With thanks to Stacey at ‘Our Compass’ for sending the following over.  Mark.

Ethical Vegans Must Reject Donald Trump. Period.

‘Our Compass’ Link as follows:

Ethical Vegans Must Reject Donald Trump. Period.

Note: Regarding Protect the Harvest’s ludicrous and deceptive claim of the nonexistence of factory farms, “family” has zero legal distinction regarding farm size; indeed, a “family” can refer to Kraft, Ford, Trump, Smithfield, and Walmart. The government defines size, and anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of Google can easily find this data. To suggest that the greater than 10 billion land animals killed annually in the US alone come from Uncle Ted’s backyard hinges on desperation to continue the animal holocaust unseen and socially accepted. SL

EPA:

USDA:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines AFOs as agricultural enterprises where animals are kept and raised in confined situations. AFOs congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area. Feed is brought to the animals rather than the animals grazing or otherwise seeking feed in pastures, fields, or on rangeland. There are approximately 450,000 AFOs in the United States.

A CAFO is another EPA term for a large concentrated AFO.  A CAFO is an AFO with more than 1000 animal units (an animal unit is defined as an animal equivalent of 1000 pounds live weight and equates to 1000 head of beef cattle, 700 dairy cows, 2500 swine weighing more than 55 lbs, 125 thousand broiler chickens, or 82 thousand laying hens or pullets) confined on site for more than 45 days during the year.  Any size AFO that discharges manure or wastewater into a natural or man-made ditch, stream or other waterway is defined as a CAFO, regardless of size.  CAFOs are regulated by EPA under the Clean Water Act in both the 2003 and 2008 versions of the “CAFO” rule.

Additional resources:

Large animal feeding operations on the rise

99% of U.S. Farmed Animals Live on Factory Farms

Ethical Vegans Must Reject Donald Trump. Period.

Source Free From Harm

By Rosemary Thompson

Veganism, at its essence, is the recognition that all animals have the right to bodily integrity. Humans do not own the bodies, families or lives of other animals – we can be guardians to animals in need of rescue, but animals are never our property or commodities.

Donald Trump has demonstrated, over and over again, that he sees animals only as obstacles to be cleared or resources to be used to serve corporate interests and generate maximum profits.

But his actions don’t reveal a detached view of other species as objects or commodities so much as a seething contempt – for the natural world, for animals and for anyone trying to protect them.

Putting animal haters in charge

At every turn, Trump has placed people who actively oppose animal welfare, wildlife and environmental protection in leadership roles at the agencies responsible for carrying out those protections. Not surprisingly, this fox-guarding-the-hen-house strategy has resulted in dire consequences for animals and their habitat.

In 2016 he selected Brian Klippenstein, executive director of a particularly vile organization called Protect the Harvest, to serve as senior advisor to the USDA – the agency charged with safeguarding animals used in commerce.

Protect the Harvest exists to “save the agricultural industry from the growing threat of the radical animal rights movement” by lobbying against animal welfare legislation, supporting ag-gag bills and promoting animal commoditization in all forms – including circuses, rodeos, dog and horse racing, horse carriages, puppy mills and horse slaughter.

One of the group’s campaigns aims to soothe consumers’ growing concern regarding confined animal feeding operations by assuring the public that factory farming is just a “fictional concept created by activists.”

Next, Trump chose to appease animal agriculture and fossil fuel industry elites by putting climate change denier Scott Pruitt in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency – a move that led to the rollback of several critical climate and pollution regulations, along with the U.S. decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

Pruitt, once honored with an award for his contribution to the success of the beef cattle industry, has described himself as a “leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda” and “a big fan of beef.”

Though he resigned in 2018 under the weight of numerous legal and ethics investigations, EPA leadership continues to prioritize industry demands over keeping the country’s air and water clean. In March the agency used the COVID-19 chaos as a cover to release polluting industries from monitoring and reporting requirements.

Perhaps the most stunning hire Trump made was William Perry Pendley, a former oil and gas attorney he installed to wreak havoc on the Bureau of Land Management. That’s the agency charged with conserving public lands – such as national parks – in 11 Western states and Alaska.

Pendley, who spent the bulk of his career lobbying for oil companies’ rights to drill in pristine wilderness, does not believe public lands should exist at all.

He has joked on video about illegally killing and burying endangered animals, and tweeted that climate change is like a unicorn because “neither exists.” He also has a grotesque obsession with eradicating wild horses and burros – insisting that they (rather than cattle grazing or resource extraction) represent an “existential threat” to public lands.

A judge recently ruled that Pendley’s service violates the Constitution because he was never confirmed by the Senate, but so far he has refused to leave his post.

Please click on the above link to continue reading the full article.