m***@truth.now
2008-11-28 17:02:35 UTC
How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians
By Martha Rosen, Posted November 27, 2008.
Unlike Alaska's governor, most Americans don't want to see the
transformations their turkey went through to get to their Thanksgiving
dinner table.
Posing for photographers with her felled caribou, her child inches
from its bleeding mouth, Sarah Life-Is-Precious Palin is not confused
about where meat comes from. So the turkey being slaughtered in full
view of the camera as she conducted an interview at Triple D Farms in
Wasilla this week probably doesn't faze her.
But most Americans don't want to see the transformations their turkey
went through to get to their Thanksgiving dinner table.
How it lived, how it was shipped, who hung the struggling bird upside
down on the conveyer to transport it to the awaiting blade, etc. --
are not thoughts that improve the taste of the cranberry sauce.
Nor will the economy get so bad people will have to take jobs as "live
hangers" like Sam, not his real name, last year.
"Today, I saw about 50 dead turkeys on the trucks, and about 80 live
birds fell onto the floor," he writes in a diary he kept while working
at House of Raeford Farms in Raeford, N.C., the seventh-largest turkey
producer in the United States.
"A worker tried to throw a turkey up to the double-sided dock from its
rail side. The bird was about to hit the rail when another worker
kneed the bird and then kicked it, knocking it back down to the floor.
The worker threw the turkey a second time, but it hit the underside of
the dock and dropped straight down to the cement floor for its third
time that day. The bird lay in watery feces for about two hours before
being picked up and hung on the line -- the turkey could keep its head
up and blink; it was otherwise motionless."
Mom or Grandma may put hours of care into roasting, basting, stuffing
and perfecting their butter-brown bird. But care is not the operant
word at the slaughterhouse as workers throw, swing and "box" at the
birds as they unload trucks in video Sam shot.
One worker holds a turkey to be crushed under a truck's moving tires
just for the heck of it; others pull heads and legs off turkeys for
fun. Workers insert their fingers into birds' cloacae (vaginal
cavities), remove eggs and throw them at each other in a depraved
game.
Because turkeys are drugged and bred to grow so quickly, their legs
can't support their own weight, and many arrive with broken and
dislocated limbs says Sam. When you try to remove them from their
crates, their legs twist completely around, offering no resistance --
useless and limp.
The turkeys must be in a lot of pain but they don't cry out, observes
Sam. In fact, the only sound you hear as you hang them, he says, is
the "trucks being washed out to go back and get a new load."
Most people admit they dont want to watch laws or 40-pound
Thanksgiving turkey carcasses being made. Nor do they want to watch a
helpless turkey unceremoniously fed into a wood chipper behind Sarah
Palin's head as KTUU-TV broadcast.
But will they eat the same bird when it is passed to them on a plate
next to mashed potatoes on Thursday? You betcha.
By Martha Rosen, Posted November 27, 2008.
Unlike Alaska's governor, most Americans don't want to see the
transformations their turkey went through to get to their Thanksgiving
dinner table.
Posing for photographers with her felled caribou, her child inches
from its bleeding mouth, Sarah Life-Is-Precious Palin is not confused
about where meat comes from. So the turkey being slaughtered in full
view of the camera as she conducted an interview at Triple D Farms in
Wasilla this week probably doesn't faze her.
But most Americans don't want to see the transformations their turkey
went through to get to their Thanksgiving dinner table.
How it lived, how it was shipped, who hung the struggling bird upside
down on the conveyer to transport it to the awaiting blade, etc. --
are not thoughts that improve the taste of the cranberry sauce.
Nor will the economy get so bad people will have to take jobs as "live
hangers" like Sam, not his real name, last year.
"Today, I saw about 50 dead turkeys on the trucks, and about 80 live
birds fell onto the floor," he writes in a diary he kept while working
at House of Raeford Farms in Raeford, N.C., the seventh-largest turkey
producer in the United States.
"A worker tried to throw a turkey up to the double-sided dock from its
rail side. The bird was about to hit the rail when another worker
kneed the bird and then kicked it, knocking it back down to the floor.
The worker threw the turkey a second time, but it hit the underside of
the dock and dropped straight down to the cement floor for its third
time that day. The bird lay in watery feces for about two hours before
being picked up and hung on the line -- the turkey could keep its head
up and blink; it was otherwise motionless."
Mom or Grandma may put hours of care into roasting, basting, stuffing
and perfecting their butter-brown bird. But care is not the operant
word at the slaughterhouse as workers throw, swing and "box" at the
birds as they unload trucks in video Sam shot.
One worker holds a turkey to be crushed under a truck's moving tires
just for the heck of it; others pull heads and legs off turkeys for
fun. Workers insert their fingers into birds' cloacae (vaginal
cavities), remove eggs and throw them at each other in a depraved
game.
Because turkeys are drugged and bred to grow so quickly, their legs
can't support their own weight, and many arrive with broken and
dislocated limbs says Sam. When you try to remove them from their
crates, their legs twist completely around, offering no resistance --
useless and limp.
The turkeys must be in a lot of pain but they don't cry out, observes
Sam. In fact, the only sound you hear as you hang them, he says, is
the "trucks being washed out to go back and get a new load."
Most people admit they dont want to watch laws or 40-pound
Thanksgiving turkey carcasses being made. Nor do they want to watch a
helpless turkey unceremoniously fed into a wood chipper behind Sarah
Palin's head as KTUU-TV broadcast.
But will they eat the same bird when it is passed to them on a plate
next to mashed potatoes on Thursday? You betcha.