Thanksgiving, Hold The Turkey

[the tortured, dead remains of the birds who were brought here to give us eggs. But that wasn't enough, I guess. A chicken in every pot! Teevees in every room! Symbols of a nation and culture enmeshed in status seeking. ]


Did you ever notice the cornucopia symbol of our Nation's bounty is laden with grains, fruits, and vegetables only? And did you ever notice every so often that a roasted chicken leg has an inexplicably broken femur? Read on.

[partly pilfered from another blog - but credit at the end ;o) ]
On feeding a nation of gluttons:

"Do you think the birds have a sense of what is going to happen to them?"

"Yes. They try everything in their power to get away from the killing machine and to get away from you. . . . They have been stunned [paralyzed], so their muscles don't work, but their eyes do, and you can tell by them looking at you, they're scared to death."

-- Virgil Butler, former Tyson slaughterhouse worker, Press Conference, Feb. 19, 2003.
"In current US slaughter practice, birds are hung upside down in shackles and their heads and upper bodies are dragged through a splashing electrified water trough that paralyzes the muscles of their feather follicles. Every day in this country, 25 million birds are being tortured in this manner before their throats are partially cut and they are hung upside down in a bleedout tunnel, then plunged into a scald tank, often while they are still alive. When this happens, Virgil Butler explains, "the chickens flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads. They often come out of the other end with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they've struggled so much in the tank."

For a very interesting perspective on our gluttonous natures, see:

http://littledynamo.blogspot.com/2005/11/take-of-it-and-eat.html

Mr. Dynamo, I really didn't know. While I eat very little to no meat now, I always believed that giving simple thanks to the animals who "sacrifice" themselves for our sustenance was sufficient. It's not. Shame on all of us.

"Gluttony denotes, not any desire of eating and drinking, but an inordinate desire... leaving the order of reason, wherein the good of moral virtue consists." --- Thomas Aquinas

Oh. One last thought: "bird flu." It's everywhere in the news. Time to re-assess what Nature is trying to tell us?