Say 'no' to the meat industry and 'yes' to the local farmer

To the Editor:
It is illegal to mistreat your pet in the United States, but legal for factory-farmers to brutalize and torture chickens, pigs and cows for human consumption. They don't have feelings like your pet?

For an example, when you buy factory-farmed chickens from the supermarket this is how they raise all of them. Much of a chicken's life will be spent in a squalid shed, crowded together with tens of thousands of other birds, each bred and drugged to grow so large and so quickly that their organs sometimes can't keep up with their bodies. More often than not their beaks and feet are amputated off with clippers without any painkillers because of the crowded and horrific conditions. A pig's life is in a steel cage in a factory-farm building so small that the pig can't move his or her head or body not even one inch until slaughter. But the pig has feelings and it is abused greatly.

The Organic Consumer's Association and the American Pastured Producer's Association has a list of websites that are helpful to consumers who want to buy organic and humanely-raised farm animals. (FarmMatch.com; LocalHarvest.org; EatWild.com) EatWild has a list of hundreds of farms in the tri-state (NY, PA, NJ) area.

Catherine Kuellmer
Milford