Defeat meat industry at the supermarket

A case that was heard before the U.S. Supreme Court last month was not about abortion, religious freedom, or gun rights, but whether farm animals are entitled to life before death. The meat industry is challenging California’s 2018 law requiring minimal space and health standards for the animals.

As millions of male baby chicks are hatched, they are ground up or suffocated, because they don’t lay eggs. Groups of females are crammed into small wire cages that tear out their feathers and cut their feet. Their beaks are cut off.

Mother pigs suffer for a lifetime in tight metal gestation stalls. Their babies are torn away shortly after birth, mutilated without anesthesia, crammed into crowded pens for six months, then slaughtered in the dawn of their lives.

Dairy cows spend their lives chained on a concrete floor, and have their milk sucked out of them by machines twice a day. Every year, they are artificially impregnated to keep the milk flowing.

Delicious, healthful, eco-friendly plant-based replacements for animal meat and dairy products are widely available. Every one of us can help defeat the meat industry’s case on our next trip to the supermarket.

Charlie Reutner

Cedar Rapids