Mahk
GOOD....
Re: Largest beef recall in US history today
GOOD....
I have nothing to declare but my genius - Oscar Wilde
Re: Largest meat recall in US history today
i hate to defend some omni's but some of them really just are uneducated ignorant idiots and it truly is not their fault that they have been raised in a home and society that makes them blind to the truth about the animals. they are taught not to care and are too weak of people to fight how they are raised.
honestly...unless you are one of the lucky people that were raised in a veggie home...if you did not decide to care at one point then would anyone have made you?
am i making any sense?
mmmmmmm...cupcakes
Re: Largest meat recall in US history today
I don't think we vegans should wish the harm of any animals, homo sapiens included.
I think most omnis have no clue what goes on in an slaughterhouse. They certainly try to shield it from the public's view as best they can but then these undercover videos get released and the only way they can deal with it is to fantasize that the abuse they are seeing is a lone exception rather than the norm.
In grade school (1-12 years in US) we were never shown any of the reality of how it all works yet they exposed us to videos of the holocaust. How odd.
Re: Largest meat recall in US history today
I agree, most of us ate meat at one point or another. The idea of Veganism is not something that is normally taught to the general public and it is a personal choice. Most of my family and friends eat meat and I am sure that a lot of your guys family eat meat as well, do you wish bad upon them? Most likely not.
I think it is just important that we remember that not everyone is as knowledgable as us on animal cruelty and health, although it is EXTREMELY hard to not scream and yell at people when they chow down on a burger... I suppose we should be as civil as possible and help teach people.
"i'm rejecting my reflection, cause i hate the way it judges me."
Re: Largest meat recall in US history today
What appalled me is that when I heard a school district head talk about this on the radio, they were discussing how they didn't know how they'd make their "chili" without meat, and how now, they'd have to spend more of the student's money to buy more expensive meat on the market!
I kept shouting at my car radio: make vegan chili! make vegan chili!
context is everything
Re: Largest meat recall in US history today
i have to say, i dont think that its fair to wish harm upon anyone who eats meat either, and its true that most people really do not know all of the things that go on in the slaughterhouses. but, i also have to say that it really does bug me that when you present people with the actual facts..and videos and things like that..most often it still makes no difference on their decision to eat meat. to me, that is not only turning a blind eye to all of the animal abuse..but that is choosing to eat something that you know for a fact is tainted. and just because they like the way it tastes? i was not raised in a veggie household. it has just always been my instinct not to want to eat flesh. and also, to want to stand up for animals, or any beings, that can not stand up for themselves.
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.~ Mahatma Ghandi
Re: Largest meat recall in US history today
Thats how I feel. As soon as I realized what went into the food I had been raised on, I stopped eating. Once I understood living creatures had to lose their life's and rights to satisfy my hunger, it ceased to be eaten.
I think a lot of people give too much weight to ignorance, and shy away from pointing the finger. I really think a large % of people understand how their "food" is created, and are far too lazy and apathetic to do anything about it, much less change their diets.
Anyone who truly understands where/how "meat" is produced, and continue to eat is quite literally a murderer, and needs to be stopped.
Re: Largest meat recall in US history today
God, that's awful. How is it that people are not jailed for this behavior? If People were caught doing this to other humans, they'd be arrested so quick...
Re: Largest meat recall in US history today
Yes, the whole thing sickens me too. I was thinking about Fast Food Nation when I first heard about this, and how there was "shit in the meat".
20080808 meat recall publised in us news sources
a friend forwarded me the news of a meat recall. everytime I hear of these they really hurt me. I remember reading "the jungle" when I was in high school and that was written about 100 years ago and it seems that humans have learned nothing since, having to repeat the same lessons over and over again.
http://www.thedailygreen.com/healthy...ecall-47070101
Re: 20080808 meat recall publised in us news sources
It's amazing anyone will buy stuff called "Coleman Plate Navel Combo" or "Beef Clod" in the first place.
I agree, though: people sometimes don't seem good at learning from their mistakes.
Mad Cows & Livid Lambs - Are animals rising up against humans?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/mai...sv_animals.xml
Marauding elephants, aggressive sea lions, snap-happy crocodiles... As animal attacks on humans reach frightening levels, scientists are beginning to understand exactly what the beasts are thinking. And it's not good. Will Storr reports
In a tiny village in rural Assam, two terrified children will tonight sleep in a tree house. It doesn't matter how much their mother scolds them; there's no way they're going to bed down there. Not after what happened. They can still remember that night, of course - being picked up by their mother, and how hard she covered their mouths with her hands to stop them screaming. They can remember the other sounds, too.
The elephants had come in from the forest again. Then they saw one, a vast dark hulk looming out of the black towards their door. Their Dad tried to push it away. That's when the elephant carried him round the side of the house and killed him.
Elephants haven't always behaved like this. But in recent years, in India and all over Africa, too, some menacing change has come over them. And not just elephants - it's almost any species. This disquieting pattern has only recently been detected, in part because it is so disparate and weird. But it's now widely accepted that the relationship between humans and animals is changing. One of the world's leading ethologists (specialists in animal behaviour) believes that a critical point has been crossed and animals are beginning to snap back. After centuries of being eaten, evicted, subjected to vivisection, killed for fun, worn as hats and made to ride bicycles in circuses, something is causing them to turn on us. And it is being taken seriously enough by scientists that it has earned its own acronym: HAC - 'human-animal conflict'.
It's happening everywhere. Authorities in America and Canada are alarmed at the increase in attacks on humans by mountain lions, cougars, foxes and wolves. Romania and Colombia have seen a rise in bear maulings. In Mexico, in just the past few months, there's been a spate of deadly shark attacks with The LA Times reporting that, 'the worldwide rate in recent years is double the average of the previous 50'. America and Sierra Leone have witnessed assaults and killings by chimps who, according to New Scientist, 'almost never attack people'. In Uganda, they have started killing children by biting off their limbs then disembowelling them.
There has been a surge in wolf attacks in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Russia and France. In Australia, there has been a run of dingo killings, and crocodile violence is up. In Beijing, injuries from cats and dogs have swelled by 34 per cent, year-on-year. In America, the number of humans killed by pet dogs has increased sharply since 2000. In Australia, dog attacks are up 20 per cent. In Britain, nearly 4,000 people needed hospital treatment for dog bites in 2007, a figure that has doubled in the past four years. In Bombay, petrified residents are being slaughtered in ever-increasing numbers by leopards, leading J. C. Daniel, a leopard specialist, to comment, 'We have to study why the animal is coming out. It never came out before.' In Edinburgh, in June, there was a string of bizarre fox attacks - a pensioner was among the victims. In Singapore, residents have been being terrorised by packs of macaques. Sharon Chan, a national parks official, told reporters, 'It's a very weird situation.'
The numbers are disturbing enough, but the menacing changes in behaviour are especially worrying to scientists. In Australia, the biologist Dr Scoresby Shepherd - who pointed out that in areas where shark attacks used to happen every three or four decades, they are now taking place at least once a year - has suggested that sharks are switching their prey to humans. In Los Angeles, Prof Lee Fitzhugh has come to the same conclusion about mountain lions. In San Francisco, a spate of sea lion assaults lead one local to comment, 'I've been swimming here for 70 years and nothing like this has happened before.' In Cameroon, for the first time, gorillas have been throwing bits of tree at humans. They're using weapons against us.
It's easy to see why some suspect revenge. The theory that the animals of the three elements are conspiring against us gained popularity in 2006, when the Australian television presenter Steve Irwin was speared through the heart by a stingray off the north Queensland coast. In the aftermath, the phrase 'freak accident' was used in news reports. When, just six weeks later, the same thing happened to James Bertakis, of Miami (he lived only because, unlike Irwin, he didn't pull the barbed sting out), people started wondering. Then, in March this year, Judy Kay Zagorski was boating on the Florida Keys when a stingray leapt from the water and fatally struck her in the face.
Any sane person might decide that his theory, which posits that beasts are working in concert to take revenge on humans, is insane. But in the regions where the most research into HAC is being carried out, scientists have concluded that revenge for our myriad barbarities could indeed be a motive.
All over Africa, India and parts of south-east Asia, elephants have started attacking humans in unprecedented numbers. Not just killing - they're rampaging through villages and stomping crops, terrorising local populations in any way they can. 'What's happening today is extraordinary,' Dr Gay Bradshaw, a world authority on elephants, told reporters in 2006. 'Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful co-existence, there is now hostility and violence.' Bradshaw is the director of the Kerulos Centre for Animal Psychology and Trauma Recovery, in Oregon. 'When you see reports of elephants running into crops or attacking people, they're highly stressed,' she tells me. 'And there are multiple stressors - violence, lack of food, lack of water; their families are being broken up; their society is collapsing. All of these things are human-derived.'
Bradshaw describes the elephants as being 'under siege' from the locals. But the violence against humans has increased so suddenly, and reached such levels, that these traditional factors aren't thought to be sufficient to explain it. Bradshaw and her colleagues now think that there's been a massive, pan-species psychological collapse throughout the world's pachyderms. In essence, we're witnessing the dysfunctional shenanigans of a generation of depraved elephants. These are individuals who have become psychologically fractured after being orphaned at a developmentally delicate age or are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after watching their families being slaughtered.
'You could make a parallel between elephants and people who are undergoing genocide and war,' Bradshaw says. 'They've gone through massive killings and many have sustained culls or severe poaching, so they've witnessed the violence and they're traumatised. It's critical to understand that when you have an experience at a young age, or through adolescence or even as an adult, it enters into the brain. In other cases, the normal rearing process is disrupted or conducted by distressed parents, so you're creating individuals who are mentally challenged.'
Such claims might be dismissed as so much Disneyfied anthropomorphism if Bradshaw did not have the observational, psychological and neuroscientific evidence to back them up. And, she says, it might not be just in elephants that this critical point has been breached. 'I think we're well past the critical point,' she says. 'Well past. People are starting to notice these atypical behaviours in an array of species.'
Of the question of elephant revenge, though, she is more cautious. 'Put yourself in an elephant's shoes. What's it like living in Africa or Asia when you're surrounded by an active threat, not just to you but to your family? Let's take, for example, one of the things that's happening in Africa. Females are starting to charge lorries. Why? It's hard to understand the motive. Perhaps she's traumatised. Perhaps it's pre-emptive - they may have a gun. It may be self defence. And other times it may well be revenge. It's not that I don't think elephants have the capacity.' Dr Marc Bekoff, a leading ethologist, agrees. 'We need to be careful when using that sort of language,' he says. 'But I don't think there's any doubt that, in certain situations, animals show revenge.'
At first he thought it was a dream; that shuffling, that banging that bulged out of the darkness around him. By the time Michael Fitzgerald had roused himself and put on his slippers, he decided it was burglars. They were in the garage. He crept forward, readying himself for what awaited behind the electric door that was slowly, noisily rising. He peered in. It was a badger. Just a badger! He'd never seen one so close before. The badger looked up, then slowly, calmly walked up to him. 'Pam!' he called to his wife. 'Get a camera!' Two minutes later, blood from his arm was spattered over his front door.
'It was some kind of hell,' Fitzgerald, from Evesham, told the BBC, in 2003. 'His razor-blade teeth were around my arm.' Even after he had shaken if off, it gave chase, biting his legs and arms. 'I never envisaged I would be seeing my own insides,' he said. The badger then embarked on an 18-hour rampage around the town.
Stories like these remind us that there are millions of beasts armed with teeth and stingers, who can out-sniff, out-run, out-fly, out-fight and out-bite every one of us. The eerie truth is that, right now, we're surrounded. As a species, we've been at the top of the food chain for so long, we've forgotten that 'humans' are mere anthropoid apes and, in distant millennia, we had to fight the feral armies to get here. In our hubris, we imagine we're an animal apart. For centuries, we've been told by priests and scientists that animals are not much more than unfeeling, unthinking, unselfconscious automatons. They're a gift from God, and their purpose is to have paracetamol rubbed into their eyes, to be turned into fancy trousers to be stuffed with nuts on His birthday. Many mainstream scientists still warn against anthropomorphism. But it doesn't stop the many people who are secretly wondering what's really going on behind those inscrutable black eyes? Are the birds talking about us? Do lobsters sulk? Can one moose love another? The more scientists have discovered about the inner lives of animals, the more troubling and strange things have become. 'Things are really changing,' acknowledges Bekoff. 'There's a lot of new behavioural research, a lot of new neuroscience research that demonstrates they are far more complex than was thought. We're not inserting into animals something they don't have.'
Bekoff describes the sound Darwinian logic beneath this gigantic paradigm shift. Simply, if our brains have developed the capacity for a rich emotional inner-life over the millions of years they've been evolving, then why not theirs? 'If you believe in biological continuity then, if we have emotions, they have emotions. If we have a heart, they have a heart.'
But there are still many people, such as Prof Peter Carruthers, of the University of Sheffield, who would consider this to be misguided sentimentality. In his book The Animals Issue, he insists that animals don't consciously feel pain, and therefore 'make no real claims on our sympathy'. When vets and vivisectionists anaesthetise their subjects, the argument runs, they're indulging in schmaltzy, greetings-card reasoning.
Dr Paul McDonald, of the Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour, in Sydney, also warns against the sort of talk Bekoff persists in. 'There's a temptation to put human emotions into animal interactions, which I think is not the way to go,' he says. 'The danger is it'll shape your interpretations. Take noisy mynah birds, for example. They have a dominance hierarchy, so there's often aggressive interactions where one bird appears to beat the other up. Through human glasses that could be a punishment or something along those lines, where in reality it's about maintaining social rank.'
But McDonald's worldview and his observations seem at odds. 'Altruism remains a conundrum,' he says. 'Why do you have so many animals helping? Particularly animals that aren't related. If you're helping to raise a nephew, at least you're replicating part of your genome. But when you're raising a totally unrelated individual, that becomes much more difficult - and that happens quite commonly.' He points to bell mynah birds, which feed chicks in many nests at the same time, even though they may have chicks in their own nest. 'That seems very, very strange.'
Even stranger is the incident Gay Bradshaw reports, of a hero crow helping hungry kittens. 'The crow would go get worms and fly down and feed them to these starving kittens. Eventually, they became friends and played together.'
And altruism isn't the only documented animal behaviour that was once thought to have been purely human. Take empathy and Kuni, the bonobo. Kuni watched a starling fly into the glass wall of its enclosure and thud to the floor. He picked it up, climbed to the top of the tallest tree, stretched the bird's wings out and launched it back into the air. When it thudded back down again, the ape climbed back down and stood over it for a long time.
And here's another complex mental state - grief. Elephants, for example, stand vigil over the bodies of dead companions for a week, before gently covering the corpse with earth. They then visit the gravesite for years afterwards, taking turns to handle the bones. 'They lift the bones with incredible sensitivity,' says zoologist Dr Tammie Matson, the WWF's human-animal conflict specialist. 'It's as if they can somehow read something about the elephant that was once attached to them.'
Bekoff, meanwhile, has witnessed a magpie funeral. 'I saw a dead magpie on the road and stopped to look at what was happening. One magpie went in and touched the corpse and backed away, another magpie went in and backed away, then another flew off and brought grass back and laid it around the corpse, then another did the same.' And then there was the fox funeral. 'This fox had been killed by a mountain lion and the next day a female fox found the carcass. She covered it up with leaves and pine needles and dirt and branches. She stamped it down and stood over it.'
British neuroscientists have found that sheep can remember at least 50 ovine faces, even when they've been separated for years. Cows, meanwhile, get anxious. John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at Bristol university, has discovered that they have between two and four best friends. They also have enemies, bearing grudges for years.
Perhaps the evolutionary achievement humans are proudest of - and is thought by some to be the very seat of consciousness - is language. But even chickens talk to each other. 'If a hawk flies over a chicken, it gives a particular call,' says Dr McDonald. 'Whereas if it's a fox, it's a different call.' Indeed, according to Bekoff, many birds have regional dialects and wolves have, 'very complex communication systems. A wolf's tail has 13 to 15 positions which send different messages. And when you combine the tail position, ear position, gait, odour and sound, you've got a kaleidoscope of different modes of communication.'
And if there's any remaining doubt that animals have the capacity to feel anger at humans, take the case of traffic-jamming rhesus monkeys. When a baby monkey had its legs crushed by a car in Tezpur, India, 100 others encircled it and blocked the road. Onlookers described the monkeys as 'angry', while a shopkeeper said, 'It was very emotional. Some of them massaged its legs. Finally, they left the scene, carrying the injured baby with them.'
Are we committing the sin of anthropomorphism by calling the monkeys angry? 'Let the philosophers debate that if they want to,' says Bekoff. 'We've got too many other things we need to deal with without worrying about whether we're being anthropomorphic.'
If revenge is one possible motive behind the dramatic global rises in animal-on-human violence, it's surely a minor one. We shouldn't be surprised when animals play nasty. They're all at it. In 2002, scientists at Michigan State University discovered that even bacteria engage in chemical warfare. And even species that we believe to be benign turn out to be ruthless. Robins, for example, fight each other to the death. And in January, marine scientists released footage of gangs of dolphins repeatedly ramming baby porpoises, tossing them in the air and chasing them to their death. Researchers in Scotland described 'perhaps the worst example of inter-specific aggression any of us has ever seen. This young female had the life beaten out of her.' ?Worse, it has been discovered that they're fond of infanticide.
The rise in animal-on-human violence turns out to have several causes which initially appear separate but are all linked. Dr Matson is clear on the elephant problem; both its causes and its nature. When she arrived in Bushmanland, Namibia, 15 years ago, an elephant had just killed an elderly woman. 'That sort of thing happened pretty regularly,' she says. When Matson arrived in Assam, last year, she met a family who had suffered similarly. 'It all comes back to humans, ultimately. It's a competition for resources. You've got this clash between the world's most dominant primate and the world's largest terrestrial animal.'
Even pet dogs and their considerably less cuddly cousins, dingos, have been clashing with humans. Dr Paul McGreevy, a British veterinary scientist, uses the run of dingo attacks in Australia's Fraser Island as an example. In April 2001, a nine-year-old boy was killed and his seven-year-old brother injured after they were chased and pounced on by the dogs. It was said to be only the second attack in modern times. Then, just six days later, two British backpackers were bitten on the legs and buttocks.
'The first step is habituation, a loss of fear,' McGreevy says. 'Familiarity breeds a form of contempt. If the animals are no longer frightened of humans they begin to hang around instead of running away. In Fraser Island, tourists became a predictor of food. The second possibility is that animals learn to fear humans under certain circumstances. This means they're coming closer to humans, but are prepared to defend themselves. When they're primed by this arousal, they can have lowered thresholds for aggression and produce hair-trigger responses.'
When a wild animal is just about not-scared-enough to approach a human, but still has enough fear heating its blood to unleash a frenzy at the slightest provocation, it's in a uniquely dangerous state. It's not hard to see how McGreevy's dingo theory could be applied to cougars, mountain lions, boars, bears and wolves, all of whom are having their traditional habitats and feeding grounds annexed.
Scientists studying the increase in big-cat attacks in America have suggested that their growing familiarity with us is leading them to view humans as hotdogs in trousers. 'There has been a huge increase in the opportunities pumas have to observe people,' Lee Fitzhugh, of the University of California, told New Scientist. 'Cats have to learn what's prey and what's not - it's not instinctive. They spend time observing a strange creature before they decide how to classify it.'
Researchers think the same process might be responsible for the increase in shark attacks: the popularity of surfing and shark-watching dives give the fish more chance to see that we're basically harmless and possibly tasty.
Perversely, conservation may also have worsened the situation. Elephant numbers are up as is the crocodile population. In Australia, where croc-hunting was banned 30 years ago, numbers of the most deadly saltwater variety have risen from 5,000 in the early 1970s to more than 70,000.
What all these problems have in common is, of course, us. We're in their face a lot more these days. And that face is full of teeth. According to Gay Bradshaw, we shouldn't be asking why they're turning on us. A more reasonable question would be, why aren't they attacking us more?
'Animals have the same capacity that we do, in terms of emotions and what we consider to be high-mindedness and moral integrity. In fact, I'd argue they have more, because they haven't done to us what we've done to them. That's a sobering thought. It's amazing that all the animals are as benign as they are. It's amazing their restraint. Why aren't they picking up guns?'
'The word gorilla was derived from the Greek word Gorillai (a "tribe of hairy women")'
Re: Mad Cows & Livid Lambs - Are animals rising up against humans?
Awesome post
k thx bai
Re: Mad Cows & Livid Lambs - Are animals rising up against humans?
That all makes a lot of sense. That's an excellent article.
tabbouleh-bouleh
Another reason we dont eat animals. Nasty news coming out of here (Ireland)
The Food Safety Authority has ordered the withdrawal and recall of all Irish pork products dating back to 1 September.
It follows the discovery of a contaminant in pig feed by a dioxin known as PCB at levels between 80 and 200 times the safe limits.
PCBs are highly dangerous man-made chemicals that were banned in 1979. They effect the immune and reproductive systems and can, in certain cases, cause cancers.
They can still be found in certain products made before the ban came into force.
The contamination first came to light last Monday, but the positive tests in the pork was only confirmed this afternoon.
The public have been advised to destroy all pork products
purchased since September.
Contaminated feed was used at a total of 47 farms.
Nine of these were pork producing farms. The remaining 38 were beef farms, with one of those also producing pork products.
But the FSA has advised that it is not necessary at this time to have a similar withdrawal of beef products.
The Taoiseach and Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith, have attended crisis talks at the Department of Agriculture following the discovery of the toxic substance in slaughtered pigs.
The discovery has provoked concern in the farming community.
The pork industry is the fourth biggest in the agriculture sector and is worth around €400 million per year.
The movement of animals at some 30 farms has been restricted.
A major investigation has been launched by the Department of Agriculture and the Food Safety Authority.
Restrictions on pig production units
Minister of State for Food Policy Trevor Sargent said the Government had acted swiftly to deal with the situation.
Mr Sargent said the affected animal feed had been banned and the pig production units using it had been restricted.
He said he would be working with An Bord Bia to ensure that quality pigmeat products - including those organically certified - can be brought back into the market as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, Labour's spokesperson on agriculture and food Sean Sherlock, has called for a full account of the extent of the risk to human health.
Fine Gael's spokesperson on agriculture, Michael Creed described the discovery as potentially the biggest threat to the agri-food sector since the outbreak Foot & Mouth disease.
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. nasty news coming out of here,-Ireland
Bloody hell! Is there more information yet, Seamus, as to what the toxin in the feed has been doing to the pigs - have they been in pain before being killed?
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. nasty news coming out of here,-Ireland
im not sure, i just stumbled across the info a few minutes ago, but looking into it right now
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. nasty news coming out of here,-Ireland
i cant seem to be able to find anything else, still searching though.
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. nasty news coming out of here,-Ireland
from the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7769391.stm
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. nasty news coming out of here,-Ireland
Wow...I hadn't heard this at all. Best tell my mam to get rid of all the stuff in the freezer. I hate wasted food but I'll be glad to see that in the bin rather than their mouths... But then again, it's an even bigger waste of a life
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. nasty news coming out of here,-Ireland
yep, best bet to that crazypolly. best bet.
this is big bad news and they're spinning it already!
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. nasty news coming out of here,-Ireland
I'm sure that's what they'd like but all those products should be returned for a full refund. The retailers that sold them should then claim the money back from the farmers.The public have been advised to destroy all pork products
purchased since September.
Hopefully this'll put some people off eating corpse.
"I don't want to live on this planet any more" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. Nasty news coming out of here (Ireland)
Poor little pigs. My heart goes out to them and their plight more than any human, as humans generally have a choice in what happens to them, the pigs do not!
I like Sandra, she keeps making me giggle. Daft little lady - Frosty
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. Nasty news coming out of here (Ireland)
twill be intresting to see what happens from now
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. Nasty news coming out of here (Ireland)
Just illustrates the fact that even if other animals kill each other to survive, humans kill only to throw out what they killed as 'junk.' Privilege, privilege, privilege.
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. Nasty news coming out of here (Ireland)
In a way I think its a good thing because it highlights human stupidity - like BSE.
It might put some people off meat.
Feed animals sh!t and then you get sick from eating them. Well what did they think was gonna happen?
Re: Another reason we dont eat animals. Nasty news coming out of here (Ireland)
I don't think it highlights human stupidity, which is beside the point. Human stupidity is everywhere, yet people only see it when they feel like seeing it. Everything has a good side. You could say that agribusiness is good because it's cheap. So I don't see any point in say it's a good thing.
And I doubt anyone's going to stop consuming meat over this. Anyone using Irish pork is just going to order pork from some other country. Austria has a ban on skinning animals, I believe, but that didn't stop the sell of animal skins there in the least.
Swine Flu
Swine flu is really big news here in Russia. Although there has been no confirmed (or even suspected) cases in our country, it seems like all the media are constantly reporting about it with a sort of panicky attitude.
Is it the same in your countries?
Re: Swine Flu
It is starting too. We are expecting the backlash against pigs and a lot of piggy murders. I am waiting for the first British case as that is when it will be be blown out of all proportion.
Re: Swine Flu
So what's the difference between the symptoms and development between the swine flu and the regular types of flu (that can also be potentially dangerous BTW)?... just curious. I haven't been able to get any info if this type is more dangerous or not....
"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends". ~ George Bernhard Shaw.
Re: Swine Flu
i'm pretty sure there is no difference in the symtoms, and they have to do a culture to figure out what you have...the big problem is we don't have a vaccine for this particular strain...Not to undermine the severity of the swine flu...but thousands of people a year die from the regular flu, and obviously thats a big deal, i mean its an epidemic, but ... it happens every year...
"i'm rejecting my reflection, cause i hate the way it judges me."
Re: Swine Flu
Millions of people (like myself) are not vaccinated against the common flu either so why should I freak out about the swine flu???....
"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends". ~ George Bernhard Shaw.
Re: Swine Flu
i don't think, from what i've gathered from the news that people should be more or less concerned...i mean try to avoid people that are obviously sick, wash your hands constantly, don't share drinks, stay out of crowed areas...these are things that people should do when the normal flu is going at an epidemic level...but then again i'm definately not a doctor...but i am pretty sure that as long as your careful you should be fine...
"i'm rejecting my reflection, cause i hate the way it judges me."
Re: Swine Flu
That's what I've gathered so far too miss bettie, and I haven't found any more info about it being more dangerous (yet) than the regular flu.... I guess the biggest fear is that it can mutate into something nastier, but that hasn't happened yet... so why the full fledged panic. If people knew how many die from the common flu each year (or due to complications from it such as pneumonia), one would think that would encourage strong common sense behaviour on an everyday basis such as avoiding exposure to infected people, staying home when sick etc. No person's immune system is above frequent hand washing - it's something we should always, always practice... and not worry too much.
"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends". ~ George Bernhard Shaw.
Re: Swine Flu
ya that it can mutate and that we don't have a vaccine yet.
"i'm rejecting my reflection, cause i hate the way it judges me."
Re: Swine Flu
xkcd [ http://xkcd.com ] cover the 'flu scare:
Blackmail is such an ugly word. I prefer "extortion". The "X" makes it sound cool.
Re: Swine Flu
Also, swine flu is apparently normally treatable with four antivirals, but this strain is resistant to two of those.
Re: Swine Flu
But Tamaflu is effective against it, right?
"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends". ~ George Bernhard Shaw.
Re: Swine Flu
I wouldn't worry. It's a well known fact that you don't go before your time is up.
Re: Swine Flu
thats what i heard. about the Tamaflu.
"i'm rejecting my reflection, cause i hate the way it judges me."
Re: Swine Flu
One benefit from being a constant worrier is that I'm not more worried about this one than other catastrophies that might happen to me.
"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends". ~ George Bernhard Shaw.
Re: Swine Flu
lol! Good thing that I don't really care much for sickness/dying!
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
- Samuel Beckett
Re: Swine Flu
New confirmed cases keep creeping up here in the States. It's not surprising because the timing of this flu outbreak in Mexico coincided with Spring break for many high school and college students here who find Mexico to be a tourist hot spot. Lots of Spring breakers go to Mexico every year. So far I believe it's been stated that every single person who has been confirmed with the swine flu outside of Mexico had traveled to the country recently, or live in close quarters with someone who has.
The sore spot is that you are most contagious when you are asymptomatic, so someone may be spreading the flu virus around to people who obviously are not immune to this strain (because it's completely new) because they feel great and are out and about. It makes it incredibly difficult to track and contain.
There is a part of me (being a total germaphobe) that is a bit frightened, but I also realize a lot of this may also be media hype. They use scary terminology such as "pandemic" and "international health crisis". We live in a large house. It's myself, my husband, my son, my mother, father, brother and grandmother. My sister and her fiance come over to visit frequently. A flu bug would run rampant in this house. My husband would be the likeliest carrier, as he works in a huge building with hundreds of people where visitors frequently fly in from other states and countries to tour the manufacturing plant. I have a weak heart and my son has a compromised immune system. My brother and sister both have asthma and my grandmother is in her seventies. A flu that cannot be vaccinated against running through this family would be horrible.
I can't help but feel this is a consequence of factory farming. When you have hogs in crowded, unsanitary conditions they become unhealthy and they are incredibly susceptible to diseases that can be passed onto humans who are in close contact with them.
Re: Swine Flu
so now we have the first British cases
its all we'll hear about for months
i believe that God is trying to tell humans something but they are (mostly) way too stupid to listen
Re: Swine Flu
^ditto on the constant worrying. what with all the worries I have consuming me, I don't have room to worry about the swine flu.One benefit from being a constant worrier is that I'm not more worried about this one than other catastrophies that might happen to me.
Re: Swine Flu
The brain can't make room for all the worries in the world, it just can't store THAT much at once, you know.
"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends". ~ George Bernhard Shaw.
Re: Swine Flu
Over the weekend, the news did nothing but panic the world with speculations of a "global pandemic that would rival the Spanish flu". Now they're saying unless you've traveled to Mexico or taken care of a sick person who recently returned from Mexico it is "highly unlikely" you will contract this swine flu. What in the world? I guess we just have to wait it out and see what unfolds over the next few weeks. That will be the true test, especially since the incubation period for this particular flu is very short in comparison to seasonal flu. My hope is that the measures that have been taken to contain this illness will prove helpful, people will stop taking vacations to Mexico until it fizzles out there and this will all blow over very soon without any more deaths.
Re: Swine Flu
I have to say I find this really unlikely - it sounds like media frenzy to me. Influenza is spread through droplet infection - like colds - if you were asymptomatic, I think your likelihood of being contagious would be minimal. And it's a mutation on a well-known strain of influenza - it's not a new virus - and so we are likely to have some level of immunity to it, and this would seem to be confirmed by the relatively mild illness of most people who have contracted it.
Don't panic - it's not that bad. The numbers of those who died seem scary until you put them in the context of numbers of deaths from (1) other strains of flu which are around all the time and (2) numbers of deaths from things like road accidents.
Re: Swine Flu
That's very true, Ruby Rose, about putting the number of deaths into the perspective of the immense population in Mexico - particularly Mexico City. The news has just been great about whipping the world into a panicked frenzy. They prophesy ominously that "many people outside of Mexico who get it will likely die" and "we're in Stage 4 pandemic alert" and "people should be very concerned, but not panicked". Gee, with such positive news coming from the media, it's a miracle anyone is leaving their house.
Re: Swine Flu
Blimey, the media are really outdoing themselves over there to create panic, aren't they?!
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