The SAFEty of New Zealand

Can you believe it? SAFE are threatening us all with further ads and actions like that one in the picture if the MPI and/or the government don't do what they want about this "animal abuse".

Who do they think they are? Our government does fine if everyone would trust them and leave them alone. Anyway, here's a roundup of what the country has to say about this so-called animal activism!

• These naive treasonous economic terrorists haven't thought for a second about what happens if everyone goes vegan but are deviously planning to ruin NZ and then move to their second Hawaii homes.
• All the farm animals will die off because they can't raise their young without our help, while overrunning the entire planet due to uncontrolled breeding. And the farmers will never work again, because they have no other skills and nobody has ever retrained for a second career.
• The filming was illegal and staged, and they should have immediately gone onto the farms, stopped the workers, and rescued the animals while they were being abused on hidden unmanned cameras. That would have been legal, right?
• We already know for a fact there are only a few who abuse animals (real farmers hug their cows!) so why didn't they immediately hand over their first footage instead of looking for more widespread evidence to selfishly grab headlines? This is all about their ego. And bringing down NZ farming by making us all go vegan. But mostly their ego.
• They only saw 0.000001% of NZ farms and let's face it, to us townies all farms look alike anyway. It was probably just one farm. And it was staged. With animals that "sanctuary owners" pretend to "rescue"! Because that's just how much sanctuary owners hate farmers...and animals.
• Why didn't they send their evidence to the SPCA who everyone knows is the agency for, duh, Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or even our police who are animal experts and would have done something right away, instead of the MPI? Who's the MPI??
• Why did they go to the media instead of waiting for our government to do its job properly? The media is only supposed to be for sports and the movie star news. They just wanted more media attention and donations to waste on paying salaries. Everyone knows that only a few abuse animals, so why did the media even air it? Nobody wants to know if a few people abuse animals - just keep quiet and report it to the SPCA!
• We'd be a third-world country without dairy exports. Why did they take an ad in the UK? What's the UK got to do with the NZ dairy industry? Hello, they're different countries, stupid SAFE. Our PM is even helping us take the Union Jack off our flag.
• The filming of abuse by transport workers and a slaughterhouse worker was clearly an attack by SAFE on all dairy farmers! So those great dairy farmers struck like a cornered snake against SAFE in self-defense, pointing out it wasn't them on the video that wasn't said to be them. We haven't heard from the transport workers or slaughterhouse workers against SAFE yet - they're probably still on shift trying to feed their families on those casual rates instead of browsing the web or making a FB page.
• Do they only care about cows? What about the pigs and chickens? If they really cared, they'd have campaigns for them too! Then that would really be attacking the NZ economy! Good thing SAFE won't be a charity for much longer - we have a petition.
• Mmmmm bacon.

So what's this rubbish about no-cholesterol milk and meat that doesn't even come from animals?

Is that from SAFE too? Someone had better warn the farmers.

Mother's best old-fashioned vegan oatmeal porridge recipe

The best thing about porridge is that you can add anything!

The best thing about becoming a mother is that you learn to go with the flow...

Morning Oatmeal 
(or whenever my day allows time for eating with utensils)

1. Boil the kettle.
2. Take kids' leftover bowl with some extra soymilk and cold cereal sloshing in the bottom.
3. Add random crumbs from yesterday's bags of kids' car snacks
4. Add organic wholegrain oats
5. OK, ran out of wholegrain oats. Add some instant oatmeal and some of that cornmeal I bought months ago when I was going to start making fresh cornbread.
6. Add some raisins, or shred some dates with bare hands, or just decide the soymilk will be sweet enough.
7. Cinnamon? Ginger? Nice if you have a few extra seconds.
8. Pour boiled water over the ingredients in the bowl.

• Cooking time - 1 shower, 5 answered emails and 1 shopping list (don't forget organic wholegrain oats!) 
• If in a super hurry, just add more soymilk to cool and eat right away as limp muesli

Bon appetit! Remember while eating that these are the best years of your life...

5 upsides of the Farmwatch expose

It's very easy to get caught up the immediate anger, denial, and polarisation when whistleblowers expose what we'd prefer not to see. Social criticism can be violently unpopular, and "killing the messenger" is a cliche for a very good reason.

But undeniably, whistleblowers get us talking about the important stuff instead of sitcoms and sports. No other way works like it. And beneath the painful arguing, this is our common ground...
 
1. Compassion

New Zealanders love animals, and we don't want to see what we all had to see. Nobody. The farmers, the businesses, the animal activists, the consumers. Not even the perpetrator of the worst videoed violence would enjoy that footage. Animal industry workers have a stressful, traumatic job that is generally insecure and badly paid, and as such are another victim of the system, as well as being the convenient scapegoat for the offenses.

2. Public pressure

The government and MPI now know without a doubt that New Zealanders want action for better treatment for farm animals. This is the only sort of pressure that really works. Simply reporting the abuses was not working.

3. Awareness

Many more people, including townies, now know the open secret of what happens during industrial farming to produce milk for the shops. Don't they say education is key? Of course it doesn't have to be this bad. Let's look for short and long-term solutions together to acknowledge that animals as economic objects are at risk.

4. Memories

So many people from rural New Zealand backgrounds have shared their memories of how farming was back on their family farms and how unbelievable it is that these traumatic scenes could be widespread. For better or for worse, caring for their animals is the common theme.

5. Vision of the future

New Zealand's economy doesn't need to depend on industrial dairy so desperately that we accept  welfare compromises for financial success. Even if New Zealanders didn't care about animals (we do!), we'd be wiser to diversify our rich land into more sustainable operations.

The future could be cruelty-free, if we decide we want it.