Cruel Tastes

Meat Comes From Animals

"I like animals. They taste great!" reads the bumper sticker on the truck in front of me. "I have a hunch this clown's bumper sticker is probably not half as lame as he is," I think to myself. "Yet another guy I can knock out of the dating pool."

But despite being tacky, is this immodest carnivore really that different from the rest of America when it comes to his behavior towards animals? I mean, he probably loves his dog, tears-up at the end of Old Yeller, and buys dolphin-safe tuna just like a lot of my friends. While many of my animal-loving friends are too soft-hearted to read the "Why Vegan" pamphlet I put in my holiday cards (in case you aren't on my Christmas list, you can view this info at whyvegan.com or factoryfarming.com) because they can't stand the thought or sight of animals suffering, ironically they eat these same animals just as surely as insensitive bumper sticker guy does - as I did for many years myself.

God love us for caring about animals, but how does our "kind-heartedness" matter to animals if we turn a blind eye and hand our money to factory farmers to raise animals "out of sight and out of mind," knowing the conditions are too miserable for us to even think about with a clear conscience or steady stomach? When we as the meat-eating public condone this closed-door policy of inhumane animal-rearing through our silence and financial consent, we play a twisted game of "don't ask, don't tell," allowing factory farmers the freedom to increase profits at the expense of animal welfare. The losers in this game are the billions of birds, pigs, cows and fish who suffer along with our sense of ethical integrity. Because, while most of us softies would rightly lose our appetite if we had to butcher a living creature ourselves, we seem not to have trouble paying a hitman to do our dirty work for us.

In my case, I finally realized swallowing my own hypocrisy at mealtime wasn't doing much for my peace of mind. But if we don't have blood on our hands, surely we must have blood-money in our wallets because even a remedial course in economics tells us that animals would stop dying if we just stopped buying (and currently, a million farmed animals are killed every hour of every day in American slaughterhouses).

Because he was a lifelong advocate for ethical vegetarianism, Mahatma Gandhi's birthday (Oct. 2) has been celebrated as "World Farm Animal Awareness Day" for over 20 years. Gandhi felt, "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." With the advent of factory farming in recent decades, I think he'd say America's moral progress has taken a big step backwards.

So, fellow animal lovers, let's no longer turn a deaf ear to the cries of the farmed animals whose welfare we have unjustly left to the mercy of the factory farmer for far too long. Let's prove the "greatness of our nation" and put our natural compassion into action by demanding humane farming reforms (as is being done in Europe) and phase out the worst of the intensive confinement systems, such as veal crates and battery cages for hens. (See farmsanctuary.com.) And more importantly, since "money talks," let your dollars speak for your conscience by buying less animal products and more vegan foods every day - forcing corporate animal agribusiness to hear loud and clear that your peace of mind is more valuable than a piece of meat.

Carrie Packwood Freeman

Carrie Packwood Freeman is a graduate student in UGA's Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication.

Animal Control

Last Week's Scorecard

Athens-Clarke County Animal Control responded to 76 calls:

8 complaints of animal cruelty

1 bite case

3 complaints of barking dogs

6 ordinance violations

40 animals impounded

36 dogs

1 cat

1 opossum

1 pigeon

1 raccoon

35 dogs placed

11 adopted

10 reclaimed

14 turned over to other agencies

The Kid Is Alright

Our New Paul Revere

Okay, so 9/11 didn't change everything after all. Two years, a couple of wars and a few trillion dollars later, you can still smuggle box cutters onto a commercial airliner. A 20-year-old kid proved it: we're no safer now than we were then. Airline security is a sad joke - and our government isn't even trying to do something about it.

Nat Heatwole, a junior studying political science and physics at Guilford College in North Carolina, is a postmodern American patriot, a Paul Revere for the age of terror. From Feb. 7 to Sept. 14, FBI officials say, Heatwole brought box cutters, knives, matches, bleach and molding clay - the last item as a "simulated plastic explosive" that ought to have provoked scrutiny - through airport security at the Raleigh-Durham and Baltimore-Washington airports on six separate occasions. In mid-September, Heatwole sent the Transportation Safety Administration an email titled "Information Regarding 6 Recent Security Breaches," intended to draw attention to the need for increased security. But nobody at the TSA reads incoming email. (They're promising to change that.) Heatwole's signed missive only turned up a month later, after the FBI began investigating two of the Ziploc bags containing box cutters, bleach and clay that he taped under the restroom sinks of two Southwest Airlines planes in New Orleans and Houston.

Heatwole intentionally breached security - over and over again - to prove that frisking children and old ladies in search of nail files and Swiss Army knives won't prevent another 9/11. According to an FBI bomb technician who questioned him after his arrest, Heatwole "stated that he was aware that his actions were against the law and that he was aware of the potential consequences for his actions, and that his actions were 'an act of civil disobedience with the aim of improving public safety for the air-traveling public.'"

He faces 10 years in prison, but he deserves a medal.

Anyone who flies regularly knows that airplanes are no safer than they were before the attacks. As the guy who mailed himself by air freight from Newark to Dallas-Fort Worth proved, only a fraction of cargo is ever checked. Anyone willing to sling bags for nine bucks an hour gets free access to the tarmac. Airport runways are separated from local roads by simple chain-link fences; doors between waiting areas and parked planes are left pried open, their alarms intentionally disabled.

Should Osama wish to choreograph a sequel to his fall 2001 blockbuster, all he needs is a new cast to replace the original 19.

The Bush Administration presented us with a stark choice: freedom or security. Trade away a little of your freedom, they argued, and we'll keep you safe from future attacks. So we gave John Ashcroft a USA Patriot Act that allows the FBI and CIA to tap our phones and read our mail. We remained silent as government goons arrested American citizens without charging them with a crime or allowing them to see a lawyer. We funded a massive new federal bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, whose duties include spying on us. When CNN's Pentagon correspondent announces that captured "enemy combatants" are "cooperating one way or another" - tacit admission that some are being tortured - we don't wince. We gave these guys everything they asked for, but they still can't keep box cutters off our planes.

Trading civil liberties for increased security would be a bad deal, but we've given away our freedoms for nothing. "The bottom line is, America is safer, more secure, and better prepared than we were on Sept. 11, 2001," says White House flack Scott McClellan, but nothing could be further from the truth. The man we blame for 9/11, Osama bin Laden, is still loose; Bush's "dead or alive" pledge has devolved to, as of Oct. 21, "We believe [Pakistani President Musharraf] will help us, if in fact [bin Laden] happens to be in Pakistan... Who knows where he is?"

The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with Bush's support for Ariel Sharon's aggressive attacks on Palestine, have increased the supply of anti-American militants willing to die as long as they take a bunch of us with them. The only reason we haven't suffered the next big attack is because They Who Hate Us are still planning it.

I flew from Ohio to New York the day after Nat Heatwole's perp walk. At Dayton International Airport, where three TSA screeners were recently fired for harassing an AirTran pilot for FWS (flying while swarthy), America's first line of defense against terrorism was furiously wanding a terrified three-year-old in a pink dress who'd been pulled from the line for a random check.

"That's funny," the guy behind me smiled as they made the girl stretch her little arms out to the side.

Osama thinks so, too.

Ted Rall

(Ted Rall, author of To Afghanistan and Back, writes the new Rallblog at www.rall.com.)