magazines

Happy meat on cover of this month’s "Good"
So, the magazine is called Good. The whole thing smells bad to me. I saw this cover at the checkout stand while at Whole Foods (fine purveyors of happy meats… I understand the meat is so happy it jumps up and dances for you if you light up a disco ball).
 
 
As you can see, this month’s cover features a picture of a cow being “pampered” (including food, a nice brushing, and a radio playing music) below the headline, “Happy Meal,” which is revolting in and of itself (can you imagine a human being depicted similarly?). In case you can’t read the low quality, slightly-blurry iPhone pic I snapped, the caption reads: “Why pampered cows make tastier steaks.” Forgetting that it probably ought to have said “make for tastier steaks” (do the cows come up tableside and make steaks for people, a la Douglas Adams?), the only thing more disgusting than this cover was the article itself, which I quickly scanned through before leaving. 
 
I’m telling you, this article sells the happy meat but good. This is where welfarist activism is taking us, folks. Not that this will surprise some of you, but even a former PETA-supporting vegan talks to the writer about the benefits of”humanely raised” beef, calling the transition from activist for the animals to someone who cares for then kills her own animals a transformative experience, in so many words. If you want to really get your blood boiling, take a look, but please don’t support the magazine by purchasing. 
 
I put the copy I was browsing back on the rack… backward. Wooo, passive-aggressive activism (passivism?).
  

By the way, also at the Good website, here is the article’s dedicated page (though, no text), along with some unhappy comments. There’s a video promoting the issue featured here as well, which is hosted at YouTube (from factory farms to family farms, in a nutshell). Interesting comments under that, as well, including something we’re going to be hearing more and more as happy cows become the new “reality”:  “They don’t know they’re on death row.”

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I wrote some more letters

I write lots of letters. I’ve been kind of remiss in sharing them here, but I’ll post a couple that I just wrote, so you can see what keeps me awake at night.

This first one is actually a bit late in coming for the editor to consider publishing it now, so that’s all the more reason to post it here, in response to this piece from Australian newspaper The Age:

Your article asks, “You wouldn’t keep a dog in a cage so small it couldn’t turn around, so why do we think it’s all right to do it to pigs?” But the question doesn’t go far enough. The question ought to be: “You wouldn’t breed dogs for food and eat them, so why do we think it’s all right to do it to pigs?”

Pigs are morally no less significant than dogs. If people don’t see a practice as acceptable for one animal, than surely they shouldn’t see that same practice as acceptable for any other animal.

And here’s one for the foodies, in response to an article in the November issue of Common Ground Magazine called The Carnivore’s Dilemma (yeah, I know, shades of Omnivore’s Dilemma… what dilemma?):

In regards to Chris Cosentino’s quote in your article, “An animal is giving its life for you to eat,” need I remind your readers that the animals do not willingly give their flesh to us? It is taken from them, along with their lives. Rather than eating unconsenting animals, we ought to consider eating a plant-based diet. To quote Cosentino, “It’s just the right thing to do.”