The Saturday Food Chain with Michael Olson- January 05th 2012- The Elite Meat

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The Elite Meat

Michael Olson hosts
Custom Butcher Rian Rinn
&
EcoFarm Board Member Thomas Wittman
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Can we bring our food animals home?
A few decades ago, we lived with the animals we ate.  Many can still remember those days.  I do.  As a young boy growing up on the grandparent’s farm near Belfry, Montana, I helped feed, nurture, kill and butcher the animals we ate.
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Tending to the animals was just part of the job of growing up on a working farm, and on the farm, every person, and every animal, had a job.  There were no pets on the farm.
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We have since moved off the farm and into big cities. The animals we live with are now pets, and often given full-citizenship in the family, with rights to eat at the dinner table, watch TV on the couch, and sleep on the bed.
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The animals we eat now live behind the high walls of distant factories, where they cannot be seen, heard, smelled or touched.  When word gets out, often via purloined video, of how our food animals are treated, we city people shudder in horror.  How can they be so mean to animals?
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But truth be told, those factories treat our food animals about as humanely as possible, given the exingencies of raising thousands of them in tightly packed containers.  It simply can’t get much better for our food animals, unless we bring them home, and so we ask…

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Can we bring our food animals home?