World Day for Farmed Animals
nobody’s going to ask you to stop eating turkey sandwiches, hamburgers or pork chops. That’s the sort of request that tends to irk devoted carnivores— i. e., the vast majority of humans who, worldwide, will consume upwards of 65 billion farm animals this year.
Not even the most passionate vegan organizer behind World Day for Farmed Animals ( Oct. 2) is expecting legions of meat- eaters to dramatically change their diets overnight, no matter how many distressing facts they offer up on their website ( dayforanimals.org) or on placards carried by supporters at the many rallies planned for Saturday.
Rather, the most productive upshot of this annual “day dedicated to exposing the suffering and death of tens of billions of farmed animals worldwide” is likely to be our collective thoughtful pause before digging into our porterhouse steaks. At best, a few thousand more consumers will take a more thoughtful approach to shopping for meat.
Founded in 1983, WDFA “envisions a world wherein animals are no longer seen as commodities” but as adorable, worthy creatures with the right to live and die with dignity. In other words, the organization— touted in Calgary last night at a Compassion for Farm Animals speaker series during which farmers from Sunworks, Grazed Right Ranch and Blue Mountain Biodynamic Farms ( home of the little piggies at left) spoke about raising animals humanely— strives to, if not make vegetarians of us all, at least make us think before we dine.
Indeed, if food- advocate and author Michael Pollan is right, thinking about or, more effectively, seeing the process ( through the walls of his imagined glasswalled slaughterhouse, for instance) would likely alter our feelings about factory farming— controversial, intensive practices that account for the fate of 99 per cent of North America’s farmed animals. “No other people in history,” Pollan writes in The Omnivore’s
Dilemma, “have lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat.”
It’s not a coincidence that a day devoted to the ethical treatment of farm animals coincides with the birthday of one of history’s most famous peaceniks: Mahatma Gandhi would have turned 146 today. He’s responsible for the often- quoted bit of wisdom, “the greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” It should come as no surprise that he was a vegetarian.