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Summary of Question:meat eating
Category:Other
Date Posted:Thursday, 6/17/1999 4:24 PM MDT

this is in reply to the advice given to one of the questions about meat eating

sikhs are allowed to eat meat as long as the animal dosent suffer.
i might be wrong
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Reply
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Some enlightening citations from Siri Guru Granth Sahib, which go beyond the generally held <belief> that our Guru had nothing negative to say about the choice to eat meat, have been offered recently on this Question Forum. The title related to the <Validity of the Rehit of Guru Gobind Singh>. Please read and contemplate the following:
http://www.sikhnet.com/Sikhnet/youth.nsf/All+by+Date/42e72f08a72345a08725677e0074ed57?Open

Since I believe that you may be from California (and a resident of the U.S.), I would also encourage you to read and understand the following information related to the U.S. system of raising beef and producing milk for human consumption. As you will see, the standard practice is neither humane or healthy for the animals in question (not just in how they're killed, but also how they live in cruelty and exploitation), the horrendous materials they are fed. Finally, the meat and dairy products of such industrial intensive forms or raising animals for food have very ominous implications for the health of the humans who choose naively to eat them. Please read the following, written by Mr. Howard Lyman, a former large-scale Montana, USA, cattle and dairy farmer, who writes little known information with the knowledge of an insider. Last year he was a co-defendant with Oprah Winfrey in a now famous jury trial in Amarillo, Texas. He was charged with <slandering> the cattle industry, under the <Texas Food
Disparagement Law>. The jury acquitted him and Oprah Winfrey. His facts withstood the challenge of a $5 million dollar lawsuit:

I'd be happy to consider your responses after you've read the following:
Sincerely,
Krishna Singh Khalsa
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FACTS ABOUT U.S. AGRIBUSINESS DAIRY & BEEF PRODUCTS : Part I
(or, Why Organic is the Only Safe Source of Animal Derived Food Products in the U.S.)

The Health Implications in Sourcing Human Food from Agri-business Cattle Products:

Beyond the fact that cattle are ruminants and therefore unsuited to digesting meat derived substances (complex proteins, high fat, no fiber), Lyman offers many startling revelations as to common feeding practices in the agribusiness cattle industry, particularly in terms of the quality (rather, the questionable, grotesque quality) of the meat based products being fed to cattle in the U.S. And, it's important to recognize that Lyman is a former cattle rancher, large scale farmer and agri-businessman himself. He knows the score from the inside of the industry. And, no cattleman has ever been able to dispute Howard Lyman on the basis of fact. His facts stand as presented. Here are some of them?

> <When a cow is slaughtered, about half of it by weight is not eaten by humans: the intestines and their contents, the head, hooves and horns, as well as bones and blood. These are dumped into giant grinders at rendering plants, as are the entire bodies of cows and other farm animals known to be diseased. Rendering is a $2.4 billion-a-year industry, processing 40 billion pounds of dead animals a year [a net 6 cents per pound],>

(from Howard Lyman, Mad Cowboy, Scribner Press, 1998; hereafter abbreviated as MC, pp. 11-12).

> <There is simply no such thing in America as an animal too ravaged by disease, too cancerous, or too putrid to be welcomed by the all-embracing arms of the renderer,> (MC, p. 12).

> <Another staple of the renderer?s diet, in addition to farm animals is euthanized pets <the six or seven million dogs and cats that are killed in animal shelters every year. The City of Los Angeles alone, for example, sends some two hundred tons of euthanized cats and dogs to a rendering plant every month,> (MC, p. 12).

> Added to the blend are the euthanized catch of animal control agencies, and roadkill. (Roadkill is not collected daily, and in the summer, the better roadkill crews can generally smell it before they can see it),? (MC, p. 12).

> <When this gruesome mix is ground and steam cooked, the lighter fatty material floating to the top gets refined for use in such products as cosmetics, lubricants, soaps, candles and waxes,> (MC, p. 12).

> <The heavier protein material is dried and pulverized into a brown powder--about a quarter of which consists of fecal material. The powder is used as an additive to almost all pet food as well as to livestock feed. Farmers call it <protein concentrates.> In 1995, 5 million tons of processed slaughterhouse leftovers were sold for animal feed in the United States,> (MC, p. 12).

> In 1997, the FDA began to prohibit the feeding of ruminant protein (from cud-chewing animals) to other ruminants, out of a concern to prevent the spread of a disease called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (<Mad Cow Disease>).

> <To the extent that the regulation is actually enforced, cattle are no longer quite the cannibals that we had made them into. They are no longer eating solid parts of other cattle, sheep, or goats,> (MC, p. 12).

> <They still munch, however, on ground up dead horses, dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, and turkeys, as well as blood and fecal matter of their own species and that of chickens. About 75 percent of the ninety million beef cattle in America are routinely given feed that has been ?enriched? with rendered animal parts,> (MC, pp. 12-13).

> <The use of animal excrement in feed is common as well, as livestock operators have found it to be an efficient way of disposing of a portion of the 1.6 billion tons of animal wastes generated annually by their industry,> (MC, p. 13).

> <In Arkansas, for example, the average farm feeds over fifty tons of chicken litter to cattle every year,> (MC, p. 13).

> <One Arkansas cattle farmer was quoted in U.S. News & World Report as as having recently purchased 745 tons of litter collected from the floors of local chicken raising operations. After mixing it with small amounts of soybean bran, he then feeds it to his eight hundred head of cattle, making them, in his words, <fat as butterballs.> He explained, <If I didn?t have the chicken litter, I'd have to sell half my herd. Other feeds are too expensive,> (MC, p. 13).

> <If you are a meat-eater [or consumer of agribusiness dairy products], understand that this is the food of your food,> (MC, p. 13).

Background:
One very important fact about all cattle (from which dairy and beef products are derived) is that cattle are ruminants, not carnivores, and not omnivores. Ruminants only eat grasses and other green plants (not including grains). Carnivores eat meat. Omnivores eat plants, grains and meat. Every animal species evolved as either raw food vegetarians, carnivores or omnivores, and simultaneously evolved an appropriate digestive system, with the required enzyme processes and intestinal systems for digestion of their own specific form of diet. Cattle are cud-chewing ruminants who have three stomachs, through which they digest leaf material in progressive stages, alternated with stages of chewing in which foods are mixed with mouth enzymes in order to digest and extract the nutrients found in grass. Carnivores rely for digestion on enzymes that are contained in the raw meats that they eat?the self-contained enzymes in raw flesh cause the meat to break down (putrefy) in order to release the various nutritional
components in the meat. These facts are extremely important, because cattle have neither the digestive structure, nor the stomach digestive enzymes (as opposed to enzymes in saliva) to digestive the cooked animal parts which they are being feed in massive amounts as protein enriched feeds by the agribusiness cattle industry.

Feeding dead animals to cattle is simply a profit based strategy to fatten cattle (and get them to produce more milk), by feeding them foods that are derived from dead animals, oftentimes diseased and/or filled with toxic chemicals, or <protein> sources that are cheap and essentially unsanitary. These are foods that the cattle would never freely choose to eat if they were exposed to them in whole form, or in the wild. Instead, the protein enrichments are sweetened with molasses and other additives, and simultaneously the cattle are being feed synthetic hormones which give them a rather ravenous hunger, under the conditions of which they would probably attempt to eat almost anything that is not nailed down or too large to get into their mouths. Thus we witness phase one of a highly organized, industrialized agribusiness system for cultivating animals in ways that are largely kept secret and out of public view and public knowledge, presumably because most humans would find the practices repugnant, inhumane
and unacceptable.



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