California is 40% Worse Than Iowa

Highest combined concentration of burger, bacon rack, and milk jug production units in the country. Yeah, the whole country. We beat friggin’ Iowa for shit’s sake. 120 pounds of waste crap and pee per cow every day, flushed out of the “barns,” into multi-million-gallon surge ponds lagoons of crap and pee, then sprayed on the ground surrounding them. And that’s just the milk-makers. Go play around with the Food and Water Watch Map. Diaper yourself beforehand.

On the drought side of the equation, 1,780,000 CA cows used for dairy are slurping up 4 gallons of water a day to squeeze out just one gallon of milk so you can suck it down your throat like you’re still an infant nursing from someone else’s mother.

Four gallons of water to get 1 gallon of cow milk.
Times 7.5 gallons of milk a day of “high production efficiency.”
Times 365 days a year.
Times 1,780,000 cows used for dairy.

Your ten-minute showers are already down to seven, you can’t afford to flush the toilet, and your house is burning to the ground beside the lake that’s gone dry. Don’t worry, it’s not too late to put off thinking about it.

As found on Craigslist

The poster requests only serious inquiries. OK, then. Start with the obvious–is his mother a Happy Cow®? If she’s still alive, we doubt it.

Children notice the strangest things, don’t they? If, after nine weeks of separation, this baby boy noticed his mother across a wide, green field and she called to him, he would run to her to be nursed and groomed by her warm, rough tongue. Make it six months and nine weeks later, the reunion would look the same. Children would notice that, too.

We noticed that our calendar marks the start of a New Year. If you cannot give hope and shelter to this mother’s precious child, we’re thinking you should do something besides nurse a hangover tomorrow.

Audio clip: Peaceable Kingdom: Falling from the Family Tree

We’re calling it early

Just in from our embedded reporter in Phoenix:

It’s about 9:30pm here in Phoenix, the Arizonans for Humane Farms rally ended a little while ago, and with about 16% of precincts reporting, Proposition 204 is leading 60% in favor. Yes, Humane Farms supporter Sheriff Joe was at the rally and said he didn’t get involved in campaigning for or against other ballot issues because he was “concerned about the pigs,” and offered KTAR News 92.3 a sincere paraphrase of Gandhi’s quote about judging the morality of a nation by the way it treats its animals.

Have fun, celebrate for the animals, and we’ll see you tomorrow.

Lock ‘em up, Joe

Sheriff Joe Arpaio may turn out to be AZ animals’ best badge-sporting friend. And he’s got your room ready and waiting in the Maricopa County Jail facilities if you’re bent on abusing and neglecting them, then leaving them to slowly die alone and in pain. Repeatedly.

“The horse was sick on the ground in deep pain for 36 hours,” Arpaio told CBS 5 News. “According to the employees that talked to our detectives, she said the horse is going to die anyway. We don’t have $200 in our school budget, so just let him stay there and die.”

Can you imagine a Sheriff Joe in LA, Ventura, Riverside, Orange, and San Bernardino County—a sheriff who runs his own Animal Safe Hospice and cuffs animal abusers to the stainless steel sofa for the night? No citiation for the round-file, no tip-offs in advance of his own Animal Cruelty Investigative Unit jump-out, no negotiation. Just jail.

Can you imagine a Sherrif Joe in Kings, Merced, and Tulare County? We can. So for the next few days we’re outta here like last year for the final Prop 204 push before Election Day, and what an uphill battle it’ll be when you’re polling better than 70%. Back on Wednesday to drop in on a little get-together you might check out, too, if you

• are even mildly interested in getting habeas corpus and the First Amendment off life-support when it comes to animal protection, rights, or welfare advocacy,
• anticipate using the USPS to convince 10,001 people to forego spending $1 each on something animal-use industry related,
• are not cool with the whole stainless steel sofa thing.

Hackles vs. heroes

Food-animal initiative raises hackles

Jim Klinker says the biggest hurdle he and other foes of Proposition 204 have is that many Arizonans have never been on a farm and have no idea about where the food comes from that reaches their tables.

Half of that’s probably close to the truth. But the other half is just a load.

In fact, the executive secretary of the Arizona Farm Bureau Federation said he thinks that people may have completely the wrong image. They may imagine that the animals slaughtered to make bacon or hamburger have lived out their lives frolicking in the grass and wallowing in the mud.

They don’t have the “wrong image.” They have your images, the continued discovery of which you’re lobbying to criminalize at the federal level. The ones over which you litigate and seek to jail investigators to prevent their findings from ever seeing the light of day. Like your boxed-up newborn calves and your pigs in their steel and concrete containers, for the duration of their existence until the day they’re trucked away to die.

You couldn’t have built a better political enemy than yourselves if you had blueprints and an even heftier government-backed loan, and for that we’re eternally thankful. See ya on Election Day!