Targeting Children (duplicate post)

I think violence is so much worse when the intended targets are children. It's been decades now and Ireland/N. Ireland still can't get over the war which never really ended. But who honestly thought it was cool to rig a kid's bike with a bomb? Horrible.

And if you think about the fact that the booby-trapped bike would have only gone off in the case that a kid were to use it, don't you have to wonder if it would've damaged or killed anything but the kid? Worse than a case of using a bomb on a kid to kill your enemies, this was direct targeting of the kid and only the kid.

Of course, isn't targeting children the same thing that any extremist crazy group does? Compare this to Peta who handed out coloring books to children telling them that their parents were murderers and including graphic images for the kids to color of their parents killing animals and eating them. No surprise that there was a huge outcry against the coloring books, but not as huge an outcry as there should've been because Peta still legally exists.

Do agriculturalists target children? Yes, of course, but not in the same way. We encourage them to explore the farm life, to eat healthy which is best done with an animal protein diet and to embrace the quality of life they have been given the opportunity to live in this country.

Compare this to the crazies with ALF and their efforts to target children of employees at Huntington. They unabashedly claimed in their press releases that they target kids instead of the parents because this is what works. The company is too strong, and the adults better equipped to handle the stress of aggression and stalking than the children.

The next time you see a Peta ad with a naked girl telling you to stop eating meat... are you going to listen?

Toxins in Germany

News is nothing if untimely, so forgive the brevity but I thought this link was worth posting on my blog. In another example of the critical need for food security, Germany is investigating the feeding of toxins to livestock that has already disrupted trades with 2 countries and possibly led to contaminated products in the UK. Nothing is more scary than having to question whether or not your food and water are safe to consume. This is why farmers here in the US go to such great lengths to protect their animals and crops and why there are so many government regulations in the food supply.

Brace yourself

As calamities compound, the world food price will continue to rise with supply shortages. It's amazing to me how quickly Econ 201 comes back to me. I can just see those diagrams of apples and lines are various as the DC freeway system defiling what had started out as a perfectly normal graph. Well, just in case you doubted why it's worth keeping food production here in the US, this would be one of those good reasons. Agriculture keeps pulling this economy along.

And for your reading, check out this BBC article on GM pigs to reduce phosphorus build-up. We discussed this in class last quarter and the idea is very exciting, although the reality has yet to be charted.

Gateway to Animal Welfare

Courtesy of my new e-newsletter: Gateway to Animal Welfare, I received a large quantity of new animal welfare articles which excites me, even if you don't care nearly as much about it as I do.

First on my list today is an article outlining how just one more use of labels to assure consumers of animal well-being has failed. It might be selling to some people, but not like it was supposed to work. You see, we have this great idea that we can sell just about anything with labels. Look at Certified Angus Beef, well, that was a success, right? So then why can't we seem to sell animal welfare certified labels with the same success. Isn't that what the general public wants to see? Better welfare for the animals may be what people want to see but either they don't want to pay for it in the grocery or they don't believe we're really providing better care. And every single time that they find out our standards aren't what they thought they should have been, then the public loses even more faith in our welfare labeling. In contrast here is another article endorsing buying these labels... hold your breath for when they decide that these standards don't match either. "High free-range standards" aren't scientifically proven to be any better for the bird either, especially as they find that the birds in some cases are even worse off in free-range. Think that over...

It sounds like they will find out in 2015 how much it costs for better eggs. Sure, we've speculated and calculated, but once supply, demand and input/output changes, then we'll finally see the true change. And will the well-being of the chickens actually be improved or is this just another example of HSUS publicly helping animals and behind the scenes having only hurt the future of healthy animal production. And then there is the extremely sticky situation of inter-state trade. So the battery eggs can't be sold in California, what about shipped?

And then there's those just "wow" moments... It's really hard for me to take this seriously.

Finally for today, here's another press release from the Ohio deal with HSUS...