CRUELTY, FREE!

Hey, ever-so-clever Chicago restaurants - be sure to keep on 'not selling' foie gras! Even though the law would seem to be able to distinguish pretty easily between "free" and "free with the purchase of," the legal outcome isn't so important as is your success in getting news outlets like this to once again plaster disgusting photos, video and facts about foie gras production on their sites for everyone to see.

2007 - THE YEAR IT HITS THE FAN?

I know, I know, the trope of "this time they'll have to open their eyes!" is as old as animal activism, but I have to wonder: Now that the reality of global warming is accepted by all but the most fantastically delusional members of society, and now that the phenomenon's connection to animal agriculture has been so thoroughly documented, will Joe and Jane Average finally start to connect the dots? "Hmmmm... this burger... end of a habitable planet... gotta decide..."?

Here's just one bellwether, the science blog of the Houston Chronicle, wherein the meat-eating author resolves (yeah, yeah, New Year's and all) to eat less meat after reading the UN report, asking the musical question, Would you stop eating meat to save the planet? It's amusing how many uninformed knee-jerk condemnations flow in to the comments, including the completely straight-faced usage of "Animals were put on Earth for us to eat, and I'm happy to oblige." I realize there will always be that fingers-in-ears element, but I'm wondering if the humming will have to get louder and louder now that the facts (and of course, these facts comprise just one of many sound logical reasons for veganism) are becoming ever more in-your-face?

JACKASSES

Here in our predominantly Judeo-Christian culture, we have to worry about idiotic kids getting hurt by emulating Jackass. Good to remember that there are other cultures with institutions just as idiotically dangerous.

EXTREME WELFARE RANCHING

"Across southeastern Colorado, ranchers, neighbors, the Colorado National Guard and others worked furiously Tuesday to feed" cattle trapped without food by the blizzards out there. "The Colorado National Guard used seven helicopters to drop hay bales to stranded animals Tuesday; 140 Guard members remain activated to help out with storm recovery."

Now, I'm all for feeding starving animals. But I'm curious - who paid for those seven helicopters to feed these animals? Did it all come out of ranchers' pockets? Or is this part of the "storm recovery" for which we all pay the National Guard? It was my understanding that the National Guard was a taxpayer-funded force to protect people - I never heard that they were also in the business of protecting animals.

Oh, sorry, this is a "humanitarian" mission, we can't allow these poor animals to starve to death? Uh-huh. If the Guard is so worried about the animals' welfare, will they be storming the slaughterhouse when these animals are being skinned alive? Just wondering.

HAPPY NEW BLOG

Hey, here's some cheery news that I just found out about, appropriately, on New Year's Day: The inestimable, the indefatiguable Gary Francione now has a blog! It's called "Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach."

At first I was totally ecstatic at seeing this development, as Francione limits himself to a paragraph or two per entry on the front page, and I assumed he had boiled his writing style down to that length. Then I saw the "Read More"s. Yikes!

Still, for those who may balk at cracking one of Francione's dense but essential tomes on Animal Rights and Animal Law, the blog is a great opportunity to get relatively quick, terse capsules of his thinking on veganism and its associated strategies.

FREE THE REINDEER

Life imitates art:

Santa and the activists talked and talked
but he was intractable
Letting the reindeer fly off on their own was impractical...

TEH SOY MADE ME GAY

Oh, man. Where to start? I'm gonna have to come back tomorrow on this. It's just too rich... rich.... RICH!

UPDATE 12/18: Y'know, after thinking about this all weekend, I still haven't got the right comic angle that adds anything to this. It's too much of a perfect gem in and of itself. I will only mention what should be, and I hope is, obvious to all who read the "column" - that the ever-greater male panic at losing men's longstanding meat-eating supremacy in the face of clear, long-term, permanent cultural change almost could not be put in better allegorical terms. Dunno if that was the idea, but if so, well done.

SMARTER PEOPLE MORE LIKELY TO GO VEGETARIAN

Heh. Posted without comment.

SOUTH AFRICA BANS CANNED HUNTS

Yes, folks, it's come to this: The United States lags behind South Freakin' Africa in acknowledging and curtailing an obviously, shamefully, fundamentally unfair institution.

MONEY WHERE HIS MOUTH IS

Good for Bob Barker. I mean, I know the guy's rich and all, but $300,000 is a hefty chunk of pocket change to part with. The Price is Right for this guy, as he's learned the Truth and its Consequences.

OK, I'm done. But really, way to go Bob.

DON'T HAVE - OR GIVE - A COW

A nice summary of why the latest trendy way to assuage liberal guilt is a bad idea for people as well as animals.

A 'TAIL' OF TWO HEADLINES

This one has nothing to do with meat-eating or plant-based diets or cruelty or compassion. It's all about the headlines, folks.

I'm here and now calling for a moratorium on the headline "Animal Rights and Wrongs" or the latest variation, "Animal Rights or Wrongs."

I know it must seem fiendishly clever to each new headline writer who comes up with it, but get this: It's been DONE TO DEATH. It's PLAYED. It's OVER. Yes, we get it - rights, then with a mind-boggling twist on the meaning, counterposed with "wrongs!" This amazing wordplay has only been used in about 17,894 HEADLINES SO FAR. Anyone who uses it after the point where I click "Publish" on this post is now officially A HACK.

In contrast, I laughed out loud when I saw this one, which I'm pretty sure (go ahead, prove me wrong) is fresh: About a proponent of the Genesis 1:29-based diet - "Eats of Eden." Bravo!

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR... CANCER?

"High Protein Diets May Boost Cancer Risk" blares the Washington Post, summarizing what looks like a pretty preliminary study, but one that merits at least as much hyping as any of the tiny preliminary studies that seemed to exonerate high-protein diets. Basically, the study found that physically fit people who consumed more protein (which, though it's not explicit here, is almost certainly mostly animal protein) had more IGF-I, known to spur the growth of cancer cells, as compared to those eating a lower-protein vegetarian diet. This should be followed up with more comprehensive studies, but for now it's worth noting that the old saw "where do you get your protein?" has never looked more dangerously inane.

UN: MEAT-EATING IS KILLING THE PLANET

This is a major report that spells out what we've known for years: Massive US-style livestock operations are the biggest factors driving global warming. Maybe people like Al "Inconvenient Truth" Gore will start to pay attention, even if the hardcore deniers keep ignoring it...

"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems," senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said. "Urgent action is required to remedy the situation."

Cattle-rearing is also a major source of land and water degradation, according to the FAO report.

Even in spelling all of this out the report, from what I've read of it, shies away from the most glaringly obvious solution: Rather than tinker with animals' diets to get a certain number of ounces less methane per cow, STOP RAISING AND EATING SO MANY OF THEM. Pretty simple, really, but I guess that'll have to wait for the next pass.

EMPTY CAGES #5

How'd I miss Carnival of Empty Cages #1 - #4? Dunno, but Eric Prescott at An Animal-Friendly Life sent this link along for this great monthly vegan-blog roundup, which I'm sure I would've linked even if he hadn't cannily included Meat Facts twice. Great to see all the vegan blogs proliferating, some of which I hadn't heard of before, and which I'll want to add to the side rail after I finish reading all these entries. Great job!

HUNTING-DEATH ICEBERG

Regular Meat Facts readers may recall the years (jeez - years!) where I would celebrate "hunting season" with an ongoing tally of accidental shootings by hunters, and how recently I've tried to cut it down because it's both time-consuming and depressing. This year I'm going to cut it back to just the incidents that really, really stick out as noteworthy, with the caveat that these represent, of course, only the tip of the iceberg - an iceberg of idiotic homicides and injuries inflicted by people to whom their own momentary entertainment is more important than, literally, the life and death of others.

So here's just two fatalities, from right around here: "Deer hunter, 79, shoots self fatally" and a "beloved drug-sniffing police dog" - with police badge and all - also killed by a none-too-sharp shooter.

MILLS' FAST-FOOD CHAIN?

I have to admit that my only real concern in the messy Paul McCartney-Heather Mills divorce was whether Mills, who has since hooking up with Paul become quite vocal about veganism's benefits, would turn against the diet in a fit of guilt-by-association. But she appears to still be going strong on it if this is any indication: "My dream is to open a fast-food vegan chain but people don't know it's vegan; they just go in and go, 'Oh, let's try this.'" Dunno how much chance it has of happening, but at the very least I like her thinking.

THE WAR AGAINST SALMONELLA

Hey, remember that historic War Against E.Coli, where we finally eradicated dealt a severe blow to stopped talking about it until the next E.Coli outbreak? This story put me in mind of that: Salmonella strain turning up more in chicken

Exactly what does the headline mean by "more"? Well, according to the USDA, over the previous five years there was a fourfold increase in positive test results for salmonella enteritidis on chicken carcasses.

Salmonella sickens more than 40,00 Americans and kills 600 people every year, so this is a pretty serious statistic. But wait - "The research was done before the Agriculture Department started a new program to reduce positive tests for salmonella. Since then, the incidence of salmonella has fallen from 18 percent in 2005 to 10 percent today, [the agency] said." Oh, OK, see? Just like with the revolutionary new E.Coli procedures that will start paying off in real data any day now. Victory is just around the corner!

WRITE WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW

This column is nothing special - I'm just highlighting it to stand in for the overall trope that turns up more and more every year as the existence of vegetarians at Thanksgiving causes meat-eaters to get nervous.

I have to say at the outset that I don't know if the writer is a "humor" columnist or not, as there seem to be a couple sad attempts to be "wry," but in whatever case, this contains the "Tofurky trifecta" of non-vegetarians writing about vegetarians at Thanksgiving. That is, they've heard of Tofurky and decide to write a column centered around it.

* "Tofurky" misspelled as "Tofurkey"? Check.
* Seitan-based product identified as "soy-based" or "tofu-based"? Check.
* Complaint about vegetarians mimicking turkey-eaters by having a protein-based centerpiece? Check - and for bonus points, compounded by the central error of believing it is "shaped like a bird" (the headline for the whole column, in fact) instead of shaped like, well, a bag.
* Additional bonus points: Columnist describing self and rest of mainstream as "carnivores"

So to summarize, what makes this mind-numbingly typical is that the columnist blithely writes about something he clearly has absolutely no experience with and about which he can't be bothered to even fact-check, arguing from the perspective of clear ignorance about vegetarian (if not human) diets and traditions to tell us what we should do.

Not to single this one guy out - I just happened across this and found it to be a perfectly typical specimen of the genre (of which another signal aspect is that each participant seems to think he's invented the genre). So there you have it.

AFTER ALL, VEGETARIANISM IS ALL ABOUT EASE

Six of one...

McClatchy Newspapers: VEGGIE THANKSGIVING ISN'T EASY

Half-dozen of the other...

USA Today: "Thanksgiving is kind of like the final exam at Le Cordon Bleu. These [turkeys] are not easy things to cook. It doesn't get any harder."

So it looks like the basic problem here is Thanksgiving, not whether it's veggie, no?