By Mandeep S. Gill Gastro Valley, CA
One of the meats that people eat in this country is veal. Veal is pale, pinkish white meat which is eaten as a luxury food. It is the flesh of a calf which is raised in some of the most inhuman conditions imaginable.
Imagine you are a calf. If you were to live a normal life, you would enjoy the outdoors, romping and playing outside, being close to your ‘mother for about six months before you grew up enough to live on your ‘own.
This won’t happen to you, because you’ve had the fortune of being born a veal calf. Remember that all the following is necessary so that ‘your flesh will be pale pink and tender when the gourmet eats it.
You will have about three days with your mother before you are shipped to a shed where you will live the rest of your short life indoors. You are crammed into a crate just a bit bigger than your body. You cannot turn around to lick yourself, as you would normally do in the ‘outdoors, you cannot run, or get exercise, or do anything but stand up and sit down in your crate, This is so you don’t get any exercise which might toughen your flesh. Further, to produce the pale color of your flesh, the veal producer wants to keep you anemic, because it is iron which produces the red color of normal flesh. To this end, you are fed a milky gruel your entire life, because if you had any access to normal roughage you would obtain some iron. The urge to obtain iron is so strong that you will lick any metal fixtures in your stall, so your owner, will make your stall completely out of wood. In fact, the urge to obtain iron is so strong that you will try and do something that you would never do out in the wild: because urine has a high iron content, you will try to tum around and drink your own. But your owner has already thought about this: when you are young, he chains your neck so that you can’t turn around; when you get older, he removes the chain as the narrow stall serves the same purpose. Also, normally you would suck on something, just as babies of all animals have the urge suck on something, but there is nothing in your stall for you to suck on.
‘You get bored, so your owner turns off the lights for 22 of 24 hours, leaving the lights on only for feeding times. So it is easier for your owner to handle, your floor is made up of wooden slats so that your droppings will fall through to the concrete floor below. Sometimes the slats are too widely spaced and your leg will slip through them, scraping and bruising your ankles and knees. Oh well, that’s just part of the business.
‘After about four months of this miserable existence, before you ‘would have even been weaned if you lived in the outside world, you are shipped to the market and killed, your body to be cut up and end up in the finest gourmet restaurants or in little plastic packages at the supermarket.
What I’ve described here is an extreme case of factory farming, 8 practices that more and more of our farmers are turning towards because it brings them money. The situation is similar, though not quite as extreme, with pigs, chickens, cows, and turkeys which many of us eat every day without thinking about the pain and suffering the animal went through while it was alive. We should know better, because, being of a different culture, we know that we can easily do without meat in our diets, And vegetables, provide better nutrition than fatty, cholesterol filled flesh. And how many of our kids would be so keen about eating hamburgers at McDonalds if they saw a cow being killed to make them? Not very many, that is why slaughterhouses are always hidden away from the public view so that we won’t connect the flesh ‘we buy in little packages at the store with a living, suffering animal.
In the end, I’d ask that you consider whether Guru Nanak would have eaten the meat of an animal which suffered so in its being raised, when the Sikh religion expressly forbids the catting of halal meat, that of animals killed cruelly and slowly according to Muslim tradition. I think you know that Guru Nanak would never have placed more importance ‘on taste or convenience than on the suffering of our brothers and sisters in the animal world.
If there is one request I’d make, it’s that you not buy veal, as this meat is such a clear example of the inhuman depths to which people will go in the selfish quest of moneymaking.
Article extracted from this publication >> December 15, 1989
