VIII Международный конкурс научно-исследовательских и творческих работ учащихся
Старт в науке
Вегетарианство как форма протеста
Автор работы награжден дипломом победителя II степени
Полная версия работы доступна во вкладке "Файлы работы" в формате PDF
Vegetarianism as a form of protest
Small introduction:
Greetings! Thank you for holding this piece of paper. First of all, I want to warn you, this isn’t a provocative PROJECT; I don’t try to convince everyone to follow my point of view, humiliate someone or induce aggression. I just once give you the food for thought which is, I hope, going to contribute to make the final choice.
I decided to pity your minds and not to add pictures from slaughter houses.
What is this project about
I represent a true story narrating how awful people treat animals, how animals are exploited and grown by humanity, how they suffer, die and live in terrible conditions and why we make them to feel pain and fear.
Purposes of the project:
Some people close their eyes on truth, I am here to tell them about lives of others and what is the price for things they usually do in daily life. We have to realise what’s happening now, in our country, in our world. We scared of something we don’t know, but we must know.
Where the information was taken:
This project was inspired by movies based on the vegetarian topic: Dominion, Earthlings, Animal people.
Animals. Born to be dead
“It TAKES NOTHING AWAY FROM HUMAN TO BE KIND TO AN ANIMAL.”
- Joaquin Phoenix
1) Some animals happily became our pets. Cats and dogs. They are so cute, aren’t they? Unfortunately for many other species their destiny has already predicted. To be born on the fabrics and die in agony to appear in the shop looking like food that we love so much. And it isn’t the end. Every day people exploit animals for food, clothes and entertainment.
2) FOOD
When you come to the meat department, you usually say: I’d like to buy some chicken or beef. This phrase literally means “I’d like to take one life from this chicken”. The main part of people all around the world consumes meat products. It’s not hard to imagine how many lives we take every day from innocent creatures.
And we perceive animals as a subject, the way to get warm and to eat, as a livestock, faceless units of production in a system of incomprehensible scale, to which cruelty, from which we protect our pets, is applied. They tell us it’s necessary to kill animals and try to convince us by the images of happy farmer or happy cows on our products, films about carefree animals’ life on farms. Natural model of puppetry. Even don’t know how meat is produced, we keep eating it, because we actually don’t want to know. Their sufferings are unseen and unheard. Their value determined only by their usefulness to humanity, rationalised by our own superiority and the conviction might equals right. This notion must be questioned.
PIGS
Most pigs begin their lives in farrowing crates, designed to allow the piglets to feed from their mothers while preventing her to move around. The frequency of stillborn or mummified piglets generally increases with each litter as the sows’ bodies become less capable of handing the large litter sizes encouraged by the industry. The first few days piglets are mutilated without any anesthesia. Their tails and teeth are cut to reduce cannibalism.
Grown up, they are moved into grower pens filled in their own waste. The extreme limitations trigger heavy psychological tolls. Those who fall into the effluent system are left to starve or drown in the waste. The week before sows are due to give birth, they’re moved into the farrowing crate cages. Unable to exercise, the sow’s muscles will weaken to the point where she has difficulty standing up and lying down. She’ll develop pressure sores from the hard surfaces, prolapse and infections from the physical strain of repeated farrowing and poor conditions which can also lead to partial paralysis, preventing her to reach the food and water at the front of the cage, or can even develop till death in the cage. She’ll watch helplessly how her piglets fall ill and die. How get mutilated and abused by workers until they are taken away from her.
At the slaughterhouse they’ll wait in small concrete or metal holding pens, typically overnight without food and with limited or no access to water. In the morning they are forcefully herded to the kill floor, often with an electric prodder. The most common method of stunning and killing pigs used at all major pig abattoirs and advertised as the most humane and efficient option is the carbon dioxide gas camera. The fully-conscious pigs are gone down into the heavily concentrated gas, which begins to burn eyes, nostrils, throat and lings, suffocating them. At that time they’re shouting and bucking. Then the pigs’ throat are cut and bled out. Electrical stunning used at smaller slaughterhouses has a much higher chance of failure. Incorrect amperage, positioning of the stunner or length of time applied or failing to cut the throat quickly enough can lead to the pig being merely paralysed and unable to move while still capable of feeling pain or regaining consciousness while bleeding out. One by one, they are picked off front of each other. After they have bled out, pigs are dropped into tanks of scalding water in order to soften their skin and remove bristles and hair. Those who haven’t been stunned and killed properly finally die by drowning. The waste products-the skins, bones, hoofs, guts and fat-are trucked to the rendering plant to be turned into lard to use for food, soaps, gelatine.
HENS
For hens life begins at the hatchery. Eggs collected from the parent birds are stored, incubated and hatched over 31 days. The male and female chicks are sorted onto separate conveyor belts. Unable to ever produce eggs and a completely different breed to chickens used for meat, the male chicks are considered waste products with females perceived to be deformed or weak. They are sent into an industrial blender called a macerator. This practice is legal and referred to as humane by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Smaller hatcheries may use carbon dioxide gas or simply suffocate the chicks in plastic bags.
All commercial egg farms-caged, barn laid, free range, organic, RSPCA-approved involve the killing of male chicks.
And although there are many solutions except killing males and then throwing away like a trash, they still keep closing eyes on ruthless murder. After all, these chickens could be transferred to someone who cares about animals’ life or set free. Isn’t that cruelty?
BROILERS
Chickens bred for meat, known as broilers are larger breed than egg layers, designed through human intervention to grow rapidly to massive sizes. Their short life begins at broiler hatchery. These hatcheries also use macerators...or gas chambers for weak or deformed birds who aren’t expected to make it to slaughtered weight. The surviving day-old chicks are trucked to broiler grow-out farms. Each shed holds forty to sixty thousand birds. Within their first week of life, a mortality rate of 4 to 6 % is normal, equating to 1600 to 3600 dead chicks per shed, roughly 200-500 daily. The majority of these will have been found dead by workers, others who seem weak or injured will be killed or tossed out alive. As they grow they quickly fill out the available space in the shed, living amongst their own faeces. The mortality rate slows, but deaths are still a regular occurrence. Not far from the sheds, the bodies are piled up and composted. Selective breeding, lack of exercise due to overcrowding, artificial lighting and the heavy use of antibiotics which enhance feed absorption, have resulted in modern broiler chickens reaching a slaughter-ready weight of 3 kilos in just 35 days, a dramatic increase from a natural peak of 2 kg in 96 days. Their bodies have great difficulty handling this extreme physical pressure, making skeletal, cardiac and metabolic disorders common. Of those who make it to the slaughterhouse, 90% have a detectable abnormal gait. The sheds are not cleaned for the entire 5 to 7 week cycle, causing a high concentration of ammonia which can irritate and burn their skin and impede their respiratory system. Depopulation occurs in low light conditions in the middle of the night, when the birds are calmest and unable to see what’s happening. They are typically caught by hand by contract teams and jammed into plastic crates, then the creates are lifted onto trucks for transport to the slaughterhouse. They are hung roughly by their legs onto the automated shackle line, then dipped into the electric stun bath with any birds who lift their heads proceeding fully conscious before having their throats cut open by a rotating blade. A worker stands by with a knife for any birds who miss the first blade.
3) CLOTHING
Nowadays fur coat is an index of wealth and dignity. Animals’ lives, here is the natural price for your beauty.
RABBITS
Most of the rabbits, capable of living for 8-12 years, are killed at 12 weeks old. 3 to 4 thousand rabbits are used for scientific research and testing every year.
Also a lot of farms use the method of plucking the fur from alive rabbits, a process repeated every 3 months, between which the rabbits live in wire cages. Plucking results in longer, more profitable hair compared to shearing or clipping As rabbits age, they grow less fur, and ultimately are hung up and skinned for final harvesting, sometimes when they are still alive.
12 rabbits are killed to make the felt for just one Akubra hat. Worldwide, over one billion rabbits are killed for their fur every year.
MINKS
Minks are a common source of fur for clothing, accessories and even eyelash extensions. In the wild, they would individually occupy up to 2500 acres of wetland habitat. Despite generations of being bred for fur, these naturally inquisitive and solitary animals have been found to suffer greatly in captivity, cramped in small wire cages where chronic boredom and stress lead to frantic pacing and self-mutilation. Minks, used for breeding are kept in these cages for four to five years, giving birth to a litter each year of 3 or 4 surviving kittens who are slaughtered and skinned at 6 months old. Gas chambers or enclosed boxes filled with engine exhaust are common ways of killing the minks, but aren’t always lethal, resulting in some waking up while being skinned. Electrocution or simply breaking their necks are common alternatives.
4) ENTERTAINMENT
Seal shows are a popular attraction in zoos, where they taught to perform tricks for food in front of a large audience. Off stage they languish in small pens like any other zoo animal, swimming constantly in repetitive circles or crying out in distress. In the wild, dolphins are known to travel up to 65km a day and are constantly on the move, foraging for food, playing and fighting within their pods. They share with humans and great apes alone the trait of self-awareness, with evidence of intuition and empathy. There is no captive situation which can provide for all the behavioural needs of these highly intelligent, cognitively complex animals. Entire dolphins’ life is spent daily performing for the reward of food. Achieving the right level of hunger before the show is a crucial consideration for a good performance.
Every year from September to March, thousands of dolphins and other small cetaceans are herded into a quiet cove at Taiji and brutally slaughtered by local fishermen who see them as a source of income or as pests. Dolphin trainers have been observed assisting fishermen in herding the dolphins, picking out a select few to be spared from the slaughter and instead transported to aquariums and dolphin parks around the world...
If the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated, what does that say about us, as a species? In our entire recorded history, 619 million humans have been killed by a war. We kill the same quantity of animals every 3 days and this isn’t even including fish and other sea creatures whose deaths are so great they are only measured in tonnes.
But before we kill them, we have to breed them, confine and exploit them for food, entertainment, clothing and research. Their entire lives, from birth to death are controlled by industries who care only about the profit. An empire of suffering and blood, paid by costumers who are told that their treatment was ethical, that their deaths were humane, that cruelty doesn’t happen in our country, and if it does, our government, our authorities will find ad stop it. And us, as consumers, have no reasons to think otherwise, because to eat and use animals is considered normal, we have been doing it forever. Because the products for sale on supermarket shelves are so far removed from the individuals who once existed, some only briefly, some for years without reprieve. Individuals who share with us and our companion animals we love so dearly, our capacity to feel love, happiness, grief and mourning. Who share with us our capacity to suffer, our desire to live. To be free, to be seen not as objects, used by others, but those who we are. Individuals. Beings in our own right, not units of production, not stock, because they accept us first time, they have appeared before us.
The truth is there is no humane way to kill someone who wants to live. It’s not a question of treatment or better ways of doing the wrong things. Bigger cages, smaller stocking densities, or less painful gas. We tell ourselves they have lived good lives and in the end, they don’t know what’s coming and feel nothing. But they do. In their final hours, minutes and seconds, there is always fear, there is always pain. The smells of blood. The screaming of other members of their species, with whom they shared their lives. There is never willingness or desire to die, but rather a desperation to live, a frantic fight to their last breath. And they are never shown mercy or kindness, instead mocked, laughed, kicked beaten, tossed like ragdolls, or sent into the mincer, cause of being born the wrong sex. We take their children. We take their freedom. We take their lives, sending them healthy and whole into a slaughterhouse to come out as packaged pieces, and we tell ourselves that somehow something humane and ethical happened. We destroy our environment, emitting more greenhouse gases than any other industry, taking all fish out of seas, ravaging areas intended to animals, violating biological system, tearing down our forests and slaughtering native animals to make room for farms.
Notwithstanding this, we continue to justify animal agriculture by the claiming that it’s normal, necessary and natural. That the animal kingdom, or certain species within it are inferior to us, because they lack our specific type of intelligence, because they’re weaker and cannot defend themselves. We believe that in our apparent superiority, we have earned the right to exercise power, authority and dominion over those we perceive to be inferior, for our own short-sighted purposes. Do we follow our ancient gold rule of morality, or animal is nothing for us? Does this superiority complex, this pure selfishness defines us as a species? Or we are capable of something more?
There are only three forces that exist on this planet.
Nature. Animals. Humankind.
We are the earthlings.
Make the connection.
15.12.2019
Sunday 20:26
THE END
Well, what side would you choose?