nice one, Iowa

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/09/16/abused.pigs.ap/index.html

"I hate them. These [expletives] deserve to be hurt. Hurt, I say!," the employee yells as he hits a sow with a metal rod. "Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! ... Take out your frustrations on 'em." He encourages the investigator to pretend that one of the pigs scared off a voluptuous and willing 17- or 18-year-old girl, and then beat the pig for it.

yes, do that

dude needs to watch "unser taglich brot", like, stat.

yucky

I'm like the rest of the world in thinking bacon is delicious, but fuck those guys.

"So many times, it took all of my willpower not to step up and do something," he said, adding that he also saw the supervisor shove a cane into a sow's vagina. "I was just shocked. What do you say to that?"

"Yuk, don't do that"?

maybe it was a candy cane, and done in the festive yuletide spirit

this is why no one visits the justen house during the holidays, of course

"Merry Christmas, Grandma!"

I'll have to ask my colleague what he thinks about this. He grew up on a farm in rural Oklahoma but is now a philosopher. He believes that it's important to restrict our eating of beef to cows that were well-treated, because cows are morally good animals. But for pork, eat whatever kind you want, he thinks; pigs deserve to be treated awfully because they are awful, morally evil animals. He's pretty wacky but he makes great steak.

One law for the cow and the pig is tyranny!

dudes

killing a cow with a bolt to the head or electricity or slitting a pig's throat and bleeding it to death is ok

but spray-painting a pig is not cool

signed, free-range tofu

ok n/a i get it but seriously beating the shit out of an animal and torturing it and sodomising it v killing it quickly...??? i mean, honestly? "spray-painting a pig" doesn't actually reflect the story here at all.

PETA are the worst

my point, which is admittedly near-trolling, is that how do you get people to draw these distinctions, where you tell people it's ok to treat animals like objects that don't feel pain and don't deserve our respect in some situations but not in others

at a bris?

(sorry y'all)

my point, which is admittedly near-trolling, is that how do you get people to draw these distinctions, where you tell people it's ok to treat animals like objects that don't feel pain and don't deserve our respect in some situations but not in others

your point is incredibly stupid

touche

ps good job making a useful thread title

it is more of a question than a point, really

(xp) everything I do, I do it for you

Just posting on this thread to mention 'Brass Eye' before Louis does

I was going to tell about seminary but how pointless would that be.

No ammonals were involved.

can this be moved to idiot thread repository plz

"Craven, the Hormel spokeswoman"

It's OK guys, we have plants that treat people just as badly.

Statement of the Iowa Attorney General’s Office
September 9, 2008

Child Labor Law Charges Filed Naming Agriprocessors Officials and Plant in Postville


Statement of the Iowa Attorney General’s Office:

The Iowa Attorney General’s Office filed a criminal Complaint and Affidavit Tuesday in Allamakee County District Court in Waukon, alleging more than 9,000 violations of Iowa Child Labor law at the Agriprocessors, Inc., plant in Postville.

Defendants named in the Complaint and Affidavit are Agriprocessors, Inc.; Abraham Aaron Rubashkin, principal owner and president of Agriprocessors; Sholom Rubashkin, manager of the slaughtering and meat packing plant at Postville and an officer; Elizabeth Billmeyer, human resources manager of Agriprocessors, Inc.; and Laura Althouse and Karina Freund, management employees in the human resources division of Agriprocessors, Inc.

The Complaint alleges a total of 9,311 child labor violations, involving 32 youths under the age of 18. (Seven of the 32 also were under age 16.) The alleged violations date back to Sept. 9, 2007, for some of the children, and to as recently as May 12, 2008, when Federal officials raided the Postville plant. The violations all are simple misdemeanors, each punishable by up to 30 days in jail and/or a fine of $65 to $625.

Iowa District Court Judge John Bauercamper scheduled an initial appearance for all defendants in Allamakee County Magistrate Courtfor 2 p.m. Wednesday, September 17, 2008.

The Complaint alleges violations of five sections of the Iowa Child Labor law, Iowa Code Ch. 92: employing a child under age 18 in a meat packing plant; employing a child under age 18 in an occupation that exposes the child to dangerous or poisonous chemicals; employing a child under age 16 who operated power machinery; employing a child under age 16 who worked during prohibited hours or more hours in a day than permitted by law; and employing a child under 16 who worked more days in a week than permitted by law. (See breakdown of alleged violations, below.)

The Affidavit said: “During the period of September 9, 2007, through May 12, 2008, the persons listed as employee-victims in the attached Complaint were employed and permitted to work at Agriprocessors’ slaughtering and meat packing establishment. All were under eighteen years of age on each of the dates listed. Throughout their employment these children were exposed to dangerous and/or poisonous chemicals, including, but not limited to, dry ice and chlorine solutions. Several of these employee-victims were also under sixteen years of age during the dates for which they are identified as such in the Complaint. Throughout their employment, these children, while under sixteen years of age, were employed in the operation of or tending of power-driven machinery, including, but not limited to, conveyor belts, meat grinders, circular saws, power washers, and power shears.”

The Complaint and Affidavit also enumerates more than 1500 violations relating to hours worked, including employee-victims under age 16 who worked more than eight hours on specified days, and more than forty hours in specified weeks. The Complaint also alleges records show instances of children under age sixteen working before 7 a.m. and after 7 p.m., and, while school was in session, working more than four hours in a day and more than 28 hours in a week. “The records of Agriprocessors, Inc., also confirm, as alleged by each of the employee-victims, that each of these employee-victims worked more hours of overtime each week than that for which they were compensated,” the Complaint said.

my point, which is admittedly near-trolling, is that how do you get people to draw these distinctions, where you tell people it's ok to treat animals like objects that don't feel pain and don't deserve our respect in some situations but not in others

the same way there are people who support lethal injection but are against the electric chair? how is this hard to understand?

i mean, the point of supporting humane animal farming tactics is to discourage people from treating animals like objects who do not feel pain, and acknowledge than in fact animals do feel pain. it's not necessarily mutually exclusive, eating meat and understanding that animals are not objects to be tortured.

my point, which is admittedly near-trolling, is that how do you get people to draw these distinctions, where you tell people it's ok to treat animals like objects that don't feel pain and don't deserve our respect in some situations but not in others

The reason I said this was incredibly stupid is because it is a wholly prejudiced argument that presupposed that the meat industry is telling its workers that animals are like objects that don't feel pain and don't deserve our respect in some situations. Equating practices which are intended to kill the animals as quickly as possible and/or minimize pain with beating and abusing an animal to vent your frustrations is intellectually dishonest at best.

right, and the problem with reductionist arguments like that is that it tends to raise the hackles of non-vegans who go out of their way to support humane farming practices and support animal-rights organizations. and i would know, i am no stranger to alarmist reductionist arguments, amirite!

i agree w/ you, schef, but i was shocked by grandin's admission that slamming piglets on the ground to kill/weed out the "weak" ones is standard industry practice. so it's fine to do that, but hitting the sows is crossing the line? okay.

xposts

no, i agree that is completely disgusting. that's not ok at all. i had no idea that was standard industry practice. my diet has virtually no pork in it at all so i admit that i don't know much about the practices of this industry and was shocked to read that.

what do you know about HATCHERIES?

(xp)That doesn't seem like a particularly good way to dispose of livestock, I agree. In fact, I'd guess that most people on this thread would agree with that. That clearly seems like something that was supposed to be a quick way to kill the animals that just doesn't work and should therefore be changed.

Again, the difference here is that that particularly unpleasant thing is supposed to be an unemotional part of the process, not a way to relieve your stress, and the pigs aren't supposed to survive it, whereas the genital poking and the back-beating are clearly not meant to be part of the animal processing procedure at all (unless there's some heretofore undisclosed research proving that Spam made from cane-poked pig vaginas is tastier than Spam made from unblemished pig vaginas).

(because let's face it, Spam is made from pig vaginas)

oops - my comment reads like i'm accusing you of condoning those practices! not what i meant.

xpost to ally

i mean, i think that throwing a baby pig into the ground to weed out "weak" pigs is torturing animals and i can't imagine that if you support local smaller market farmers when you buy your bacon or whathaveyou, that they do these practices too? but i wouldn't know and am very interested in finding out what some of the organic/free-range/yadda yadda farmers in the ny area do, for example.

xpost what do you want to know about hatcheries???

xpost again, oh i know, i'm just thinking aloud mostly in response to it!

HATCHERIES are magical places that turn eggs into meat

xxxpost

pigs are cool

ugh okay I misread the piglet slamming thing, ick

I also avoid pork as much as possible btw

well actually that's not strictly true, I just rarely choose to eat it

i love pork. the piglet smacking is totally indefensible though.

I only eat pork if it is delicious which reminds me adam schefter do u wanna get pork bbq

pigs is good people

homosexual II otm.

jw i invited you over for bbq the other night jerkwad and got no reply, is yr phone broken? lol maybe i accidentally PICTURE MESSAGED you the invite.

the piglet smacking thing gets easier to deal with if you just think of it as hitting the piglet in the head with a really big hammer, but in reverse.

Hitting a really big hammer with a piglet's head?

when did you invite me for bbq -- also please recall YOUR blackberry has a history of not having texts get through or getting through MULTIPLE TIMES.

I love pork too but shit like this is why we buy a pig from a local farmer every year and have it slaughtered and processed locally. I guess I don't *know* that he doesn't beat the animals up, but I do know the guy, which re-humanizes things a lot.

http://www.idealword.org/box/bacchus.gif

yeah, i originally worded it as "a factory floor sized hammer", but it sounded better this way. xxpost

i did make pulled pork for our monday night football party and now i feel vaguely guilty, even if i did buy the "local organic" pork. mainly because i actually think the supermarket brands of organic meat are just as bad as the regular farming industry -- but sometimes i'll look the other way and cross my fingers that it's better practices.

xpost i do not have a blackberry crazypants! i invited you like right before the game started. rich came over, he got my text! anyway we should go do something soon anyway.

The thing is any voluptuous 17 or 18 year old who could be scared away by a pig probably isn't putting out anyway.

THANK YOU

The last text messageS I have from you are from saturday

schef: 911 was an inside job.
schef: 911 was an inside job.
schef: 911 was an inside job.
me: U mad. I have a date.
schef: A date w 911?

I seem to get other text messages just fine perhaps it is in the outbox of your phone?

i know you dudes are right and there are shades of gray and whatnot, but i guess it's just not that surprising to me that people who kill animals all day, even humanely, might start to think of them as objects appropriate for throwing on the floor or sticking things into

ok who put ilx in the time machine

that's what i was thinking.

xpost

im a vegetarian but im not gonna lie and say meat tastes gross. IT IS GOOD-TASTING. But I always struggle to think of a neato platform to explain why I am a vegetarian and I guess here it is: because I think pigs are cool!

i really don't want to get into more vegetarian vs. meat-eaters nonsense

http://i.gleeson.us/gb/0602/some-pig.jpg

as a proud meat eater i gotta say i agree with n/a here

me too

peta + meat = meta

Given the potential backlash of articles like the one I posted, I'm more surprised that the owners of the farm didn't keep a closer eye on the staff. (They will now, of course.)

(altho where I say "more surprised" I really mean "disappointed")

You know, this marks the first time that PETA has done something in the name of animal rights that hasn't struck me as being naive, self-serving bullshit. Either I'm mellowing to them or they're figuring out what actually makes people care about their cause.

maybe it is a pointless distinction to insist that animals born and raised entirely to be killed and eaten not be beaten and tortured while they're alive, but so what. it's gross.

didn't they also make that last slaughterhouse torture broo-ha-ha public too? the one where they were slaughtering crippled cows?

im sorry, was I going there?
not my intention

didn't they also make that last slaughterhouse torture broo-ha-ha public too? the one where they were slaughtering crippled cows?

They may have but I didn't hear or read about it.

this was the deal i was thinking of: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-ia-abusedpigs-oversi,0,4071527.story

the last slaughterhouse thing i recall reading about was the Kosher Iowa place that had lots of illegal immigrants working there

it was a PETA investigator who made the video apparently

Nice one, Iowa.

Contract of Wifely Expectations

(^^^ Not a Roger Adultrey thread, btw.)

this story doesn't make me any more sympathetic to PETA, TBH. The problem they have is that they aren't able to control their own rhetoric much of the time, so even when they're completely in the right, the sweeping statements remind me of all of their missteps of the past.

holy shit PP

petas ads are creepy and sexist

I would take them more seriously if they treated women as humanely as they would like to see animals treated.

maybe it is a pointless distinction to insist that animals born and raised entirely to be killed and eaten not be beaten and tortured while they're alive, but so what. it's gross.

The distinction is in having respect for the animal's sacrifice.

We have a lot of completely normal shit and even some cool shit now too, guys, I swear.

(Not affiliated with Iowa tourism borad)

Iowa: the pig-slamming, wife-enslaving state

I would take them more seriously if they treated women as humanely as they would like to see animals treated.

i dunno, that video they put out of a naked mena suvari being slammed onto a concrete floor really got to me on a real level

lolz

did her bizarre alien forehead damage the floor?

n/a i see your point, that if you are already working in conditions such as those at mass farms then it's really not surprising that the distinction in behaviors would become blurred.

also 911 was an inside job.

congratulations, gays of iowa!

Now you can slam pigs on the floor of your factor as a married couple!

Nice work, Iowa, I have always been on yr side

yeah righteous thread btw

I have no idea why I was so hostile towards n/a's original post.

was this the n/a-dan conflict that eventually led up to "my fucking shitting mind is blown"?

memories

classic ILX arguments, gay marriage, the Butter Cow -- so many good things Iowa has given us

hahahahaha