File this one under “Eat My…”

…Shit.”

We all know that newspaper links in blogs can be iffy, since they tend to deteriorate or get locked up behind a user-fee wall. But here’s an item from the Globe and Mail, repeated more or less in the Hindustan Times “Health” section (and elsewhere), that made me wonder just what kind of animals we really are.

Or whether we are indeed animals at all. Perhaps humans are just machines, removed from the cycles of nature and not worthy of the designation animal or sentient being. It sure looks as if we’re out to make sure that other animals wish they weren’t sentient beings…

So, we’ve all heard about the second case of Mad Cow disease in the US by now.

Dig a little deeper. It turns out that the people who raise beef cattle feed chicken shit (you read that right) to cows:

Ground-up cattle remains can be fed to chicken, and chicken litter is fed back to cattle. Poultry feed that spills from cages mixes with chicken waste on the ground, then is swept up for use in cattle feed. Scientists believe the BSE protein will survive the feed-making process and may survive being digested in chickens.

(…)

Besides being fed to poultry, cattle protein is allowed in feed for pigs and household pets, creating the possibility it could mistakenly be fed to cattle. [More…]

More on this story in the Globe and Mail article, called Mad Cow Back on the Menu?.

Quoting John Stauber, the G&M’s Libby Quaid writes,

“Once the cameras were turned off and the media coverage dissipated, then it’s been business as usual, no real reform, just keep feeding slaughterhouse waste,” said John Stauber, an activist and co-author of Mad Cow USA: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?

He contended that “the entire U.S. policy is designed to protect the livestock industry’s access to slaughterhouse waste as cheap feed.”

(…)

…it is legal to put ground-up cattle remains in chicken feed. Feed that spills from cages mixes with chicken waste on the ground, then is swept up for use in cattle feed.

Scientists believe the BSE protein will survive the feed-making process and may even survive the trip through a chicken’s gut.

That amounts to the legal feeding of some cattle protein back to cattle, said Linda Detwiler, a former Agriculture Department veterinarian who led the department’s work on mad cow for several years.

(…)

Rendering companies contend that new restrictions would be costly and create hazards from leftover waste. They say changes are not justified.

“We process about 50 billion pounds of product annually — in visual terms, that is a convoy of semi trucks, four lanes wide, running from New York to L.A. every year,” said Jim Hodges, president of the meatpacking industry‘s American Meat Institute Foundation. [note: the meatpacking industry is a huge employer of illegal immigrant slave labour, so it’s a real double-plus good situation we have here…. Get your karmic hamburger, hold the bun.][More…]

If this link decays, try the Hindustan Times (Wide open gaps may cause Mad Cow to strike back) or the google results page cited above.

What does this have to do with my (theoretical) shit, as in “Eat my shit”? It’s a long story. It has to do with the Marquis de Sade and his renowned coprophilia (and coprophagia, painfully examined in Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pier Paolo Pasolini, which dared to compare the Sadean universe with fascism (which upset all the leftist French intellectuals intent on rehabilitating and defending Sade, but they completely misunderstood Pasolini’s critique), and it has to do with Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which examined Sade (and Nietzsche) and dared to compare the philosophy of the latter to outcomes under Nazism and totalitarianism.

It’s all of a cloth, and that cloth is an asswipe.

The point is, for modern consciousness, with its dead deities and moribund morals, nature cannot provide a barrier. Nature is something to be dominated and conquered, and nature furthermore provides no moral precepts whatsoever. Life or death: they seem to be irrelevant to nature. Nature, it appears, does not care, and it’s only the gloss of religion or New Age folderol that makes it look as though Nature does. Against that, it’s always possible to reason: rational people know that “god” (meaning) is dead. That’s what the infant Sade, powerless, unable even to crawl, knows in his darkest heart: nature doesn’t give a shit. The next step, therefore, is easy: if the archaic monsters (or gods) from the past are finally dead, and if nature doesn’t care, what is to stop the hubris of man? Nothing. Nothing at all. That’s why we can feed chicken shit to cows (who are ruminants and vegetarians) and call it progress and call it rationalisation. That’s why we can create self-sustaining machines (especially corporate machines) that will destroy us in the end — machines that literally and figuratively are 4 lanes deep, and stretch the width of a whole continent if not the circumference of the world, of which we are of course the sovereigns. And that’s why we (not just I) say, Eat My Shit.