Growing local-farm movement should include your fruit, vegetables and meat

Living Simply, Living Franciscan
by Mary Ellen Dunford, affiliate
This past year my husband and I made a decision to eat less meat and to purchase locally what we do consume. We eat less meat for a variety of reasons: to lower our carbon footprint and help reduce global warming, to bolster our healthy diet of vegetables and fruit, and to support the ethical treatment of animals. We purchase our meat from a local farmer who raises chickens, hogs, cattle and goats. The animals are raised free range and organically and treated humanely during their life and death.

I believe animals raised for food, like all animals, deserve to be treated with respect. Animals raised on industrialized farms are denied the most basic, humane considerations. Next time you purchase meat from the grocery store or eat at a restaurant consider these facts from Farm Sanctuary, a group dedicated to the ethical treatment of animals:

• Female pigs used to breed piglets for pork often spend most of their lives in metal gestation crates barely larger than their bodies. In addition to lameness, which comes with being immobilized for years, the sows suffer from open sores caused by constantly rubbing their bodies against the bars of the cages. This type of confinement restricts normal growth, development and behavior. The sows develop severe psychological behaviors including depression and aggression.
• Food animals are mutilated without pain relief. Parts of turkeys’ and chickens’ beaks and toes are frequently
  cut off to prevent frustrated birds from injuring each other in crowded conditions, and pigs, sheep and cattle are commonly castrated, ear-notched and tail-docked.
  
• During transport, animals are often packed inside trucks with inadequate ventilation where they become stressed and sustain injuries from being trampled by other anxious animals. They can be legally transported for up to 36 hours without food and water. During hot weather, animals routinely die from heat exhaustion and, in the winter, they freeze to death on trucks.
  

The list of cruel practices is long. Pigs, cows and other food animals have nervous systems like you and me. They feel pain and are capable of experiencing basic emotions like contentment, anxiety, fear and anger.

If you are concerned about the conditions of factory farming, buy your meat from local farmers who practice ethical treatment of their animals, talk to your local restaurants about buying local meat, and write your legislative representatives to ban these cruel practices and create laws that respect the lives of food animals.