Why Free Range Is Not Enough – Rose

Free range is an oxymoron. Free range is not the answer. Free range is still slavery. Free range is just slavery people kid themselves is not slavery.I hope the thoughts below will help explain why free-range is little more than a marketing gimick, designed to make ethically-motivated vegetarians stop halfway, before reaching the logical conclusion of their ethical motivation to minimise animal suffering. They want your money, and they will invent new and wonderful ways to make sure they keep getting it. A guilt-free diet is not possible simply by paying more for your meat, eggs, or milk.***“Free range” is not “living in the wild”. It is still living in captivity. In the slavery of humans. It is still speciesist. It is still working on the assumption that we humans have the right to enslave others, anyone, force them to work their bodies to the detriment of their health, stealing from them their children, their menstrual products, their freedom, and eventually, their lives.We would never shake someone’s hand for choosing to rape a woman on a soft mattress to classical music. We would never shake someone’s hand for putting poison in someone’s food, if it happened to be a delicious meal. Similarly, we must not honour the organic / free-range / grass-feeding farmers. They are still rapists. They are still murderers.***On a ‘free range’ dairy farm, a calf must still be born every year to 18 months to keep the milk flowing. These calves still get killed. There is nothing natural about this death. Vegetarians must not kid themselves that any farm may not involve this.If starting from just one cow, within twenty years when the first dies of old age, you would have 5,000 cows. Of the 5,000, a large number will be producing declining amounts of milk, whilst half will provide no milk at all on account of their gender. Get real.These cows are still the victims of cruel breeding and excessive hormones. Their breasts become sore from the excessive milk production and theft of this milk from their calves. The hard, metal, pump machines cause sores and infections, a side-effect of even this “free range” cow’s suffering being the pus, blood and antibiotics that end up in dairy products.In their ‘free range’ environment, they are free to experience the proven depression and sense of loss any mother feels when her baby is taken from her. However, when these mothers become less productive, they may finally follow to their babies’ destination: the slaughterhouse.There are no ‘free range’ chicken farms for free range eggs, either. Are they all living together, with equal numbers of girls and boys? No, the male chicks are minced alive shortly after birth. The facts of their behavioural biology make such an environment impossible, anyway. The free range chickens still suffer pain, injuries and imprisonment. The free range chickens still suffer an untimely demise – killed after a year or 18 months at most, when they are less productive. The free range chickens are still the victims of cruel, intensive, unnatural breeding that results in excessive egg production and calcium sucked from their bones.All free range animals still go to slaughter long before the end of their natural lives.Ask yourselves this: Would any “free” animal send themselves to slaughter?The free range myth fools vegetarians into thinking they have reached the end goal, and that the vegans are extremists. We are not extremists. We are consistent, following the same principles that made you turn vegetarian. It is very hard, when the egg and dairy industries and powerful supermarkets invent such new and sneaky ways of getting you to buy their products and quelling your conscience. Don’t believe their lies. A gilded cage is still a cage – a ‘well-treated’ slave (by the slaver’s standards) with a small amount of freedom to move not afforded to other slaves, before his or her untimely and inevitable death, is still a slave. Free range is still slavery.We aren’t arguing about the definitions of free range and grass fed just to argue. We are highlighting that free range is a clever marketing lie that involves little difference to the conditions and none to the status of non-human animals. This is a lie that nobody who claims to care for non-human animals should help propagate.Ask yourselves this:If I cared about animals, would I not do all I could to avoid their suffering?You are a free-range human. You have the freedom to play no part in this suffering.