We may surely be justified in considering the possibility that animals have access to a kind of intelligence beyond our comprehension. It is hard to attribute such accomplishments to mere instinct.
Animals are interesting creatures…
with their own unique kinds of intelligence and beauty…
When treated well, most kinds of animals are friendly to people…
Pigs are as capable of friendship with us as dogs and cats…
But the animals raised for meat, eggs, and dairy products in the United States today…
are treated terribly…
Chickens are crammed into cages so tightly they can barely move and are driven insane…
From below, the view is nothing to put on a picture postcard.
When treated well, pigs are remarkably happy…
and friendly creatures…
But today they are crammed together so tightly that they go crazy…
and often bite one another’s tails and rears, even killing one another…
When you realize what friendly and intelligent animals pigs are by nature…
it’s terribly sad to see the desolate lives they are forced to live today, treated like cars in a parking lot…
From childhood on they are treated like merchandise…
with no respect for the fact that they are living beings…
Yesterday’s cows spent their whole lives grazing happily in pastures…
but today this is no longer the case…
The love and bonding between mother cows and their calves…
is strong and deep…
But today’s veal calves are taken away from their mothers as soon as they are born…
and forced to live their entire lives in unspeakably miserable conditions…
These are little babies, separated from their mothers, and they desperately seek anything to suck on…
But they are never allowed to suck, and instead are fed a diet deliberately designed to make them anemic. Anyone who treated a dog or cat the way millions of baby veal calves are treated today would be arrested…
We prefer to numb ourselves psychically to the fact of the slaughterhouse. We don’t like to remember that a hamburger is a ground-up cow…
In fact, some people evidently think chickens are vegetables. When someone says, “I’m a vegetarian,” these people say, “Yes, but you do eat chicken, don’t you?”
The author of Diet for a New America, John Robbins shows us how our health, our happiness, and the future of life on earth depend on our shifting to a compassionate way of eating.
An Elephant with a Sweet Tooth
If the only time you’ve seen an elephant is in a zoo, you’ve only seen the most devastated and abused specimens of this grand species. But even captive elephants are capable of sophisticated reasoning. One five-ton lady elephant, known as Bertha, was kept for years in the Nugget Casino in Las Vegas. She used to wake up her handler, Jenda Smaha, when it was time for a show by brushing her eyelashes against his cheek! Also, she had a clever way of getting at the sweets Jenda used in the show but kept stored between times in a cabinet in Bertha’s house. Of course, Bertha was an enormously powerful animal and could easily have smashed the cabinet to smithereens and nabbed the goodies. But that, evidently, would have been too gross a strategy for a being of her subtlety. Instead, when a stranger would wander into the elephant house, Bertha would grab his arm with her trunk. You can imagine how this would startle just about anybody, so Bertha, sensitive as she was to others’ feelings, was just as gentle about it as she could be. But if her captive tried to pull away, she’d tighten