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a good list of food and nutrition resources.
Great resource!
Average price of ground beef per pound: $3.66
Average price of beef roasts per pound: $4.48
Average price of beef steaks (any type): $6.21
Average price of short ribs (any source) per pound: $4.66
Average price of chicken breast per pound: $3.17
Average price of ham (any type,…
“HOWEVER. A lot of omnivores who use the “veganism is privileged” argument have the means to be vegan, they are just using other peoples suffering as a platform for their own guilt.”
Very yes. The number of times folks with privilege have told me they don’t go vegan because some people can’t afford to…
— From ‘The Sexual Politics of Meat’, by Carol Adams.
ialwayslandonmyfeet: Can someone explain to me, not in concerns to cosmetics, why people get angry when animals, specifically rats and rabbits, are used in medicinal experiments?
Does that not benefit humanity? My mum’s medication for example, thyroxine, wouldn’t have exsisted without the use of such lab tests.
This is not a closed minded question, I genuinely want some insight into this…
Most people that work in the field of animal testing would like us all to believe that what they do is important for human health. Unfortunately for us and the animals this is just not true.
Vivisection has its roots in a DesCartes way of thinking. That is, that animals are machines and any sound they make is not the sound of an animal crying out in pain, but are merely mechanical reactions. From his Wiki “he believed that only humans have minds. This led him to the belief that animals cannot feel pain, and Descartes’s practice of vivisection (the dissection of live animals) became widely used throughout Europe until the Enlightenment.”.
Most animal testing done today is done with one goal in mind- money. Researchers can pull in millions of dollars for just one experiment and half the money automatically goes to the institution they work at. Also, companies use vivisection as a shield to lawsuits. If something goes wrong with human trials they can point to the cat they tested on and say, “See! I did my part, it was unavoidable!” One of the most notorious uses of this excuse came from big tobacco. They pumped monkey after monkey with poisonous cigarette smoke and none of the animals ever got cancer. They used this reasoning to make the audacious claim, in a court of law, that “cigarettes do not cause cancer”.
It is estimated that over 150 million vertebrate animals, including mice, rats, birds, fish, rabbits, guinea pigs, farm animals, dogs, cats and non-human primates, are used annually worldwide in vivisection. Animals are bred for this purpose and can also be wild-caught or taken from an animal shelter. All animals on Earth have many things in common, including humans. We have tongues to taste, we have noses to sniff, and eyes to see. But on the cellular level we are just too different. Take chocolate, for example- you or I can eat as much chocolate as we want and we might eventually get a tummy-ache, but if you feed your dog even a little chocolate, she could die. Also, arsenic, known for it’s deadliness in humans, is a mild sedative for sheep. These cellular differences mean a lot.
Vivisection is not only erroneous to human health, it has a history of setting us back. Today, most people know that Polio is caused by ingesting contaminated fecal material. Inside humans, the disease manifests itself in the digestive tract, but with rhesus monkeys, the poliovirus infects their body through their nasal passages and attacks their central nervous system. In 1937, using monkey data, a preventative nasal spray was created. Sadly, the only thing the spray did was to erase some children’s sense of smell, sometimes permanently. For nearly 25 years progress was delayed by using the animal model. As far back as 1907, Dr. Ivar Wickman, using careful epidemiological analysis of actual human cases had shown that polio was not entirely or even chiefly a disease of the CNS, (central nervous system). The studies, based on over 1000 Swedish cases also correctly concluded that the gastrointestinal tract was the probable route of infection. These findings were ignored for years in favor of the easier, although highly inaccurate, animal model.
But I urge you, please, do not believe a word I say. The facts are out there. If you look up what these medical researchers are actually doing to animals, you’ll find that most of these experiments are pointless or could be done easily with in vitro and computer models. Technology today allows us to do many things that we could not do before, including learning programs that teach advanced surgery techniques using a computer.
L/D 50 tests, are widespread, cruel and utterly useless. Researchers take a substance; bleach, toothpaste, nyquil, air freshener, etc, and they take a group of animals and pump their bodies full of it until half of the test subjects die, hence the name L/D 50- the lethal dose for 50% of your test subjects. The list of pointless studies goes on for miles. During maternal deprivation studies they impregnate a monkey and quickly take her baby away at birth. Infant monkeys are implanted with monitoring devices, and behavior – consisting of crying for their mothers, shaking, clasping themselves, social withdrawal, and slouched posture – is recorded. “Maternal Obesity and Childhood Body Weight” is another experiment currently funded at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. This one entails feeding monkeys a diet of water, oil, lard, beef tallow and butter only. These experiments continue despite the fact that the negative effects of maternal obesity on children have already been well established in human clinical studies. Vivisectors also impregnate monkeys and then feed her alcohol and cigarettes. Once she has given birth, they dissect her baby to see what happened, as if we needed to know that smoking and drinking while pregnant is not a good thing to do. Electro-ejaculation is another cruel feature of vivisection. Animals are strapped to a machine and then repeatedly force-ejaculated by an electric rod, sometimes up to 241 times, not including failed attempts.
I could go on for days, but the point is- these animals suffer and die for nothing. These animals suffer and die and there isn’t even a database for the knowledge acquired through vivisection, meaning that a pregnant Macau monkey can go through painful maternal deprivation studies and 2 months later, the same experiment can happen, even within the same facility. Also, it is important to remember, over 100,000 people die annually from legally prescribed medication, so we are most certainly already testing on humans. Vivisection has held us back for too long, it has proven bad medications “safe” and who knows how many safe medications failed in the lab using animal models.
All of this is just the tip of the iceberg, for more information, I highly recommend the book “Sacred Cows and Golden Geese”, learning the story of “Britches”, typing “vivisection” into YouTube and be sure to check out http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Animal_testing
Signal boost!
(via vegspiration)
omfg
“they tipped us in our sleep, we burned them in their beds”
They took the milk from our udders.
WE TOOK THE LIFE FROM THEIR BONES
(Source: pleatedjeans)
PSA of the Day: According to the Best Friends Animal Society, more than 80 percent of pet owners support spaying or neutering their furry friends. But apparently, pet owners can’t seem to remember exactly when their animals should be sterilized (at 4 months old).
Enter the Fix at Four campaign, a series of clever PSAs that aims to reduce the number of accidental pets, and the best of which makes it seem as if a freaked-out father is trying to keep a bunch of horny neighborhood boys from impregnating his tween-age daughter.
“We purposely made them lighter,” says Bill Oakley, of TM Advertising, which helped design the spots. “When I see those Sarah McLachlan commercials, I turn them off. I can’t even watch them.”
[adweek]
ugh, animal rights/animal welfare causes using rape culture and benevolent sexism to sell sterilizing companion animals.
INTERSECTIONALITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yep - this video pretty much sums up my beef (tofu?) with the mainstream animal rights movement.
Actually, this is probably an animal welfare organization, so that’s not quite so accurate. I have whole other set of problems with animal welfare folks.
Homemade vegan pizza…shaped like a kitty cat :3
A cat-shaped vegan pizza? THE INTERNET IS NOW COMPLETE!
Going to make this
(via fuckyeahfatvegans)
by Mia McKenzie
President Obama just “endorsed” gay marriage. And guess what? I barely give a damn.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s okay. It’s fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. Saying that gay people who want to get married to each other should be able to do so is basically a…
I mostly just reblog stuff, but you'll find my occasional thoughts and ruminations here, too.
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