Quotes from Karen Davis

The recognition that human beings are specifically and deliberately responsible for whatever aberrances farm animals may embody, that their discordances reflect our, not their, primary disruption of natural rhythms, and that we owe them more rather than less for having stripped them of their birthright and earthrights has not entered into the environmentalist discussions that I've encountered to date.

Especially when it comes to animals used for food, humanity's reasoning power and concern about fairness plummets.

To accept the environmentalist argument that the suffering of individual animals is inconsequential compared to the ozone layer, we must be willing to admit that the sufferings of minority groups, raped women, battered wives, abused children, people sitting on death row, and our loved ones are small potatoes beneath the hole in the sky. To worry about any of them is, in effect, to miniaturize the big picture to portraits of battered puppy dogs.

For a chicken trapped inside the world of modern food manufacturing, to break out of the shell i sot enter a deeper darkness full of bewildering pain and suffering from birth to death.

The term "productivity" is an economic measure referring to averages, not the well-being of individuals. Excess fertility and musculature are not the criteria that we use to judge the well-being of human beings, and they are not indices of avian well-being either. They more likely signify the opposite.

The chicken industry tells the public that economic profitability cannot be achieved without careful attention to the welfare of the chicken, but this is not how the system actually works. Chickens can be profoundly mistreated and still "produce," just as profoundly mistreated humans can be overweight, sexually active, and able to produce offspring. Like humans, chickens can "adapt," up to a point, to living in slum conditions. Is this an argument for slums?

As already noted, the Poultry Products Inspection Regulations of the U.S. Department of Agriculture only states, "Poultry shall be slaughtered in accordance with good commercial practices in a manner that will result in thorough bleeding of the carcasses and assure that breathing has stopped prior to scalding.

At the same time, to those who say that vegetarianism will not come overnight, it can be said with even greater assurance that "humane slaughter" will never come at all, because the slaughter process is inherently inhumane, and the slaughter of the innocent is wrong, and because the poultry industry, even in countries where humane slaughter laws may exists, is, for all practical purposes, ungovernable. Humane slaughter is an illusion.

Rendering the slaughter process less inhumane is a possibility. A question is whether "humane slaughter" legislation for poultry will speed or delay the day when regarding a fellow creature as food is no longer an option.

What gives us the right to violate the bodies and minds of other feeling beings? -Henry Spira