I am an extreme dog lover, I own 7 myself and work in the dog industry. I've adopted two, got two off the streets, took one from unfit family, and purshased the other two from a breeder. I'm beyond against puppy mills as is any moral human being with a heart. I think it's great that someone recomended to Oprah to speak against puppy mills. However, it back fired. No puppy mills have been shut down or affected at all. The ones that have been affected are privatley owned pet shops and the puppies in them. It is a FACT that since Oprah's show about puppy mills was aired, radical activists have protested in an extreme fashion against innocent puppy stores. Ignorant activists have decided that every puppy store must get there puppies from mills which couldn't be further from the truth in many cases. Purebreed puppies from legitamate liscenced breeders are not able too find homes because of the false accusations of the ignorant protesters. Somnething needs to be fixed

Thank you, Mypups. I personally am for puppy mills if they are humane. Unfortunately the label itself only implies large quantities of puppies and doesn't attach well to the concept of an inhumane breeding operation. The label is very sloppy. I don't appreciate sloppy work.

Rather than being against something, I prefer to be for humane operation of breeding kennels. Puppy mill laws actually act against humane operation of breeding kennels by shutting them down according to criteria that have little to do with humane operation. A lot of dogs, not all dogs but a lot of them, like living with large numbers of dogs because they are pack animals. Obviously then the question is cleanliness, proper shelter, room to exercise, and good food. Eliminate abuse by adding positive things to their lives.

The activists are virulently against breeding, and that means poisonous. If someone held Wayne Pacelle's feet to the fire, he would admit that his policy all along has been to rid the world of domesticated animals. The anti-breeder rhetoric and legislation originates with people who want no domesticated animals to exist. The same people often try to hide this agenda even after they have declared it in public. They use the negatives to excuse eliminating pets instead of trying to add positives to the lives of domesticated animals.

well said chef walnut,

what you describe in your post .........................is called evolving..........evolution at work

Chef, I make a point of buying products from animal sources. Animals have to be part of our economy to survive these days. Bring back the family farm, kick the animal rights activists out of our heads, and make some progress, I say.

What to vegans use for fertilizer? chemicals?

do, oops

Thanks ellenpisa...that's how I think of it, too: as evolution toward a more compassionate and intelligent world. There was a time when the many people found human slavery acceptable and defensible. Women and children were (and in same cultures, still are) seen as "property." People used to be drawn and quartered. Human history is full of brutality and oppression. But history also shows us that we are not condemned to perpetually continue particular behaviors or belief systems. Particularly those which emphasize the worst in our nature. We have the ability to reason and change for the better.

Have you read "The World Peace Diet" by Will Tuttle? It's an amazing book which explores the links between our treatment of animals and the historic treatment of blacks, women and children. He also discusses the metaphysics of food and how, when we consume the corpses or bodily secretions of animals who have lived in misery or died a violent death, we are ingesting that violence and pain into our own bodies.

In so many ways, peace begins on our plates.

Each vegetable, flower, tree, fruit, nut grown uses the minerals in the soil to grow and produce viable foods. Depending on the species it will take out different amounts and when over farmed will cause the soil to become unusable. Composting is a good fertilizer but you must compost both animal products and vegetable products. Use of ONLY vegetable compost and crop rotation will eventually after several hundred years make all the soil infertile. Why? Because not all the nutrients are returned to the soil since much of the nutrients gathered from the soil goes into the fruit/vegetable and is then eaten by humans and/or animals. So what is left to compost is less than what was taken out, this is commonsense physics. If we take out three cups of water from a sistern and only return two we will eventually have an empty sistern. This is exactly what will happen with our soil. The advantage that the Vegan philosophy has is that this will take a several generations to happen and by then it may very well be too late to change things since there will be no domestic animals left. Quite possibly no animals left since overpopulations of some animals caused natural resources to be exploited, others caused the extinction of certain spieces and still others starve for lack of food since the species they ate all died from lack of resources.

Little by little the soil will be depleted of the necessary ingredients for life, not replaced by vegetable composting and the soil will no longer produce enough vegetables to support life. However we could start composting dead people and use them for fertilizer, I suppose that is one why to make it work.

Nancy

Or we could keep our domesticated animals and add animals to the list of domesticated animals. We had a lot more domesticated tigers, lions, and other animals just five years ago before the current drive against domesticated animals started, and as anyone could have predicted, it has already mestasized to a general drive against all species.

Owners of dogs and owners of tigers are in the same boat now.

What do we do, really? Do we keep trying to keep part of a basic right safe while denying the rest of it to other people who don't share our interests? That's tiring and it quite rightly gets us in trouble.

I listened to a few more podcasts from Colleen Patrick-Goudreau this weekend on the compassionate cooks site and highly recommend it to anyone interested in adopting a cruelty-free diet. She has such an enthusiastic and positive approach. I also made the chocolate chip cookies from her Joy Of Vegan Baking and they were OUT OF THIS WORLD! I modified the recipe by adding pecans and walnuts...yum...My non-vegan neighbors gobbled them up and asked me for the recipe! I hope Oprah will invite her to be on the show...she's an incredible resource.

Chefwalnut, thanks for addressing this topic. For the most part, people are starting to realize that a sentient being is a sentient being regardless of what species that being belongs to. I am so happy to witness this compassionate shift in thinking that is taking place within the minds of so many people, and look forward to watching it continue to grow. People are getting excited about real food again! Beautiful fruits and vegetables, grains, and of course, vegan chocolate chip cookies! If anyone wants recipes, check out the Vegetarian Recipe Exchange Forum on this site. I added several of my favorite recipes. Looking forward to seeing some of your faves on there as well!

I'm so grateful to Oprah for airing this show again today. THANK YOU OPRAH!

I sincerely hope you will do a similar expose on Factory Farming........ALL animals deserve protection from the unfathomably cruel abuses which arise from greed.