Should be Mandatory Viewing: Bearing Witness by Toronto Cow Save

This is heartbreaking video shot by the wonderful activists in Toronto who organized Toronto Pig Save. It should be mandatory viewing. Thank you to the brave and inspiring Anita Krajnc for bringing it to my attention. Bless you Anita and all the activists with Toronto Cow Save!

Please watch it. It does not show gore, only terrified cows on their way to death. 

And please, please, please - if you haven't already, please go Vegan!

If you already have, right on! You're a kindred spirit.

Fighting the good fight: Canadian brothers and sisters spreading the word

My previous post (below) was a bit of a downer. Please watch this wonderful and very hopeful short film about our Canadian brothers and sisters spreading the truth and winning the hearts and minds of people. All it takes is one really well-placed image or documentary or article or leaflet to open someone's eyes. I was a meat lover and omnivore right up until when I watched Death on a Factory Farm. It was the jolt I needed. Something snapped in me. I woke up. I came to grips with the profound immorality of exploiting and destroying and consuming animals. If I underwent that transformation, anyone can.

The other side has a lot of weapons in its arsenal: Mass production facilities that destroy animals in an assembly-line fashion; a huge war chest to spend on advertising and finding new ways to increase efficiency; magazines and television shows and websites that promote consuming animal products.

But we have the most powerful weapon of all on our side. Truth. It's not always easy to know how to spread the word. But as one vegan banner showing a beautiful cow states: "They're worth it."

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.

Mobilizing to Help the Pigs: In Praise of Toronto Pig Rescue

Across North America, livestock are being transported to killing factories in sweltering heat. It is bad enough that they are being slaughtered in such huge numbers, but to have to be squeezed into truck trailers by the dozens and dozens, with barely enough room to move, while the heat pounds down on them, is unthinkable.

Yesterday alone, here in southwestern Ontario, temperatures hit 38 Celsius (about 101 Fahrenheit). Factor in what they call the Humidex - an index used by Canadian meteorologists to figure out what the temperature really feels like to people once humidity is factored in - and you reach temperatures that feel like about 43 Celsius/110 Fahrenheit.

A few days ago, I blogged about Quality Meat Packers, a killing factory in Toronto where up to 6,000 pigs are processed every day.

What I failed to say is that small numbers of Torontonians are mobilizing. People in the region have formed a group called Toronto Pig Save. So far, they've launched letter writing campaigns to public officials and key political figures, picketed at various slaughterhouses, taken videos and photographs of distressed pigs, and attempted to speak to workers at these facilities in an effort to start a dialogue about what's going on. Their efforts have drawn media attention to the suffering of the animals.

Most of these activists are committed vegans who understand that winning new converts takes time and lots of hard work.

Yet when you begin to think of the suffering that so many animals are enduring on a daily basis, in what essentially amounts to assembly line murder, you get that sick sense of restlessness, that stabbing feeling that maybe small pockets of sane, reasonable, rational human beings aren't sufficient to counteract disturbing patterns of human destructiveness.

But the wonderful folks at Toronto Pig Save (see their fantastic Website here) are trying. They're part of a larger vegan and animal rights community in the city - and indeed, the region - working to open people's eyes to the suffering. That community has grown over the years. New people are waking up all the time. They are opening their eyes. They're starting to realize that reclaiming our humanity involves embracing nonviolence and compassion, and veganism is the ultimate expression of those values.

Those poor pigs are still out there in the sweltering sun, suffering, with no sweat glands, no means to cool down, knowing nothing but agony in their final days. But like the abolitionists of the 19th Century, who faced overwhelming odds in their efforts to undermine slavery, decent committed people are not giving up on them.

Postscript: To speak out against this madness, I wrote the following letter to The Globe and Mail, Canada's version of The New York Times. I don't know if they'll print it. If it doesn't appear shortly, I'll give The National Post a try.

Dear Editor,

Right now, as most of us struggle to stay cool, a tragedy is unfolding in our midst. Each day in this sweltering heat, truckloads pigs are left outside in the sun next to Quality Meat Packers Limited on Tecumseh Street in Toronto. The pigs squeal in agony, packed into nightmarish, oven-like conditions. Dazed, overheated, their snouts bleed from pressing against the walls of the truck trailers. They have no sweat glands, so their internal body temperature spikes. All the while, the heat blazes down on them relentlessly, making the final moments of their short lives unbearable. Efforts by concerned citizens to bring relief to the pigs are met with resistance by plant managers.

Six thousand pigs a day are processed at Quality Meat Packers. They know nothing but misery before their lives are cut short to fill our plates with meat we do not need to consume in order to survive. Sadly, Quality Meat Packers is not unique. This deplorable treatment is standard operating procedure for pork producers. “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” said Mahatma Gandhi. Ask yourself if this is the kind of Canada you want.

Andrew Hunt

The Lonely Fight is Always Worth It

Gwen Dunlop is a vegan from Toronto who is on a mission.

Each Sunday, she appears outside the buildings that house Toronto Abattoirs Ltd. and Quality Meat Packers Ltd. and holds her own one-woman vigil to speak out against what happens inside of those places.

If you want to read more about Gwen's experiences, visit her Blog here.

She started this vigil on December 13, 2009, and has been at it day in and day out ever since then. As Gwen writes on her Blog:

My vigil takes various forms but mostly it entails meeting the truckers as they arrive, witnessing the unloading of the females of the pig species, (called sows by some, who I call my soul friends and my tribe) and then seeing the truckers (who have no option but to pass right by me, my conscience and I hope and I know, in some cases, theirs) turn out of the driveway on route to wherever home is, to sometimes far-enough-away parts of Ontario.

Her Blog truly is one of the most powerful I have ever read. Gwen is brutally honest about her experiences. She is also humble. She writes without a hint of self-aggrandizement. She has engaged in lots of soul searching over the past year-plus. Her experiences have been a compelling mix of harrowing, boring, pathos-filled and intense. She has been yelled at by angry truckers and workers at the slaughterhouses. She has struggled to stay true to her beliefs and not let the violence she witnesses on a regular basis erode her humanity.

The most powerful passages on her Blog discuss her experiences during her vigils. Gwen writes:

I don’t always or only stand in the same place. I have had deeply meaningful, if not at times, intense interaction with the truckers, “super” visors, security, police, City of Toronto public workers (who share the same driveway), residents from the area, one of the care-takers of the numerous feral cats having sought refuge nearby, passers-by and even on one occasion, a waiter from a nearby restaurant. I’ve heard personal stories and extended hugs to someone who came across me and was moved to tears by what I was doing, but moreover through hearing the cries of pain and terror, of the animals themselves. I have had a slaughterhouse worker scream at me: “Who are you…some stupid, f’ing, psycho bitch?” only to very quietly say moments later: “I have nightmares you know…we all do”.

I have seen the inside of the holding area, the ugly red welts and deep gashes near sensitive parts of the animals’ bodies, their precious behinds fire-engine red and sore. I have seen the pile-up of bodies of those who didn’t survive transport, who I originally hoped might have found some modicum of comfort with each other until the realization set in that they were dead. I’ve run up one of the ladders attached to the holding compound and with my head stuck in a truck, screamed for leniency regarding the severity of the beatings. On at least a few occasions, I’ve lost my composure and done my own fair share of screaming, (I am no saint) raising my voice not in anger but as an appeal for humanity, theirs and mine.

The cynic might ask: What good does Gwen do by going out and conducting a one-woman vigil? What has she changed? The pigs still get slaughtered. The meat still goes to market wrapped in plastic and styrofoam. The killing continues. The system remains unchanged. So why do it? Why show up each day and hold these vigils? Why not simply concede defeat and move on?

Years ago, in 1958, World War II veteran-turned-pacifist Albert Bigelow sailed his ship, the Golden Rule, to the atolls in the Pacific where the United States was conducting atomic tests. He and a small group of his pacifist friends put their lives on the line - and put themselves in harm's way - to speak out against the insanity that was the arms race.

When they did this, back in 1958, it was a very gutsy thing to do (hell, it would be a gutsy thing to do now). This was back in the depths of the Cold War, when anticommunist hysteria had reached a fever pitch, and few people dared protest the arms race.

But Bigelow and his friends took that risk. Did they stop the insane escalation of nuclear arms? No. Did their actions halt the tests in the Pacific? No. So exactly what good did they do?

Right after Bigelow's daring protest, Dissent - a tiny, humanistic monthly magazine run by Irving Howe and other anti-Stalinist left-wing intellectuals - published a piece that explained the importance of Bigelow's protest. The article's author, Martin Oppenheimer, eloquently wrote:

If, as they admit, their effort may bring no real change, why do it at all? . . . They did it because they could do no other, because no one else did it for them, because politics failed to do it, because the hour was late and because they had to. Effectiveness had little to do with it. This was the individual act undertaken against a state and a condition which seemed omnipotent; above all, this was propaganda of the deed, one's physical body thrown into a void where no other bridge seemed to exist. (Source)

Today, 53 years after that article appeared in Dissent magazine, Oppenheimer's words could also be used to describe Gwen Dunlop's actions. Sure, she is not going to single-handedly stop the slaughter. Yes, pigs will continue to die in huge numbers to satisfy the human demand for a kind of food that is not necessary for our survival. The insanity will continue.

But in this tiny little corner of a huge, dark, cold universe, one woman is taking a stand. A candle is flickering in the wind. One person is standing against the madness. On a few occasions, she has even been joined by others who have come out to show their support. Thus, a few more candles are lit.

Does this create a revolution? Maybe not. But imagine how much darker, how much emptier, this universe would be if that one little candle weren't lit. If there is any hope of stopping the tragedy and the madness that surrounds us, it comes from the Gwen Dunlops. Great changes have always come from the lonely, the weary and the discouraged, who somehow find, within themselves, the courage to fight for their beliefs, even against impossible odds.

Especially against impossible odds.