oldchakra.com

About Cruelty-Free Living
By Benjamin Bjerre

Dear Chalissal,

I want to thank you many times for your article.

I've myself seen much abuse of animals: piglets being castrated without anesthetic, being killed because it was uneconomic to cure them of their diseases, etc. Still, I'm surprised, hearing of the atrocities that are committed in these state-sanctioned murder-houses.

Cruelty-Free Living
By Chalissal

We are truly unaware of the support we lend to cruel practices by our purchases and the selections we make for our food and clothing. If only we knew…

The fact of the matter is that we can choose to make compassionate selections when we shop, and often we will end up with products that are healthier, more economical, and more ecological when we shop cruelty free.

Let’s take the case of eggs. Most of us feel that there is no cruelty in eating them, and even vegetarians feel quite justified since there is, on the surface, no loss of life. We think that the hens roam free and we humans take a few eggs, leaving the rest for the propagation of the species.

Not true. This perhaps may have been the case several decades ago. Today’s egg factories would unnerve even the thick-skinned ones among us. There are typically eight hens to a cage, each having about 53 square inches of space, not even enough to spread their wings. They are on a slanted wire-mesh cage so the eggs will roll into a tray that captures them. The feed and water are in troughs, and these cages are stacked one atop of another. The chicken manure falls through the cage to both cages and hens below and to a steel pan that has a scraping mechanism to gather and collect it.