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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

[ALF’s self-defined mission is “to effectively allocate resources (time and money) to reduce animal suffering in the world.” Toward this end, ALF states that it “carries out direct action against animal abuse in the form of rescuing animals and causing financial loss to animal exploiters, usually through the damage and destruction of property.” In our rotten, filthy system, which holds profit and property sacrosanct and rationalizes the infliction of widespread suffering as a justifiable means to its depraved ends, Animal Liberation Front members have been designated as “terrorists.” One such “terrorist” is picture above.]

By Eduardo Lamazon*

10/1/07

Life for most animals can hardly be described as such. That is, it early on ceases to be life in the greater sense of the term, quickly devolving into an intense pain that serves as punishment for going along with a human coexistence that is entirely out of their control.

These ‘non-human animals,’ as propriety should coerce us into calling them, are marvelous creatures whose tendency towards both aesthetic and mechanical perfection is commonplace, yet whose defenses against our species’ incorrigibly vitriolic means of predation sadly do not follow suit.

There are those who posit reason as the singular quality of distinction between humans and animals. However, for those so quick to call upon the comparatively larger frontal lobes we possess, the counter response should both flatter and offend such a narrow-minded sensibility: ‘How,’ we should ask, ‘do we come to use this more refined calculating potential, not solely in relation to our admitted inferiors, but also as regards our unscrupulous method of understanding our own everyday actions?’

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Most factory-farmed animals are confined for life in completely unnatural surroundings, reduced to mere abstract units denied the status of living creatures, and manipulated relentlessly to maximize profits. Alongside Big Pharma, agribusiness is one of the most corrupting influences in American politics.

by Peter Singer

10/2006

For low meat prices, the animals, the environment and rural neighborhoods pay steeply.

There is a growing consensus that factory farming of animals - also known as CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations - is morally wrong. The American animal rights movement, which in its early years focused largely on the use of animals in research, now has come to see that factory farming represents by far the greater abuse of animals. The numbers speak for themselves. In the United States somewhere between 20 million and 40 million birds and mammals are killed for research every year. That might seem like a lot - and it far exceeds the number of animals killed for their fur, let alone the relatively tiny number used in circuses - but 40 million represents less than two days’ toll in America’s slaughterhouses, which kill about 10 billion animals each year.

The overwhelming majority of these animals have spent their entire lives confined inside sheds, never going outdoors for a single hour. Their suffering isn’t just for a few hours or days, but for all their lives. Sows and veal calves are confined in crates too narrow for them even to turn around, let alone walk a few steps. Egg-laying hens are unable to stretch their wings because their cages are too small and too crowded. With nothing to do all day, they become frustrated and attack each other. To prevent losses, producers sear off their beaks with a hot knife, cutting through sensitive nerves.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Vi Ransel

8/28/07

See them plump, parading
with cherubic cheeks,
their blimp-like breasts
and bouffant thighs chafing,
framing cheese,
butter, milk and ice cream-fed
pendulous bellies swaying
as they waddle, breathing laboriously,
to receive their 1st, 2nd and 3rd
place prizes, oversized satin ribbons
of heart disease and diabetes,
the dairy princes and princesses
who comprise America’s royal obesity,
her children suckled vicariously
by mothers whose milk
is a blueprint for producing
2,000 pound steers.

Look. At. Us.

Of all Earth’s creatures,
only man wet nurses himself
with the milk
of another species.

Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Vi Ransel

8/18/07

Meat & potatoes.
Potatoes & meat.
This, we’re told,
is what REAL men
eat.

And since faggots, feminazis
and minorities got the upper hand,
it’s one of the last legal ways left
to show you’re a HE, not a girly, man.

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By Jason Miller

8/15/07

“The moral duty of man consists of imitating the moral goodness and benificence of God manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.”

–Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason

Despite the trappings of a civilized culture and the incredibly persistent myth of our moral exceptionalism, we in the United States are collectively a group of mean-spirited, depraved barbarians. Sparing our psyches the pangs of conscience by ferociously devouring the corporate media’s seemingly endless supply of rationalizations, euphemisms, historical revisions, distractions, denials, distortions, and affirmations of our pathological self-absorption, we each carry a degree of responsibility in the infliction of immeasurable unnecessary pain and suffering upon the rest of the Earth’s sentient beings.

Deeply integrated into a cultural and economic system in which compassion is considered to be a weakness and in which greed, exploitation, profits, property, winning, bellicosity and selfishness are sacrosanct, we cannot escape the reality that each of us participates in the American version of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” to some extent. Unless we isolate ourselves in a mountain cabin or expatriate, as US citizens we are each damned to be one of the 300 million “Little Eichmanns” who enable our cynical plutocratic masters to dominate the world both economically and militarily.

Struggling to make itself heard above the cacophonous din of sound bites, advertising jingles, clichés, tropes, memes, mythos, and various other manifestations of the false consciousness that afflicts so many of us, the voice of conscience occasionally grabs our attention and violently reminds us how badly we are fucking the rest of the world.

And when it does, the question we each need to ask ourselves is, “How much like “Eich” do I want to be?”

While there are myriad ways we can each minimize our culpability in the egregious crimes of savage capitalism and its most banal representation, consumerism, the struggle to end speciesism is at the vanguard of our much needed moral evolution. Yet is often minimized and ridiculed by sociopolitical thinkers of nearly all stripes.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to  

Commentary written by Vi Ransel and edited by Jason Miller

Verse by Vi Ransel

8/7/07

It seems you’ve been able to unite liberals, progressives, conservatives, libertarians and even whacka-wacka Americans not in a righteous condemnation of the Iraq War, illegal dictatorial legislation, the wealth gap, lack of health care, vote fraud, dumbed down education, a bought-off/wholly-owned media and Congress, but simply by reminding them of where the meat they eat comes from. Would that we could inspire such passion over any of the aforementioned topics!

And while comments on well-reasoned pieces by eminent authors such as Chalmers Johnson are slim to none, DEAD ANIMALS got 29 comments - some VERY scary, many of them cartoons of hysteria and caricatures of sentient debate - on its first day up. (at 54 today)

While the author does drive himself right over that cliff of “going-so-far-you-have-a-hard-time-getting-anybody-to-go-along-with-you”, most of us probably agree that concentration camps and torture are wrong in any context, that mistreatment of the least of us leads inevitably to mistreatment of the rest of us and has nothing at all to do, ultimately, with meat, the food chain or population growth, but the ethics (or the lack of) on which we base our actions and the fully-aware acceptance, or denial, of what is being done in our name.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

“YOU, ANIMALS, AND THE EARTH WILL SURVIVE VERY WELL”

“It’s great news that so many people are going veggie!” says Viva! Campaigns manager, Justin Kerswell. “Almost a billion animals are still killed for meat each year in the UK, most of them living appallingly short lives in squalid conditions and facing a terrifying death so we clearly have a long way to go but we are winning. Concerns about animal cruelty, health and the state of the planet are growing daily and vegetarianism provides a solution to all of them. It’s needed like never before.”

BY ARTHUR POLETTI

8/1/07

HUMANS MUST STOP USING THEIR STOMACHS AS A GRAVEYARD FOR THE DEAD FLESH FROM THE CORPSES OF TORTURED AND MURDERED ANIMALS.

“WAKE UP” BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!

PARTICIPATING IN AND SUPPORTING THE LIVESTOCK INDUSTRY IS LIKE PLAYING A DEADLY “NO WAY TO WIN” GAME OF RUSSIAN ROULETTE WITH NATURE.

EVEN THOUGH THE INSIDIOUS DEMAND TO EAT DEAD ANIMAL FLESH IS THE DRIVING FORCE THAT IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE NUMBER ONE CAUSE OF GLOBAL WARMING, INCREDIBLY IT DOES NOT SEEM TO CURB THE INSATIABLE, AND UNQUENCHABLE EATING HABITS OF BILLIONS OF PEOPLE THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.

INCLUDING WELL KNOWN “SO CALLED”GLOBAL WARMING EXPERTS THAT PROFESS TO KNOW THE MAJOR CAUSES AND THE SOLUTIONS.

NATURE’S BRUTAL EXPRESSIONS OF VENGEANCE ARE BEING UNLEASHED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD IN THE FORM OF SOME OF THE MOST POWERFUL AND DESTRUCTIVE FORCES TO HUMANITY IMAGINABLE AS RETRIBUTION FOR THE WORST POSSIBLE CRIMES HUMANS HAVE COMMITTED TO GOD’S CREATURES AND NATURE.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

BY RALPH R. ACAMPORA

July 22, 2007

The story many Long Islanders have followed during the past few weeks of an escaped steer on the North Fork whose notoriety landed him a refuge away from the abattoir gets more perplexing the more you think about it. From a strictly agribusiness point of view, of course, the fugitive livestock presented only the problem of recapturing an ornery investment before its due harvest. Bad cow - get back into the pen.

But from the perspective of animal rights, the tale takes on a different tone altogether. “Moo,” as he came to be nicknamed, represented the fiery spirit of independence even domesticated animals still harbor. He broke free in a bid for liberation, impressed the public and was rewarded with sanctuary in the end. Good cow - move on to greener pastures.

Listen to animal advocates’ viewpoint, and you’ll be forced to confront what we normally prefer to leave hidden and forgotten: the ultimate destiny of farm animals, namely (dis)assembly-line slaughter. If you have the stomach, you can visit a slaughterhouse or else watch the recent documentary “Earthlings” (at isawearthlings.com) to reacquaint yourself rather graphically with the gruesome details.

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