A Vision of the Future / Calf269

So Bill Gates is a vegan. This doesn't come as a particularly big surprise to me but what did is the research he is funding into plant-based meat alternatives and his outspoken backing of vegetarianism/veganism as the future of the meat industry. 

Have a look at his official site here and learn about the Future of Food here and have a look at PETA's article on Bill Gates here. 

News like this makes me really hopeful. I've been spending a lot of time reading about commercialised farming (again) and the sheer scale of the abuse and exploitation is overwhelming. And the extent of peoples' complacency is overwhelming. And then I see what the statistitions are saying about the increase in meat consumption over the next 20 years and I get this sick, sinking feeling in my stomach. But then I read about what pioneers like Bill Gates are doing and I feel better about things. If ethics doesn't win at the end of the day, then at least sustainability will go towards achieving part of the desired outcome.  

 

Have you heard about 269 Life yet? I only found out about the group the other day and feel a little ignorant for only having done so now. The group was founded in Israel and derives its name from "269" which was a calf on a dairy farm. He was a male calf and, as such, would be killed to supply veal shortly after being   torn away from his mother at birth.

The group terms the commercialised mass-slaughtering of animals "the animal holocaust" and it holds pretty intense demonstrations which "call for empathy towards the most oppressed sector of our society and call into question the deep disconnect we as a society, have towards sanctioned animal cruelty." 

I found a thought-provoking excerpt on the group's Facebook page today by Angel Flinn & Dan Cudahy: 

"In recent years, the debate about the welfare of animals has centralized around specific cases of egregious suffering, with a strong focus on certain practices and procedures perceived to cause extreme harm, including intensive confinement, bodily mutilations, and physical and psychological torture. This focus on specific welfare violations has led to an interesting phenomenon: The public’s attention has been sidetracked from the primary issue involved with economic exploitation of sentient beings, which is the commodification of their very lives. In other words, the current direction of the debate has obscured from view the fundamental question of whether it is unethical, or morally indefensible, to take the life of another sentient being for any reason other than self-defense or compassion toward an individual who is severely suffering from a terminal illness or fatal injury.

This is the reason that the animal industry now markets itself as a stronghold of ‘ethical death and dismemberment’. In this new territory of animal slavery double-speak, consumers are actually expected to believe the ever-more-frequent and increasingly perverse accounts of ‘happy farming’; the proliferation of animal exploitation sites where the victims are so content with their circumstances that they happily offer the products of their bodies, then go gladly to their deaths at the side of kindly oppressors whom they trust unconditionally."

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." 

(Frederick Douglass, slavery abolitionist, 1818-1895)