On "Feces Farming" and Honest Work

Robert Ben Mitchell, D.O., is on a mission to educate the American public about the currently-acceptable practice--worldwide--of feeding farm-animal feces to other farm animals. He believes his site, www.fecesfarming.com (catchy, eh?) will be shut down, and he recommends printing the articles he links to that provide evidence for what some of us have been reading about for probably five years (maybe longer--that's when I learned about it, but check out the FDA's own statement on the topic from nearly a decade ago).

What I'm upset about isn't that humans are eating meat that contains feces. What upsets me is that people have somehow decided that it's okay to feed animals:

Rendered animal protein from the slaughter of food production animals and other animals    Meat meal, meat meal tankage, meat and bone meal, poultry meal, animal by-product meal, dried animal blood, blood meal, feather meal, egg-shell meal, hydrolyzed whole poultry, hydrolyzed hair, bone marrow, and animal digest from dead, dying, diseased, or disabled animals including deer and elk

Dried ruminant waste, dried swine waste, dried poultry litter, and undried processed animal waste products

(The above is from Table 1 on this page.)

I first wrote a logical deconstruction, then the cable went out and I lost the post because I didn't save it. Rather than recreate it, here's what was really going through my head while I was being calm and diplomatic . . .

I've been thinking a lot about moral development and about the people involved in breeding, feeding, mutilating, torturing, transporting and slaughtering nonhuman animals. At every twist and turn, I find myself asking, "How does a person (usually a man) do that?" What kind of mental acrobatics are required to convince yourself that your behavior is acceptable? How do you, day after day, justify feeding feces and rendered meat to animals whose natural diet is grass? And when you hear shrieks of pain or smell the noxious air in their barely ventilated spaces, how do you not collapse with guilt and grief?

What do you dream of at night after you've skinned animals alive? If you believe in a god, where does that belief fit in? Would your god find your behavior acceptable? Do people who torture animals go to church on Sunday and are they active in their communities? (Probably.) Do they selectively forget or alter what they've done in their minds to get them through the day?

When we talk about moral development, outside of Howard Lyman and several other exceptions, we don't ask farmers to evolve (their financial well being is anathema to moral development). We have pressured farmers to pretend to evolve through cage-free egg campaigns and the like, but I think now it's pretty clear that there's no real moral imperative manifesting itself anytime soon from the "production" side of the equation. Perhaps that's why we concentrate on the "consumption" side, where there's a higher probability of conversion.

Many vegans say that eating meat is the same as killing the animal yourself, but it's not. Paying someone to kill someone for you may make you just as guilty legally, but when it comes to the physical act, it's not the same. It's far easier to eat animals than to kill them.

So where are the breeders, branders, mutilators, transporters and slaughterers on the spectrum of moral development? Do we dare say they are a bit developmentally delayed?  It's not just that they have a moral system that they don't apply to "others;" what they do is so much worse. They routinely torture, in the course of business, and it's perfectly legal. Who is to blame for that? Is it the entire system/country that is developmentally delayed and they are mere products of their environment? Is it fair to hold individuals responsible? If they branded, mutilated and slaughtered dogs they would be held responsible.

Culture may be responsible for some of the highest expressions of some of our abilities (that we used to think were unique). But it's also responsible for the perpetuation of the most hideous behavior, which is then justified as "honest work." There's something very wrong with what we consider honest work in this country.

Comments

[Dr. Robert Ben Mitchell, D.O.]

Thanks for your thoughts, comments and concerns about feces farming. I am organizing a grass roots group on FaceBook called "Ban Feces Farming in the US". I hope you'll take the time to look at it and see the BAN PLAN.

Our group is asking for legislation at both the federal and state levels to permanently ban this hideous practice. Every month our group members are sending the following email to their federal and state legistlators:

- - - - start email - - - -

Dear (NAME),

Feces farming is the practice of feeding animal manure and urine to agricultural livestock, including cattle, poultry and fish. In the United States, over 4 billion pounds of chicken manure are fed to beef cattle each year. Dairy cattle and other livestock share a similar fate. We then consume the meat and milk products from these diseased animals. The practice of feces farming is the worst case of mass-scale animal abuse in US history, and it is a looming public health disaster. Agricultural and governmental proponents of this issue claim there are no documented cases of people being harmed by feces farming. For decades, the tobacco industry made similar claims about the link between smoking and lung cancer. I WON'T BE FOOLED AGAIN. I urge you to learn more about this issue by going to http://www.FecesFarming.com and then I want you to propose legislation to ban this abusive, unhealthy, and disgusting practice within our borders.

- - - - end email - - - -

The actual legistlation hasn't been written yet, but as part of it we want peole to know that this is a global problem that the United Nations has been promulgating for almost 30 years. It affects nearly every citizen in nearly every country, including the United States. We are demanding that our legislators take action and ban feces farming. Laws are needed that prevent this from continuing and require farmers to dispose of their animals' feces in an ecologically sound manner, including a reduction in livestock numbers to levels that allow for sound ecological management of farm animal feces.

I'll hope you'll consider joining the group and share this information with your readers.

"Ignorance is ubiquitous . . . knowledge is an uphill battle . . . keep climbing!" - Dr. Robert Ben Mitchell