Illuminating Anti- and Proslavery quotes from yesteryear to today
Wearing fox fur used to support a fox shooting and trapping industry here in Australia[,] rabbits as well.
Now [that] so called conservationists have stopped people wearing fur[,] foxes and rabbits have been able to breed and spread damaging native animals to the point of extinction.
People need to realize ethical hunting of feral animals is environmentally sound.
~ Doug Steley (May 12, 2012)
In this class Scott Ketterman, chef and owner of Crown Paella, and former chef at Simpatica Catering, will teach students how to turn a whole rabbit into porchetta and rillette. Each student will have the chance to debone a whole rabbit. They’ll then learn to turn the legs into sausage meat, which will be used to stuff the loins in preparation for porchetta. While the porchettas are poaching, students will learn how to transform rabbit into rillette, a French method that involves slow poaching rabbit meat in duck fat then emulsifying the tender meat and rich fat into a rough, spreadable, delicious paste. Students will get to taste all the results, and at the end of the class they’ll go home with recipes, their own porchetta, a jar of rabbit rillette, and a jar of rabbit stock.
~ Portland Meat Collective (March 2, 2012)
As long as there is a dairy industry there will be excess production of calves, and if nobody’s going to eat them, those calves aren’t going to be sent away to live on a farm, like your mum and dad told you your old dog was when you were a kid. Your old dog wasn’t sent away to live on a farm either. And there is no Santa Claus. Sorry, once you get started it’s hard to stop. The point is that the dairy industry relies on calves being born, most of which (and pretty much all the males) are always going to be slaughtered whether we eat veal or not. So if we want milk, and cheese, we really should be eating veal as well. Otherwise all those calves, which are going to die anyway, will simply go to waste. And as long as we eat pink, or rose, veal, which British veal has always tended to be anyway, then the animal welfare issues that are commonly, and inaccurately, associated with all veal production, do not arise. The thing to avoid is white veal, the meat of calves fed exclusively on milk (or, more to the point, milk “products”) and kept in the dark, in spaces too confined to move, in order to keep the meat pale and soft. Why anyone thinks this is a good idea is quite beyond me, because—quite apart from the unspeakable cruelty—the meat produced this way really does taste, at best, of nothing, at worst of stale milk.
~ Sebastian Roach (November 29, 2010)
Few things raise the hackles of thoughtful eaters quite like veal—unless it’s veal with a side order of foie gras. Bleak images of calves in cramped crates or being herded on to lorries linger in the memory. And they should—as a reminder of the worst excesses of indifference to animal welfare, they take some beating. But today I’m unashamedly putting on my rose-tinted spectacles and flying the flag for British rose veal. To be honest, if you drink milk or eat cheese, it’s crueller not to eat it.
Spare a thought for male dairy calves. Over a quarter of a million of them are killed each year. Unable to produce milk (obviously) and unsuitable for beef production, they are shot soon after birth as a “waste product” of the dairy industry. Either that or they’re exported to Europe, where the continental craving for pale meat means their welfare is profoundly compromised.
In the past few years, there’s been a growing interest in high-welfare rose veal in this country, and I for one am glad of it. Calves live in small groups, with deep straw bedding and access to a varied diet that leads to their distinctive pink meat; in free-range or organic production, they’re also given access to outdoor grazing. The animals are killed at around six months old, roughly the same age as most pigs or sheep slaughtered for pork and lamb.
~ Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (May 20, 2011)
If I really wanted to maximize the death toll, I would go into business creating tofu for the vegetarians. ’Cause in order to create tofu, you have to take that wonderful giant tractor, you have to go across that field and every songbird, every gopher, every squirrel, every turtle, every rabbit, every mouse, every shrew, every snake, every bug, everything there must die.
In order to go full tofu, you have to have 100% complete annihilation of all life forms. To the vegetarians, how deep is the cloak of denial? How can you pretend that Paul McCartney isn’t responsible for killing anything? I kill stuff one arrow at a time. Meanwhile, Paul McCartney, master of the final solution, only thinks of his tofu consumption. I believe that every bowl of tofu is responsible for the death of billions of things. I can’t compete with that and I can’t compete with Paul McCartney’s death toll.
~ Ted Nugent (December 29, 2009)
THE controversy on SLAVERY, in the United States, has been one of an exciting and complicated character. The power to emancipate existing, in fact, in the States separately and not in the general government, the efforts to abolish it, by appeals to public opinion, have been fruitless except when confined to single States. In Great Britain the question was simple. The power to abolish slavery in her West Indian colonies was vested in Parliament. To agitate the people of England, and call out a full expression of sentiment, was to control Parliament and secure its abolition. The success of the English abolitionists, in the employment of moral force, had a powerful influence in modifying the policy of American anti-slavery men. Failing to discern the difference in the condition of the two countries, they attempted to create a public sentiment throughout the United States adverse to slavery, in the confident expectation of speedily overthrowing the institution. The issue taken, that slavery is malum in se—a sin in itself—was prosecuted with all the zeal and eloquence they could command. Churches adopting the sin per se doctrine, inquired of their converts, not whether they supported slavery by the use of its products, but whether they believed the institution itself sinful. Could public sentiment be brought to assume the proper ground; could the slaveholder be convinced that the world denounced him as equally criminal with the robber and murderer; then, it was believed, he would abandon the system. Political parties, subsequently organized, taught, that to vote for a slave-holder, or a pro-slavery man, was sinful, and could not be done without violence to conscience; while, at the same time, they made no scruples of using the products of slave labor—the exorbitant demand for which was the great bulwark of the institution. This was a radical error. It laid who adopted it open to the charge of practical inconsistency, and left them without any moral power over the consciences of others. As long as all used their products, so long the slaveholders found the per se doctrine working them no harm; as long as no provision was made for supplying the demand for tropical products by free labor, so long there was no risk in extending the field of operations. Thus, the very things necessary to the overthrow of American slavery, were left undone, while those essential to its prosperity, were continued in the most active operation; so that, now, after more than a thirty years’ war, we may say, emphatically, COTTEN IS KING, and his enemies are vanquished.
~ David Christy (1860)
In his latest piece for the Atlantic Food Channel, he [James McWilliams] attempts to refine his earlier argument by saying that animals are sentient beings, and therefore it is wrong to kill and eat them. Not an argument I personally agree with, but so far, so good. The trouble comes with his definition of “sentient.” If sentient means, according to McWilliams, “capable of suffering,” where do we draw the line? And if animals are so sentient, doesn’t that make a farm system where they suffer less, if at all, dramatically better than one that causes nothing but suffering for all of the animals and many of the people involved?
A fish does not register “pain” or “fear”. It might exhibit a rush of stress hormones when confronted with a lethal situation, but plants also release stress hormones, especially as a result of any sort of damage. Like when you snap a tree branch to pick an apple. Or shear off leaves from a spinach plant for salad. I’m not making the argument that plants are sentient beings, but as long as we’re “lifting veils” and performing “mental exercises,” to use McWilliams’ parlance, we might as well go whole hog, don’t you think?
~ Nicole Washington (January 11, 2011)
