Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren Take on Factory Farms

[CatLady78]

I have never seen a news story that uplifted my spirits more.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/7/8/21311327/farmers-factory-farms-cafos-animal-rights-booker-warren-khanna

Farmers and animal rights activists are coming together to fight big factory farms
Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren have a new bill, and a new coalition, with far-reaching consequences.

Asked during a September CNN town hall whether he thought others should become vegan, Booker said “no,” before pivoting to discuss the problems of factory farming. In an MSNBC interview, he laughed off the idea of a “radical vegan agenda,” reassuring voters he doesn’t think “government should be telling Americans what to eat.”

But Booker realized there was a place that vegans and farmers could come together: Both of them hate the ways agribusiness had consolidated and mechanized the meat market, forcing farmers into using massive, cruel, and environmentally devastating confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.

Booker realized that, as unlikely as it sounds, there was a space in the Venn diagram between the people who believe raising and killing animals for food is wrong and the people who chose, as their livelihoods, to raise and kill animals for food. Both could agree that the way we are doing it now is cruel, both to animals and to people.

“This is not how we raised livestock 70 years ago,” Booker says. “We’ve gone from raising animals in a far more humane, pasture-based model to one where we’re producing food in hyper-confined, concentrated, enclosed buildings that produce these massive lagoons of waste that are poisoning our streams and our rivers.”

In December of 2019, while campaigning in Iowa, Booker unveiled the Farm System Reform Act. It’s sweeping legislation, but at its core it does four things:

Imposes an immediate moratorium on the construction of new CAFOs and phases out the largest existing CAFOs by 2040. (More at the link)

In May of 2020, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) signed on to the bill. That same month, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, sponsored a companion bill in the House with six co-sponsors, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus.


“We can’t vilify each other,” Booker says. “If we can’t have compassion for people in these broken systems, then we’re not going to have the compassion or coalitions to end these systems themselves.”

Please read the whole article. The part about the killing of chickens is hard to read but important.

Similar stuff at:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/20/21028200/factory-farms-abuse-workers-animals-and-the-environment-cory-booker-has-a-plan-to-stop-them

[CatLady78]

1. I really like how Cory Booker thinks

I am playing fast and loose with DU's excerpts rule but I hope Vox forgives me...I promise them a donation in 2021. So much of this article is so important:

The politics of animal — and human — suffering
David Coman-Hidy is the president of the Humane League, an animal welfare organization. In May, I had a conversation with him I’ve had trouble getting out of my head. My question was innocuous. I wanted to know what he was working on. “Switching from live shackling to the atmospheric killing of chickens,” he replied.

Oh.

I wasn’t familiar with these terms, and maybe you aren’t, either. And I’m sorry for what I’m going to force you to imagine as I explain them. “The process of how we slaughter broiler chickens is the cruelest thing imaginable,” says Coman-Hidy. These are, functionally, malnourished, young birds. Workers flip them upside down to shackle them by their legs. In many cases, the process dislocates their hips.

Chickens aren’t meant to be upside-down. They have no diaphragm. Shackled and inverted, their organs crush into their lungs, making it hard for the birds to breathe. The point of the shackling is to put them on a conveyor that drags them through electrified water, stunning them before the kill. But the birds panic, thrashing in wild terror. Some of them miss the water, or the stun setting is too low. Those birds have their throats cut while they’re still conscious, and then they’re pulled through boiling water to defeather them. If the blade misses the bird, the bird boils alive.

Almost no human experiences this outside of human trafficking rings and this is the common lot of chickens which share about 60% of their genome with us.

What I like about Booker is his pragmatism. This is REAL pragmatism and imagination in action:

Coman-Hidy and his organization are working to convince agricultural producers to slaughter chickens by simply gassing them, en masse. It’s easier on the chickens, and less traumatizing for the workers. And the campaign is seeing some success. McDonald’s has pledged to move to atmospheric killing, for one.

Coman-Hidy is vegan; he’s devoted his life to reducing animal suffering. Didn’t it feel strange, I asked him, to become part of this machine whose very existence he loathes? Even if atmospheric killing was more humane, wouldn’t it unnerve him to become one of the people shaping the architecture of animal slaughter?

“The thought experiment that helped me is if I could die, or have a member of my family die, by being euthanized by gas, or have what I just described happen to them, what would I give to get the gas?” He replied. “And the answer is everything.”

That question btw is a bit whacky-not blaming the author..it is just that it is based on the stereotype of animal activists as self righteous, irrational, purity-test pushing extremists.

You may give up meat in your personal life and still push for/expect and even welcome incremental progress. The world is not going to give up animal products. Our goal should be to eliminate the torture and confinement of living animals and to make their deaths as painless as possible.

The more we learn about animal intelligence, the less scientific/philosophical justification there is for this crass worldview. A little imagination is all it takes, even if information is lacking....

[Duppers]

2. Hi Lady!

We definitely are on the same page.



On edit: Am going to make my hubby read this thread.

[jfz9580m]

4. Kicking for Earth Day 2022

The Earth Day website is kinda wishy-washy and has a dated feel. Like stock crap..
https://www.earthday.org/earth-day-2022/

It doesn't even overtly address factory farming or meat in general.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-greenhouses-gases-food-production-study

Meat accounts for nearly 60% of all greenhouse gases from food production, study finds
This article is more than 7 months old
Production of meat worldwide causes twice the pollution of production of plant-based foods, a major new study has found