From: unglenie@ford.ecn.purdue.edu (Robert J Unglenieks)
Subject: Re: What Animal "Rights" People are _Really_ Saying?
Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 05:29:08 GMT

Quotable Quotes

  Beyond Beef Campaign
  1130 17th St., N.W.
  Suite 300
  Washington, D.C.  20036
  Tel: 202-775-1132
  Fax: 202-775-0074


HEALTH

  "If you step back and look at the data, the optimum amount of red meat
you eat should be zero."

    -- Walter Willett, M.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital, director
       of a study that found a close correlation between red meat
       consumption and colon cancer.


  "Usually, the first thing a country does in the course of economic
development is to introduce a lot of livestock.  Our data are showing
that this is not a very smart move and the Chinese are listening.  They
are realizing that animal-based agriculture is not the way to go....  We
are basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety
of plant food and minimizing our intake of animal foods....
  "Once people start introducing animal products into their diet, that's
when the mischief starts."

    -- T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., of Cornell University, director of a
       study of 6,500 Chinese that found a close correlation between
       meat consumption and the incidence of heart disease and cancer.


  "The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all
the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile
accidents combined.  If beef is your idea of `real food for real
people,' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital."

    -- Neal D. Barnard, M.D., President, Physicians Committee for
       Responsible Medicine, Washington, D.C.


  "When we kill the animals to eat them, they end up killing us because
their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never
intended for human beings."

    -- William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of The American Journal of
       Cardiology


  "All red meat contains saturated fat.  There is no such thing as truly
lean meat.  Trimming away the edge ring of fat around a steak really
does not lower the fat content significantly.  People who have red meat
(trimmed or untrimmed) as a regular feature of their diets suffer in far
greater numbers from heart attacks and strokes."

    -- Michael Klaper, M.D., Medical Director, EarthSave Foundation,
       Santa Cruz, California


  "The thousands of people who have suffered food poisoning after eating
beef will, no doubt, appreciate that their beef was aesthetically
acceptable, even though it made them ill.  `Lovely to look at, dangerous
to eat' is not a standard that is likely to help beef sales."

    -- Carol Tucker Foreman, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture during
       the Carter administration, commenting on the inadequacy of the
       U.S. Department of Agriculture's Streamlined (Meat) Inspection
       System (SIS).


  "As happened with tobacco, health warnings about meat eating are
multiplying, and awareness of the environmental effects of meat
production is rising.  Just as cigarettes lost their allure, meat is
losing its social cachet in some countries.  Food marketers in the
United Kingdom estimate that 2 million people in that country are strict
vegetarians.  More important, the number of people limiting meat in
their diets is rising rapidly.  An estimated 6 million people in the
United Kingdom dine on meatless meals most of the time."

    -- Alan B. Durning and Holly B. Brough, in Taking Stock: Animal
       Farming and the Environment, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C.,
       1991


ENVIRONMENT

  "An alien ecologist observing... Earth might conclude that cattle is
the dominant animal species in our biosphere."

    -- David Hamilton Wright, Ph.D., Emory University biologist


  "The impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done
more to alter the type of vegetation and land forms of the West than all
the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and subdivsion
developments combined."

    -- Philip Fradkin in Audubon, National Audubon Society, NY, NY


  "Most of the public lands in the West, and especially the Southwest,
are what you might call `cow burnt.'  Almost anywhere and everywhere you
go in the American West you find hordes of [cows]....  They are a pest
and a plague.  They pollute our springs and streams and rivers.  They
infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests.  They graze off the
native bluestems and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of
prickly pear.  They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti.
They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested
wheat grass.  Weeds.  Even when the cattle are not physically present,
you see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general
destruction.  If you don't see it, you'll smell it.  The whole American
West stinks of cattle."

    -- The late Edward Abbey, conservationist and author, in a speech
       before cattlemen at the University of Montana in 1985


  "You can buy the land out there now for the same price as a couple of
bottles of beer per acre.  When you've got half a million acres and
20,000 head of cattle, you can leave the lousy place and go live in
Paris, Hawaii, Switzerland, or anywhere you choose."

    -- American rancher who owns grazing land in the Amazon, describing
       the attitude of cattle colonists in the Brazilian rain forest


  "We got hooked on grain-fed meat just as we got hooked on gas guzzling
automobiles.  Big cars `made sense' only when oil was cheap; grain-fed
meat `makes sense' only because the true costs of producing it are not
counted."

    -- Frances Moore Lappe', in _Diet for a Small Planet_


  "A reduction in beef and other meat consumption is the most potent
single act you can take to halt the destruction of our environment and
preserve our natural resources.  Our choices do matter.  What's
healthiest for each of us personally is also healthiest for the life
support system of our precious, but wounded planet."

    -- John Robbins, author of _Diet for a New America_, and President,
       EarthSave Foundation, Santa Cruz, California


HUNGER AND POVERTY

  "It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world
to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and
third-world nations while virtually ignoring the over-population of
cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of
sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat."

    -- Jeremy Rifkin, author of _Beyond Beef, The Rise and Fall of the
       Cattle Culture_, and President of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation,
       Washington, D.C.


  "A meat-fed world now appears a chimera.  World grain production has
grown more slowly than population since 1984, and farmers lack new
methods for repeating the gains of the `green revolution.'  Supporting
the world's current population of 5.4 billion people on an
American-style diet would require two-and-ahalf times as much grain as
the world's farmers produce for all purposes.  A future world of 8
billion to 14 billion people eating the American ration of 220 grams of
grain-fed meat a day can be nothing but a flight of fancy."

    -- Alan B. Durning and Holly Brough, Worldwatch Institute, 
       Washington, D.C.


  "There can be no question that more hunger can be alleviated with a
given quantity of grain by completely eliminating animals [from the food
production process].  About 2,000 pounds of concentrates [grains] must
be supplied to livestock in order to produce enough meat and other
livestock products to support a person for a year, whereas 400 pounds of
grain (corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, etc.) eaten directly will support a
person for a year.  Thus, a given quantity of grain eaten directly will
feed 5 times as many people as it will if it is first fed to livestock
and then is eaten indirectly by humans in the form of livestock
products...."

    -- M. E. Ensminger, Ph.D., internationally recognized animal
       agriculture specialist, former Department of Animal Science Chairman at
       Washington State University, currently President of
       Consultants-Agriservices, Clovis, California


  "Changing eating habits in the North is an important link in the chain
of events needed to create environmentally sustainable development that
meets people's needs.  The Beyond Beef campaign is an important step in
that direction."

    -- Dr. Walden Bello, Executive Director, Food First/The Institute
       for Food and Development Policy, San Francisco, California

  "Suppose food _were_ distributed equally.  If everyone in the world
ate as Americans do, less than half the _present_ world population could
be fed on the record harvests of 1985 and 1986.  Of course, everyone
doesn't have to eat like Americans.  About a third of the world grain
harvest -- the staples of the human feeding base -- is fed to animals to
produce eggs, milk, and meat for American-style diets.  Wouldn't feeding
that grain directly to people solve the problem?  If everyone were
willing to eat an essentially vegetarian diet, that additional grain
would allow perhaps a billion more people to be fed with 1986
production."

    -- Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, authors of _The Population
       Explosion_, 1990 


  "Family farmers are victims of public policy that gives preference to
feeding animals over feeding people.  This has encouraged the cheap
grain policy of this nation and has made the Beef Cartel the biggest hog
at the trough."

    -- Howard Lyman, Executive Director, Beyond Beef campaign, former
       senior lobbyist for the National Farmers Union


ANIMAL SUFFERING

  "In my opinion, one of the greatest animal-welfare problems is the
physical abuse of livestock during transportation....  Typical abuses I
have witnessed with alarming frequency are; hitting, beating, use of
badly maintained trucks, jabbing of short objects into animals, and
deliberate cruelty."

    -- Temple Grandin, Ph.D., internationally recognized livestock
       handling consultant and board member of the meat industry's Livestock
       Conservation Institute


  "For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban
communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at
meal time: we eat them....  The use and abuse of animals raised for food
far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of
mistreatment."

    -- Peter Singer, author of _Animal Liberation_, and professor of
       philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia


  "The amount of meat lost each year through careless handling and
brutality would be enough to feed a million Americans for a year."

    -- John McFarlane, Executive Director, The Council for Livestock
       Protection, a meat industry organization


  "I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten,
and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy.  It's
like...you're just eating misery.  You're eating a bitter life."

    -- Alice Walker, author and poet


  "In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be
cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in
the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of
money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise
intelligent people."

    -- Ruth Harrison, author of _Animal Machines_


  "Yet saddest of all fates, surely, is to have lost that sense of the
holiness of life altogether; that we commit the blasphemy of bringing
thousands of lives to a cruel and terrifying death or of making those
lives a living death -- and feel nothing."

    -- The Right Reverend John Austin Baker, Bishop of Salisbury,
       England, commenting on the cruelty of modern animal agriculture


  "You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is
concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."

    -- Ralph Waldo Emerson in _Fate_


I thought I'd pass this along too......

Rob U
--
-       Rob Unglenieks             REAL race cars DON'T wear BOWTIES       -
-     "Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle           -
-      of compassion to embrace all living creatures."                     -
-                           -  Albert Einstein                             -
Newsgroups: talk.politics.animals