People are mocking this post, but the main reason the United States won the World Cup in 2010 was their exciting quarterfinals performance 8 years earlier at the 2002 tournament
Lots of things are wrong with the world right now but continuing pigs in crates for their entire lifetime is abominably cruel. I hope this barbarism goes away and never comes back.
In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.
This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.
The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.
A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.
These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.
They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.
They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.
Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:
> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”
—
The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.
It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.
SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).
The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.
With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.
Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.
It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.
All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.
That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.
If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.
@zenx I once had to physically put myself between an uncle/aunty and the young couple they were harassing on the metro. It's sadly all too common. But it's also downstream from caste as the dominant regulator of sexuality -> marriage -> children.
No you don’t get it when Trump says “a whole civilization will die tonight” he is being hyperbolic and posturing unlike when Iran says “death to America” which is actually a very serious threat and should definitely serve as the basis for an invasion
@zenx I'm sure the intent is to get people off the land into low wage urban jobs so that 1) they can consolidate agri land for business and 2) factory labour won't have access to farm produce that they can use to resist while on strike.
An extremist group in Washington, DC has claimed credit for the terrorist attack on the Iranian bridge, promising further attacks on civilian infrastructure if its demands aren't met
"In the iron cages of a fur farm, countless foxes are huddled together. They know nothing of "fashion," nor do they know that their fur will become someone's collar. All they know is the pain when the steel trap clamps down on their leg; the pain when the knife slices through ->
Always thought it was sad that Ayn Rand—one of the most successful authors of children's fantasy books of all time—had little enough saved in the bank in her old age that she had to rely on public assistance until her death, but I'm glad it was there for her.