Coincidence? Bah!

A dear friend emailed me this link earlier today.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-talk-eng-slaughter-column-20100826,0,225489.story
It was a really odd coincidence, since I had gone to sleep last night thinking of Clarice Starling's titular childhood experience in "The Silence of the Lambs". No, I had no good reason thinking about this at bedtime. The mind takes us to odd, dark places in the wee small hours.
I was thinking about all the pain we cause in order to serve ourselves young, tender meat. I ain't no hippie tree-hugger, I hate patchouli and white people dreads and I understand that we eat animals in order to keep them from eating us. All the same, the idea of all the many thousands of tiny lambs bleating as they are slaughtered in the most painful way possible (at least in the kosher tradition) gave me pause.
Getting rid of the factory farms and the methods in which the meat industry operates is next to impossible. They got the juice and are integral to our economy as well as the average diet. It's not really a secret that their products can be hazardous, (this USDA report from last April ain't great news http://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/24601-08-KC.pdf )but very little is ever done to curb their practices or tighten their oversight, mainly because they give a free side of beef to every FDA and FSIS inspector.
I'm not going to get in to how the cow farts have contributed to ozone depletion. We all know about it, and it's a little too predictable that we would bring about such a vulgar apocalypse.
Alls I'm saying is, we've made progress on the veal front, no one likes what goes on there. Maybe we can work on all the other animal children we eat, just let them get to adulthood before we slaughter them, like college interns or graduates that join Teach for America