Wake Up and *See*

I'd like to meet:

*Anyone who understands our need to evolve. Animal lovers. Animal crusaders. Vegans. Vegetarians. Thinkers. Lovers. Truth-driven devotees. Questioners of our force-fed exsistance.... aaaand all those in between."A righteous man takes care of his beast, but the heart of the wicked is merciless."
-Proverbs 12:10"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
"To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being."
-Mahatma Gandhi, statesman and philosopher"One day I chanced to see the slaughter of a chicken, which made me decide to be a vegetarian."
-Dalai Lama"Our task must be to free ourselves . . . by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty."
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
-Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel Prize 1921"May all that have life be delivered from suffering."
-Buddha"The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men."
-Leonardo da Vinci, artist and scientist"For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
-Pythagoras, mathematician"What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
-Jeremy Bentham, philosopher"In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they're the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer, author, Nobel Prize 1978"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."
-Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President"I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further."
-Mark Twain, author"One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with.' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle."
-Henry David Thoreau"Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?"
-Plutarch"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
-Thomas Edison, inventor

Movies:

Books:

I understand some of us will always include meat in our diet.
So if you must eat meat... -Support TRADITIONAL family-centered farming. This ensures the quality of animal life. -Check out the sources of your "Organic" or "Free-Range" eggs/meats as well. A football-sized metal & concrete structure isn't exactly a natural habital of the animals you are consuming. -And F.Y.I., if you eat fast food... you are supporting routine cruelty and inhumane treatment/conditions of the ANIMALS you are eating. It is your responsibility as an evolved, "top of the food-chain-I'm-going-to-eat-meat" human-being to be educated and responsible for your pre-packaged/slaughtered-for-you animals.The consumers have the power to change the quality of U.S. "Agriculture". The power is where the almighty dollar is. If the demand for well-cared for animals surges, factory farms will close their doors,... and the traditional U.S. farmer will rise once again.*SOME MEAT-CONSUMER RESOURCES*http://www.nimanranch.com/
(supplier of Chipotle, Trader Joes, etc.)http://www.cowboyfreerangemeat.com/http://www.brokenarr owranch.com/http://www.happymeats.co.uk/http://organicvalley .coop/Bert's Beef
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewpro file&friendid=155117426_______________________Facts of the meat and farming communities:**By reducing your consumption of meat, dairy products and eggs by 50%, you reduce your risk of a heart attack by 45%... by following a pure vegetarian diet (no animal products at all) you reduce your risk by 90%.**Women who eat eggs 3 times or more a week have a risk 3 times higher of developing ovarian cancer than those women who consume eggs less than once a week.**A man who eats meat has a 50% greater chance of dying from a heart attack. A man who does not eat meat only has a 15% chance of dying from a heart attack.**Women are twice as likely to be vegetarian than men.**Meat/Dairy centered diets are linked to many types of cancer, as well as heart ailments, diabetes, obesity, gallbladder disease, hypertension, and more deadly diseases and disorders.**Meat and dairy products raise the acid level in human blood, causing calcium to be excreted from the bones to restore the body's natural pH balance. This calcium depletion results in osteoporosis. Contrary to the common belief that dairy products are necessary to prevent osteoporosis, dairy consumption actually increases the likeliness of this crippling disease.**It is estimated that meat-eaters consume 95 animals in one year.**660,000 animals are killed in the United States every hour for their flesh.**About 7 billion farm animals die or are slaughtered each year in the U.S. for the production of flesh food.**There are virtually no laws against cruelty to animals raised for food in the U.S. The Animal Welfare Act, which governs the humane treatment of animals, excludes animals intended for food consumption.**Many factory-farmed animals never see a blade of grass in their lifetime.**In the egg industry, male chicks are considered useless so are often thrown into a grinding machine- ALIVE!**For each quarter-pound fast food hamburger sold that came from cattle raised on former rainforest land, 55 square feet of rainforest was destroyed.**Malnutrition and starvation will kill approximately 14 million people this year. If Americans reduced their intake of meat by just 10 percent, the land, water and energy freed up from growing livestock feed would feed 100 million people.**A typical hog factory farm generates raw waste equivalent to that of a city of 12,000 people. The waste from U.S. factory farms in a single year would fill 6.7 million train boxcars - enough to circle the Earth 12 and a half times.**A lot more water is required in animal agriculture than in plant agriculture. It takes only about 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat and around 390 gallons to produce just one pound of beef. In fact, It takes less water to produce the food that a pure vegetarian needs for one year than to produce the food that a meat eater needs for a month.**More than 40% of the world's grain is now fed to animals to maintain modern meat and dairy based diets.**260 million acres of forest in the United States have been cleared in order to maintain a meat-centered diet.**Twenty vegetarians can be fed on the amount of land needed to feed one person on a meat-based diet.**1,000 rainforest species become extinct every year because people destroy the rainforest for cattle grazing.**Rainforests, vital to earth's oxygen supply, are being destroyed at an alarming rate - the top cause is the raising of animals for food.**More than one-third of all the raw materials and fossil fuels used in our country go to raise animals for food.**Plants yield 10 times more protein per acre than meat.**Spinach grown on an acre of land can yield 26 times more protein than beef produced on the same acre.**Cows contribute to global warming otherwise known as the "greenhouse effect" due to the amount of fossil fuels it takes to maintain a meat diet. It takes three times more fuel than it does to produce a vegetarian diet.**We have permanently lost 3/4 of U.S. topsoil; 85 percent of this loss is directly due to the raising of animals for food.

Heroes:

************************************************ In the September 1976 issue of the industry journal Hog Farm Management, John Byrnes advised: “Forget the pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory.”The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of 'real food for real people,' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital. -Neal D. Barnard, M.DAccording to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service, each year about 10 percent, or 900 million, of the animals raised for food never reach the slaughterhouse. They die on the farm due to stress, injury, and disease. The on-farm death rate ranges from a low of 4 percent for cows and calves to 12 percent for turkeys, 14 percent for hogs, and 28 percent for some types of chickens.Agribusiness corporations claim that animals in factory farms are “as well cared for as their own pet dog or cat.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The life of an animal in a factory farm is characterized by acute deprivation, stress, and disease. Industrialized agriculture has made the determination that it is more “cost effective” to accept some loss in inventory than to spend money on treating animals humanely.It is also estimated that the "average" meat consumer eats over 95 animals per year.