remember when ranches were rated on how many head to the acre they could handle. Big business says they can make more money by jamming the animals in until they can barely walk around. Additionally, they find it's easier to load them with antibiotics to prevent illness outbreaks. They don't loose many animals to germs that way. By the way, when we ingest that meat, we help to build a resistance to the antibiotics we just might need to save our lives one day. ************************************************************************************ Confinement at high stocking density requires antibiotics and pesticides to mitigate the spread of disease and pestilence exacerbated by these crowded living conditions. In addition, antibiotics are used to stimulate livestock growth by killing intestinal bacteria. Widespread use of antibiotics increases the chance of a pandemic resistant to known measures, which is exacerbated by a globally distributed food system. Decreased genetic diversity increases the chance of a food crisis. "An animal feeding operation is defined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency as a lot or facility where animals are kept 45 days of the year or more [and] structures or animal traffic prevents vegetative growth. Note that this is different from a EPA's definition of a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) which is an animal feeding operation larger than a given size." http://www.google.com/search?q=CAFO+&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-ContextMenu&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7ADBS_en ********************************************************************************* *** The No Bell Peace Prize *** As to Obama and his Nobel prize; the story of Butch the Rooster John the farmer was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called "pullets" and eight or ten roosters, whose job was to fertilize the eggs. The farmer kept records and any rooster that didn't perform went into the soup pot and was replaced. That took an awful lot of his time so he bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone so John could tell from a distance which rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report simply by listening to the bells. The farmer's favorite rooster was old Butch, and a very fine specimen he was, too. But on this particular morning John noticed old Butch's bell hadn't rung at all! John went to investigate. The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover. But to Farmer John's amazement, Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring. He'd sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of Butch, he entered him in the Boone County Fair and Butch became an overnight sensation among the judges. The result: The judges not only awarded Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well. Clearly Butch was a politician in the making: who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention? **********************************************************************************