We Are All Related The train headed west passing through western Kansas early in the morning. That is really the beginning of the West. As you begin the approach to the Great Plains. It is there you can view the great stockyards where cattle are rounded up and sent into the slaughterhouses. It is not a very cheerful sight. Especially for anyone who has closely studied the subject of mass food production. I was just down at Eco Loco (eco crazy) , a natural food shop in the town of Orgiva, in the south of Spain, close to where the experimental community project known as Benefecio is located. I picked up a copy of a brochure, entitled, Animal Rights. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, humans kill approximately 53 billion animals (thats 53,000,000,000) for food per year, not including fish and other sea animals. I realize that Planet Earth is a very strange place in many ways, that much is increasingly obvious, but this information is completely over the top. (Three billion people, close to half the worlds population cannot read at all. So at least they have an excuse to continue consuming animal products. They are completely oblivious to the implications.) Read the book Fastfood Nation and you will most likely become a vegetarian. So, in order to feed the hungry people on Planet Earth; -145 million animals are killed every day -6 million every hour -100,000 every minute -1,680 per second .......and this number is rising and will double in the second part of this century. What? This is more than very odd. Yet there is close to zero discussion of this subject and many other related subjects in this world of ours. There is not a lot of information available about this or many other subjects. They don’t teach you this in your high school nutrition class. So we tend not to think about it or even begin to consider the degree of suffering that is being inflicted on sentient lifeforms around here. On the animal kingdom in particular and subsequently on humanity itself. If we, the "human" specieś, are treating the animal kingdom like that because we are hungry it raises many moral issues. From a spiritual perspective the implications are disturbing. 6 million an hour. Day after day, year after year. That is an absolutely enormous, outrageous degree of suffering for "humanity" to inflict on the Animal Kingdom. All because we are hungry? The karma and the karmic implications are unsettling to say the least. People with cats and dogs say they love animals, but think nothing of eating dead animals that have been cruelly slaughtered in mass meat production facilities. That’s why documentary film makers are banned from going anywhere near those places. If people realized how cruel mass meat production is they would stop participating in the slaughter by eating the flesh of dead animals that is soaked in red dye to make it look a bit more appetizing. If it wasn’t colored red to look more alive it would look the way it actually is...... a greyish piece of dead flesh filled with artificial growth hormones. Why turn our stomachs into an animal graveyard? Have a heart, animals, our four legged associates here on Earth, deserve better than that. We, the two-legged creatures that inhabit this world are capable of doing better than that. I mean we are humans, right? Not exactly? Ok, I understand. I am a human-becoming. Humanity is a work in progress. We are striving to attain our humanty. It is simply a question of progress and evolution. How will we ever find peace within ourselves and in this world unless we stop consuming animal products? Including dairy products. At least those being produced for mass consumption, that require the abuse of animals. That is the least that we, the two-leggeds, can do for our four-legged relations in the Animal Kingdom with whom we share the God-given abundance of Creation. God help us to make the right moral and ethical choices. Where is all this madness leading? (6 million an hour?) It is our responsibility to ourselves and to all sentient life here on planet earth to rethink these equations. Unthinkingly and unknowingly we contribute to an enormous amount of suffering for animals when we consume animal products. The mass production of chemicalized dairy products is also a source of suffering for animals as well as the humans that consume them. When we as a collective species "consume" that degree of misery and suffering then it is reflected in our own minds and the world which we inhabit. Look around. A sad state of affairs indeed. If you can manage to locate one, maybe drive by a chicken "factory" in some rural location. Smell the putrid stench. If you do so there is a very strong possibility that you will never consume another dead chicken or one of their eggs, a cow or a pig, ever again for the rest of your life. I lived in a small, rural town for awhile. It was the location of a large, corporate, 24-7, chicken "factory". I had to cover my nose with a cloth within a mile or so of the structure. It was easier to go miles out of the way to avoid the smell. Since that time I have vowed never to eat meat, fish or eggs ever again. 100,000 a minute??? Our four-legged friends here on Planet Earth deserve better and so do we. May the human species have compassion for the animal kingdom and find the strength to stop consuming all animal products. Amen.
