Animal Rights?

While doing a little researching on a local meat processor, I came across the website www.finalnail.com. This came up because I've recently become a lot more concerned with the food I feed my family. The unsafe industrial processes that most of our food, as Americans, goes through is shocking (more on that later). Anyway, I purchased a pig from a local farmer, and was checking out the processor he recommended. So I typed Tooele Valley Meats into google to see what would come up. Just slightly down the results page, after the directory listings, was this website. I thought, hmm, final nail, if there was anything bad to be said about this business, it might be listed here.

Turns out this site is a listing of furriers, trappers, lab animal suppliers, and 'slaughterhouses' or meat processors. I'm not sure where they get their information for sure but after a little digging, it appears their source is federal, maybe some regulatory database of some kind. I was concerned that my potential processor was on this list so I sent an email. It was very simple, I subjected it Question, then wrote "How do you know that every business on this list abuses their animals? Is there a watchdog organization you rely on?" They responded, "Thanks for the e-mail. We do not make any claims about specific businesses. But we do believe that fur farms, slaughterhouses and businesses that provide animals for vivisection are inherently cruel and exploitive. We hope that our website will encourage people to take a closer look at businesses in their community.".

After that, I did a little research on them. It turns out that they've been connected multiple times to animal rights activists who have committed crimes targeting these businesses. Locally here, they were connected to incidents where mink farms nearby, had their animals 'released back into the wild'. I wonder how those minks are doing now? Were they able to adapt to their new environment? Could they find food and shelter? More likely, they starved to death, slowly. A death which, I think would be less preferable to the quick and presumably humane death at the furriers. It's also possible that some of them were hunted and eaten by local wildlife, which brings up another point, what about the natural balance of the ecosystem of the area?

What effect would releasing those mink into that habitat have?

It is my feelings that websites like the finalnail bring violence to corrupt and honest business alike. The finalnail of course has a legal disclaimer claiming they don't encourage illegal behavior, but I never saw anywhere where they discouraged it either.

I was eventually able to find some positive information on the processor I'll be using, my meat will be delivered on March 3rd. I'll leave a comment and let you know how it goes.

There is one group however I think does need an advocate, and I would like to bring it to the attention organizations like the finalnail. Fruits and vegetables have long been abused and exploited by both man and beast. All you vegans out there thought you had the moral high ground but you have treated poor fruits and vegetables horribly just because they don't have faces! They live, they grow, they breathe, they reproduce, and what do you vegans do? You cut them down, you dig them up and you eat them! You even often eat their children! What kind of monsters are you?