Sunday, July 24, 2011

Mandatory Viewing: Another Video from Toronto Pig Save



The heroic men and women of Toronto Pig Save are fighting a noble battle against the slaughter of pigs at Quality Meat Packers and other slaughterhouses in the Toronto area.

Please watch this video to understand what they're up against. Pigs across North America are being transported in packed trucks in record high temperatures, spending their final moments in agony before they're murdered so human beings can devour their flesh. For those of you who do not follow temperatures in celsius, 38 degrees equals about 101 degrees Fahrenheit. That was the temperature on Thursday when these poor beings were crammed into a transport truck and taken to the last place they will ever be alive.

"There is a crime that goes beyond denunciation," John Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath. He could have been describing this scene.

Toronto Pig Save is helping to create glass walls, and, in the process, tearing down the walls of denial. A lot of people will go out of their way not to watch these videos - not to gaze into the abyss and view the horror and suffering firsthand - because they want their ham or their bacon or their pork. But we need to keep battering away at these walls.

Hit, hit, hit, hit these walls, like waves crashing on the shore. Tear them down brick by brick. Demolish them until there is nothing left standing.

Because, take my word for it my friends, this ghastly scene is not confined to Toronto. It has taken place in city after city, country after county, and this "damned human race" (now quoting Mark Twain) has so much blood on its hands. The blood of innocents.

The only way to stop this madness is for everybody to go vegan. That may seem like a pipe dream. But when the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) started his newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and called for the immediate emancipation of his enslaved brothers and sisters and an end to chattel slavery, that was the ultimate pipe dream. Slavery had the government on its side. It had the courts on its side. It had the forces of coercion and the power of wealth on its side. And, yet, thirty-five years after Garrison published the first Liberator and 1,820 issues later, the institution of slavery crumbled into the garbage heap of history.

The mass murder of animals will one day be added to that same wretched garbage heap.

3 comments:

  1. I fear, unless human animals move completely and quickly, to a vegan lifestyle...that the world as we know it is doomed. I wish I thought the previous sentence was melodrama, but I don't.

    The infliction of such suffering and misery on a living sentient being for some sort of "advantage" or for any reason is beyond unconscionable. There simply are no words for this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I couldn't agree more. I only wish that the resisters weren't so small in number. I try to see the hope in everything and I work real hard never to be overwhelmed by despair. But it is difficult when it feels like so many people in society are just paying these companies to do their "dirty work," and are content to look the other way when it comes to this suffering. And so few people are out there carrying the signs, or writing letters to officials, or blogging, or passing out vegan literature, etc. etc. There are so many reasons to abandon hope and so few to remain hopeful. But I suppose it's like Antonio Gramsci said: "I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will." It's hard to know what else to do to stop all of this evil around us.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This blog is awesome full of useful information that i was in dire need of.

    ReplyDelete