The professionally funny Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest have taken up a serious topic and written an open letter about farm animal abuse.

Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest posted an open letter to Conklin Dairy Farms-the site where barbaric animal abuse was captured on video by a Mercy For Animals investigator.

The footage obtained at the dairy farm located in Plain City, Ohio reveals horrors including workers violently punching calves in the face, beating cows with crowbars, stabbing cows in the legs and stomach with pitchforks, and twisting the tails of cows until the bone snaps.

In the letter, Curtis and Guest explain that their daughter was “overcome with grief that human beings could inflict such cruelty and unconscious hatred at the most benign of creatures and their infants. The shocking images were too much for her father and me but we watched enough to know where it led.”

The couple asks the dairy farm’s owner, Gary Conklin, if he has shown the video to his children and suggests that he attend classes where he is “taught kindness and compassion for all beings.”

“We challenge you to have the courage, as the brave person who filmed this did, to open your doors and your hearts. Become the standard for safety and kindness and actually change – change your mental state and spend the rest of your lives, and the lives of your descendants, trying to make your farm the leader in humane, clean, loving treatment of the very animals you profit from.”

To read the rest of the letter and learn more, check out the full article at Ecorazzi.

Editor’s note: Article by Daelyn Fortney. Originally published by our friends at Ecorazzi. Ecorazzi is the source for breaking green gossip. Be sure to visit them and say hi, and follow Ecorazzi on Twitter, too!

Image: newagecrap

Is this a meat destined for the dinner tables of the 21st Century? Eaten in parts of Italy, Korea, Madagascar, Spain and China, it’s allegedly tastier than chicken, rabbit or pigeon…and it’s available worldwide in vast quantities. The name of this super-food? Brace yourself. It’s cat.

Midway through an episode of Italian cooking show La Prova del Cuoco, celebrity chef Beppe Bigazzi began waxing lyrical about the joys of a nice big bowl of casseroled cat. Describing the dish as “quite tender” he gave tips on preparation (soak in springwater for 3 days) before predicting “now we’ll get letters from nature lovers”.

No kidding. One white-hot telephone switchboard later, Bigazzi has been indefinitely suspended from the show (despite claiming it was all a prank), and Italy’s Deputy Health Minister is calling for a criminal investigation. Is Bigazzi suitably contrite? Well, not so much. “In the 1930s and 1940s, when I was a boy, people certainly did eat cat in the countryside around Arezzo,” he explains.

Fighting a churning stomach and a rising sense of outrage? Me, too – but there’s an interesting, and valid, question here. In the blossoming world culture of the 21st Century, where will food taboos fit in?

Take cats. Our horror at popping puss in a pot is because for us, cats have crossed that invisible cultural line between wild animals and domestic companions. They’re part of our lives in a way that lifts them out of our food chain. Consequently, while it’s often technically legal to consume cat meat, doing so breaches a number of animal cruelty laws and lands the chef in prison (the challenge facing Bigazzi right now). And that’s mild compared to the public reaction to stories like this.

It’s clearly, obviously wrong to eat cats, right? But a Hindu would say exactly the same thing about beef, as they regard the cow as a sacred animal. The Somali (recently famous for their piracy) don’t eat fish. Even staunchly meat-eating England, Australia and the U.S. have a mild taboo against eating offal. How about escargot, anyone? Wherever you look, we flinch at different things.

Across the world as a whole, “wrong” is anything but obvious. And this allows shock-jock TV chefs to go in search of dishes that will thrill their audiences with ratings-winning revulsion.

Sometimes food taboos make perfect sense, and sometimes they’re no-nos laced with hypocrisy. We’re inconsistent. That’s often the way we roll. But when the world needs feeding, should we be trying to put a lid on our indignation – or is it about time we turned up the heat on the culinary wrongdoers?

Image: avlxyz

]]> http://ecosalon.com/its-a-what-casserole/feed/ 2 http://ecosalon.com/doris-day/ http://ecosalon.com/doris-day/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:00:22 +0000 Luanne Bradley http://www.ecosalon.com/?p=14518

Longtime animal rights advocate Doris Day is calling on us to pay special attention to the treatment of dogs, cats, and birds in our neighborhoods. April is Prevention of Animal Cruelty Month.

In her first post for Larry King’s page on CNN, the actress who lives in Carmel, Calif. says it’s the perfect time to ask for help with her campaign for humane treatment of our four-legged friends.

“You would not believe how much mail I receive and the terrible stories I hear about dogs chained and left for hours, crying all the time; or cats confined to the smallest spaces and left in the cold, or other tales of dogs, cats and birds that are too shocking to tell to humane and sensitive people,” she writes.

Day says many communities have formed effective neighborhood watches which look out for each others’ properties, as well as reporting any inhumane treatment they see to authorities. She adds that pets are more important than property and should be a priority.

“At the very least, animals should have shelter, food, water, protection from the weather and the company of their guardians,” she reminds us. “That’s the absolute minimum. I am asking you to make sure the animals near your home, school and/or workplace are well treated.”

Animal abuse is illegal, so Day suggests we become proactive as we would be with any crimes in our area.

She says if you hear barking and crying, check it out. It you hear the barking and crying repeatedly and think the animal is being abused – look to see what’s going on, and if necessary, report the problem right away.

Doris Day Animal Foundation is a non-profit organization established by the actress to further her goals of caring for the wonderful critters who so enhance our lives.