Man's Inhumanity to Animals with Veda Stram by Julia Griffin

In our country, animals are treated so inhumanely that most of us cannot bear even to hear about it. Yet we go on using the products that support this outrage to our fellow beings.

Although experiments done on animals are inconclusive for human beings, most grants that are given for scientific projects involve animal testing.[1] Vivisection is routinely employed for testing the products we use, not just pharmaceuticals but cosmetics and household products. And most of this scientific experimentation on animals involves extreme cruelty.

The cruelty practiced in the meat and dairy industries is equally horrifying. In 1905, Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle was published, exposing the practices of the meat industry in the United States.[2] The book caused a huge public outcry, but a cursory glimpse proves that meat-industry practices are as frightening today as they were then.

Parts of dogs and cats are rendered into fat and food for cattle, poultry, and pigs. Vast amounts of antibiotics are fed to the animals we later consume ourselves. To increase their growth rate, beef cattle receive hormones ranging from progesterone to testosterone. In tiny lots, they stand in their own feces waiting to be slaughtered.

Most animals — chickens, beef, and pigs — are still alive when the blades begin to slice them up. And their feces routinely go into the meat that is eventually packaged. Any living bacteria that have survived the antibiotics can be found actively growing in the meat.

Dairy cows are deprived of their calves after only one day. The male cows are held for slaughter, while the females become milk cows. Dairy cows also are given large amounts of hormones to increase their milk production. The same hormones cause infection, requiring treatment with antibiotics.

Eventually, the consumer ingests the hormones, antibiotics, and feces that go into our meat and milk. Heart disease, breast and prostate cancer, and early onset of menstruation are just a few of the resulting problems. Additionally, antibiotics ingested from meat and milk decrease our own natural ability to fight disease.[3]

To learn more about animal testing and the processing of animal foods, we spoke with Veda Stram, coordinator of AnimalsVoice.com.

Julia: Veda, was there a special event that began your interest in helping animals? What was the path that changed your life?

Veda: I was asked once in a seminar if I would be willing to take on something as a life project that I couldn't complete in my lifetime.

A few days later, while I was still pondering this question, I saw a picture of an animal experiment. That night, I went to an animal rights meeting, and my life took a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. I became a vegan and devoted my entire life to animal rights.

For many years afteward, before taking my present job, I worked as little as I could so that I could give my life to the support of animals.

Julia: Can you tell me a little about your life as an animal activist? Have there been some surprises?

Veda: First of all, I didn't expect to be perceived as a threat. I have had to study human nature in order to learn how to educate people about animal rights.

I thought in the beginning that if I could just talk about the facts and show pictures, those who saw the pictures and heard the facts would be willing to change. What I didn't take into consideration was that when I talked seriously about animal rights I was threatening people's jobs and lives. If I spoke against pharmaceuticals or slaughterhouses or feed companies or cattle farms, I was threatening the ability of those who worked in related industries to pay the rent and buy their babies' diapers.

So I've encountered a lot of resistance that I didn't expect. Like the animals themselves, people do what they have to do in order to survive, and they resist anything that might threaten that survival. This resistance makes it hard to educate them.

But we are much more than our thoughts and opinions. We have souls. So when we can look past our prejudices, we have an opportunity to see the Light, and to bring in new understanding.

Julia: Let's start by talking about vivisection practices.[4]

Veda: There are three different approaches. The first is the fraudulent approach. This is to say that vivisection is largely fraudulent and damaging to human beings. While children starve and old people barely eke out a living on welfare, over $2 billion dollars are spent each day on animal experiments

There is also the It's cruel, but we don't care approach. Those who hold this view are aware of the cruelty involved in animal testing, but they basically believe that it's just a part of what is, and that it's necessary. I've heard people say, "I would rather they experiment on animals than on my child."

The third group talks about reducing the use of animals and replacing them with other testing methods. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of action there.

Genetic research is becoming more popular, and that's both good and bad. It's good because genetic researchers are more interested in DNA than in animals. But the cloning experiments are horrible. The animals that have been created are a travesty.

Julia: Who carries out most animal experiments?

Veda: Proctor & Gamble and Huntington Life are two of the major companies that carry out animal experiments. Ironically, the companies that support vivisection and animal abuse are incredibly wealthy. These include the petrochemical companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the meat industry, and agricultural companies like Monsanto that produce the hormones.

The National Institute of Health tends to give grants only to scientists whose research involves animal experimentation. I say "experimentation" rather than research because that's what it is. They have tests to see how long a puppy can live with no food or water, or how its behavior changes when its eyes are sewn shut. It's horrible.

Julia: What about the research? In your opinion, is any of it valuable?

Veda: No. Vivisection degrades human beings by implying that we have no control over our health, and that experiments on animals can cure disease.

The whole industry is mixed up. Doctors aren't helping. Most of our illnesses are caused from eating meat, dairy, and eggs. Look at the hormonal problems everyone has. In countries where not much meat is eaten, menopause is not a problem, heart disease is significantly decreased, and girls start their periods at a normal age — not eight years old, as often happens now in the United States.

We are all individuals. For example, I may have a piece of wheat toast and a glass of orange juice for breakfast and be fine. You may do the same and have an allergic reaction. People all respond differently. But modern medicine treats individuals as though they all had the same reactions.

It's frightening to read the list of reactions and side effects of drugs: seizures, uncontrollable diarrhea, headaches.. . . And people are supposedly taking these drugs to get better!

Real health is about eating well and cleanly. It's about learning how your own body responds, and how to live with it. Health is not about taking pills and hoping you'll be better.

Look at the number of commercials for allergy pills. The sensible approach to allergies is to learn what causes them and avoid those triggers — not to expose ourselves and then take pills. If your cat causes allergies, then wash your cat and vacuum your house every day.

Julia: What about vaccines and antibiotics?

Veda: It's important to remember that an animal's body is not identical to our own. For example, fifty-two percent of drugs that are approved turn out to have side effects not predicated by the animal tests. That's because absorption, metabolism, and elimination rates differ in animals. We are not cats, dogs, or rabbits. Most experiments are done on mice, but we are not mice.

Julia: What are some of the drugs that have caused problems after being approved?

Veda: Three examples are Fenfluramine, a dieter's drug, Opren, an arthritis drug, and Cylert, for children with attention deficit disorder.[5] These drugs all brought about a number of deaths before they were withdrawn from the market.

On the other hand, both smallpox vaccine and penicillin were developed without experimentation on animals. So it's obvious that very important medicines can be developed without animal testing.

Julia: I understand from my research that animals usually suffer horribly and die in these experiments, and that pain relievers are not administered. One source said that the animals screamed for hours. Do you think the animals are aware of what is going on around them?

Veda: I can't imagine they're not. They have to watch what happens to the animals around them, and then die themselves. It must be horrible.

Julia: Let's talk about the meat industry. Here in my part of the country, animals are actually fed chicken litter with parts of dead chickens in it. And I've read that food made of animal parts is routinely fed to livestock?

Veda: I've listened to people denying this, but my understanding is that dead dogs and cats and the heads and hooves of pigs, horses, and cattle are routinely rendered or cooked into food products. The so-called "enhancer" produced this way is referred to as "meat products" or "meat by-products," and has many other names. Poultry ranches, cattle feedlots, and dairy and hog farms use food enhancers mixed with bone meal as a source of protein. This animal food feeds the animals that meat-eating humans will consume.

And meatpacking plants are not regulated. Flea collars are said to go into the pit along with diseased animals and plastic-wrapped meat. Food enhancers are not tested for pesticides or toxins. Surely, no one would be willing to eat this or give it to children, yet we are consuming these food enhancers when we eat meat.[6]

Julia: What can you tell me about the hormones and antibiotics that are given to the animals?

Veda: The USDA says that chickens are no longer given hormones, but I don't know anyone who raises chickens who actually eats them.

Beef hormones are used to increase weight gain in cattle. Monsanto is one of the major producers of the hormones. There are six hormones used for growth: estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, zeranol, melengesterol, and trenbolone acetate. All of these hormones are thought to greatly increase the risk of prostate cancer, breast cancer, and heart disease.

Hormone residues in meat and meat products can disrupt the natural hormone balance in the body, in turn leading to multiple biological effects upon our health. Children and pregnant women are put at greater risk by these hormones. They cause early puberty in girls. And some forms of cancer are associated with estrogen in meat.

I think that the risks from hormones are significant. But even if you perceive that the risks are small, why would you expose your children to them? Europe has banned the use of hormones in the food industry. Why can't we do that?

As for antibiotics, they say that seventy percent of the total U.S. production of antibiotics is fed to animals in the meat industry. This totals about 25 million pounds annually and dwarfs the amount of antibiotics in human medication. The use of antibiotics is supposedly justified in that it makes the meat safer, ensuring that the animals do not have diseases. But the diseases in our meat animals are caused by their diet and living conditions.[7]

The effects of these hidden antibiotics on human consumers are hidden. The overhead simply from dealing with antibiotic-resistant bacteria ranges from four to five million dollars annually. When we constantly dose ourselves with antibiotics through eating meat, we encourage the growth of microbes that are resistant to those drugs. Then if we pick up those microbes, antibiotics won't cure the ailment that results. So antibiotic resistance from eating meat puts our health at risk. Some antibiotics still work, but soon we will be resistant to those, as well.

The big businesses that produce antibiotics and hormones are causing all of this. It's all about money. And both human consumers and the animals are suffering.

Julia: What about the actual slaughtering process itself?

Veda: When I speak of this, I am not talking about an animal that has grown up on a farm and then been taken to slaughter. I am talking about animals that have spent their lives in tiny pens and are then taken to a slaughterhouse.

They are crowded into trucks so tightly that their skin and sometimes their bodies freeze on the way to the slaughterhouse. But they are very carefully cut away from the truck and processed so that none of the precious meat is left behind.

If the animal is a cow, then it will be electronically stunned, or stunned by driving a metal bolt into its head. Then it is hung on a chain to be cut into pieces. But many, many of the cows are not stunned, and are still mooing as they are hacked into pieces. Chickens are hung upside down and are supposed to pass through electrified water that would kill them. But of course they are screaming and trying to get away, so most of them don't die in a "humane" way. They, too, are hacked to pieces alive.

Julia: What kind of person could do that on a daily basis?

Veda: Sometimes very nice people who need to make a living. It's important not to allow our beliefs to influence our perception of who might work in a slaughterhouse — I did that, in the beginning, but I've learned to be careful about forming those kinds of opinions.

One person I knew worked in a slaughterhouse to video the procedures, and said he encountered some of the nicest people there that he'd ever met. But they regarded the animals the way they looked at furniture. They weren't educated about animals. They just didn't see them as being "real."

So people need to be educated. Whenever there is a big exposé in the media, people tend to change their habits. Protest pictures of a calf in a tiny pen caused many people to stop eating veal. It's not that the public wants to support vivisection or these methods of the food processing industry. It's often that they simply don't know how bad it is.

Julia: You've indicated that meat production is not very sanitary. Could you elaborate?

Veda: "Not very sanitary" is an understatement. It's filthy.

Three hundred animals per hour are processed, and so it's natural that some of the time their intestines are inadvertently slit. When that happens, the feces cover everything. That's why meat directions say to "cook fully." Once, when nineteen million pounds of E. coli-contaminated meat were recalled, PETA recommended wrapping hamburgers in toilet paper so that consumers would know what they were eating. They thought consumers should know that every time they eat meat, they are eating poop.

Also, the animals' bodies contain antibiotic-resistant material along with the bacteria that were not killed by the antibiotics.

Julia: If we look at animals as sentient beings, what are we doing? What are the spiritual effects of how we treat animals?

Veda: Silence is the voice of complicity. We justify violence, and then we wonder why the world is the way it is.

We are all connected and composed of the same spiritual energy. What we do to the animals we ultimately are doing to ourselves. And it shows. We have drugs that are harmful to us because the testing is wrong, and we have meat that gives disease because it is contaminated.

Julia: Can you tell us about vegetarianism and how you think that it changes things?

Veda: To begin with, I don't say, "I don't eat meat." I say, "I don't eat animals."

A vegan life is a cruelty-free life. It's not always easy, but it's a very clean way to live. It involves reading lists of ingredients and taking time to prepare our meals. I wrote a small book on vegan meals to help people get started if they choose to do so.

Not eating animals does help to create a better world. The topsoil is preserved because less land is needed agriculturally to grow grains for animals. The forest is protected because the land is not developed. The water is protected from the polluted runoff of animal ranches. More animals can be saved through vegetarianism than any other way.

Julia: What are other changes that we can make to change the animal industry?

Veda: At the Animals Voice Online website there are ten thousand links to websites that deal with this subject. Some of them may speak to you.

If you decide to become an activist, you should find a group of people with whom you share values. For example, some people find going to jail worthwhile for the publicity it attains for the animals. Personally, I find that expensive, and I don't think the exposure merits the time or money, but others feel differently.

So in other words, find people who express their interests in a way that works for you. Even if you don't want to be an activist yourself, you can support others.

And do look into vegetarianism. It's a highly effective and personal method of changing the meat industry.

Veda Stram is the administration and outreach coordinator for Animals Voice Online. She was formerly outreach director for Orange County People for Animals, and is well known for her volunteer efforts.

Veda is the author of What to Eat When You Don't Eat Animals and Voices from the Garden: Stories of Becoming a Vegetarian. She can be reached by email at vedas@gte.net or by phone at 253-539-0218.

For more information, see Animals Voice Online.

Footnotes:

See article at iiNet website.

Go here for the complete text of Sinclair's book.

See articles about meat additives at the Canadian Health Coalition website.

The word vivisection literally means "cutting apart living animals." At the turn of the century, the meaning of the term was widely known. Over time, the definition of vivisection has come to refer to any animal experimentation or animal research, including non-invasive psychology research, product testing, or dissection. See the American Anti-Vivisection Society website.

The footnoted list of 50 Disasters of Animal Testing at the Vivisection-Absurd U.K. website, documents drug fatalities from these three drugs (items 24, 38, and 40) and forty-seven others.

See The Dark Side of Recycling by Keith Woods, originally printed in the fall 1990 Earth Island Journal.

See footnote 3.