My Foodprint

In the race to make our food better and to understand our food better, humans have experimented on animals over and over again. And cows, the unwitting, docile champions of the farm have unfortunately born the brunt of many of these experiments. Many seem cruel and clearly tied into a system designed to maximize profit and improve the animal’s utility as a food source–not necessarily taking to account the animal as animal. This morning, looking around online, I came across an experiment performed on cows in which a hole called a fistula is made in the cow’s side. A hole like the small windows in the hull of a boat. Through this hole one can remove half-digested food from the cow’s stomach in order to study it and determine how the cow is breaking down certain types of food. The web sites that discuss the fistulated cows claim the cows feel no pain when the operation is performed and that the cows live a long and happy life. Even if this is true, the oddity of this experiment, the fact that someone decided we should put a hole in an animal where there was no hole before, is almost too Orwellian to handle. Can;t we just let these animals live without holes in their sides? Can’t we let them digest their own food instead of tinkering with them like pieces of machinery? Guess not.

–Nick