Connecticut Company to Make Motor Oil from Animal Fat

Green Earth Technologies, Inc. claims that it can make an animal-derived product chemically identical to crude oil, and intends to use animal fat from slaughterhouses to make it. You can read about it here.

I don't even have the words to describe how disgusting this is to me on so many different levels.

Bits and blurbs in the news about animals we call 'food'

Doug Moss had a short (but effective) opinion piece in emagazine.com a few days ago about how the majority of environmental leaders and advocates are still refusing to face (and address) the impact of the meat industry on the world around us. It reminded me of an opinion piece in the New York Times I'd read last summer that raised similar points.

Less than a year after a HSUS' investigation into downer cow abuse at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. slaughterhouse and meat packing plant in Chino, CA led to the biggest voluntary meat recall in US history, another investigation has revealed that the goings on there seem to have been the industry norm, rather than the exception. Ironically, a bill was defeated last Wednesday that would have required video surveillance in California slaughterhouses to prevent similar acts of cruelty in the future; slaughterhouse owners and meat industry lobbyists are no doubt relieved.

A sorry day to be a pig

In an effort to keep the Canadian pig industry from collapsing, the federal government has announced that they'll be paying pig farmers $50 million of taxpayers' money to kill off 150,000 pigs over the next six months and to give the bulk of the meat to pet food processors or otherwise dispose of it, but earmarking 'up to 25% of it for food banks. How, do you wonder, will these pigs who are mostly being trashed be killed?

From the Canadian Press:

To ensure that the animals are treated in a humane way, producers are being encouraged to ship their pigs to approved slaughter plants. Producers who live in areas without plants will be asked to ship their animals to a province with such a facility.

But there is nothing to prevent producers from killing the animals on their farms themselves.

"We want to minimize the amount of on-farm euthanizing," Rice said. "Before we would approve that application we would need to know how it was going to be done - that it was going to be done humanely and in an environmentally sound way."