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Quote by Lisa Kemmerer

“Animals arrive at slaughter exhausted, thirsty, hungry, and terrified. Every year 100,000 factory farmed cattle arrive at slaughter injured, or too dispirited to walk; undercover investigators have repeatedly documented downed animals who are kicked, beaten, pushed with bulldozers, and dragged from transport trucks with ropes or a chain, though they are fully conscious, in pain, and bellowing pitifully. Cows exploited in the dairy industry, because they are older and their bodies have been exhausted by perpetual pregnancy, birthing, and milking, are among the most pathetic when they arrive at slaughter.”

Quote by Lisa Kemmerer

Book:Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices
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Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

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Lisa Kemmerer

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“Public grazing provides just one dollar out of every $2,500 of taxable income in the West, or 0.04 percent, and just one out of everything 1,400 jobs, or 0.07 percent. On both public and private lands in the eleven Western states, the livestock industry accounts for less than 0.5 percent of all income.”

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“The argument goes like this: even if public grazing contributes almost nothing to local economies and national food production, it nonetheless supports "an important western lifestyle and the rural west's social and cultural fabric." If we keep ranchers working on the range, on the big wide-open of the public domain, we ensure the historical continuity of a "custom" that has gone on for close to 150 years.”

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“Pound for pound, these animals don’t add up to much. Dog fanciers with a couple of Rottweilers trump us in terms of sheer biomass. But, when it comes to sheer insistence, even the largest, most unruly dogs—or for that matter, your average herd of cattle—are no match for our ducks, geese, parrots, parakeets, turkeys, cats, rabbits, and other birds.”

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“They walked gingerly across the junk-filled vacant lots to the local abattoir - a place of infinite fascination, with its strange sights and stranger smells. It was a thrill - because it outraged their every sense of animal love - to watch the killings. To see calm, innocent cattle led one by one into that room with the fetid smells and the stained, concrete floor always a'swish with running water. To see brawny, heavy-set Gus Milner and his equally big son, Charley, slip the snubbing rope through the ring in the cow's nose, and relentlessly draw its head down and down until its nose touched the heavy ring set in the floor, then fasten it. Their hearts did strange nip-ups just back of their mouths as one of the men would pick up the heavy sledge, and with one great, perfectly aimed blow, strike the animal just between and a bit above the eyes. They always jumped at the sudden slump as the carcass dropped, spraddled and lifeless, to the floor. ("The Shed")”

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