Avian Flu

So I'm getting quite into this whole 'save the animals' thing after reading 'Eating Animals' by Jonathan Safran Foer. My main objection, if you can call it that, however, was that the book described the situation in the States, which of course is far worse than in Europe.

Well, today Avian Flu (H7N7, the slightly less deadly form of Avian Flu, but still deadly) was found at a chicken farm in Deurne, which some of you might know as the village where I was raised. 28,000 chickens were killed because of this. 28,000 chickens! That's your average amount of football supporters that fit into one stadium! You don't want to be in that situation for too long a time, but it's alright if your dinner spends its entire (but very short) life that way? Seriously, those chickens cannot have had a 'normal' or 'healthy' life anyway. Do you really want to eat these animals? This time they found a disease that could infect humans, but most of the time they have al kinds of others diseases that just don't happen to form a threat to humans as far as we know so it's 'fine' to eat them according to the health authorities. They don't even try to hide this fact from you: everyone knows you should thoroughly heat chicken in order to kill all the bacteria the flesh is swarming with. Is the really the kind of food you want to offer your children? Let alone the antibiotics and other chemicals these chickens, and other factory farm animals for that matter, are filled with.

Everyone knows that what we're doing to these animals is inherently, ethically and morally wrong. But as long as we collectively ignore it, and enough people are still ignoring it, we feel that we're okay with ignoring it. It doesn't help very much that the only people that seem to be calling out for these injustices are the Party of the Animals, who are depicted as being a bit flimsy at the very least, and 'hippy-organisations' as some people call them. I don't really sympathise with either of them, but I urge you to think about this. I also want you to know that 'organic' or 'biologic' meat is not an awful lot better. Most of the time, this just means that they have had other food than just genetically manipulated corn or 'had access to the outdoors' (meaning that they had a window to look at the outdoors).

If I had the opportunity, I would love to do the proper research and make a European version of this truly amazing and eye-opening book, but unfortunately I haven't. So I'm trying to do my bit this way. I'm not trying to make you give up meat, I just want people to admit that factory farming is not right, in whatever light you look at it, and that changes have to made. One way of endorsing this would indeed be to stop eating meat, as I have done, others would be to just be conscious of what you're eating. And maybe eat free range chickens and eggs a bit more.