Hurray for Kimberly Lobherr for pointing out the problems with tainted meat begin well before slaughter.

Today's meat and dairy industries maximize their profits by treating animals like widgets on assembly lines. They subject living, breathing creatures to disease in overcrowded conditions of intensive confinement. They pump them full of drugs to make them grow fast and to keep them well enough for transport to slaughter. They very often boil and butcher them while they are still conscious.

When we eat the carcasses of these animals, we ingest the drugs and disease in their systems, as well as the pain and suffering in their hearts. It is not just the meat of "downed" animals that is unfit; almost all meat sold today is tainted by the cruelty and violence that animals are subjected to in factory farms, during transport, at the feedlot and at the slaughterhouse. Everyone who eats this meat is complicit in supporting a tainted system.

Deborah L. Pace, Valparaiso