December 21 is National Hamburger Day. It's interesting that a dead cow on a bun is called a hamburger rather than a cowburger so I looked up the origin of the word. I discovered that historically, beef and other meats served on a bun were called "Hamburg steaks" because of their association with Hamburg, Germany. This popular meal first appeared on an American menu in 1826. But, regardless of what you call it, a Big Mac, le Big Mac or Royale with cheese (as in Pulp Fiction), or Whopper, a hamburger sandwich is essentially a dead cow on a bun. This is so whether it's grilled or barbequed, square, round, filled with holes or other ingredients such as flour, vegetable protein, or ammonia treated defatted beef trimmings (really!) or topped with assorted items including ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise or seasonings that enhance or mask its taste rendering the burger palatable. And you can be sure that the cow who provided the meal into which you're sinking your teeth suffered immensely during his journey from grazing to his home in a bun. The plate on which this unnecessary meal is sitting is a platter of death.
This might sound harsh but those are the facts even if the cow was one of a very lucky few who walked up Temple Grandin's purportedly humane "stairway to heaven." Dr. Grandin is famous for making the living conditions of cows more humane but only an incredibly tiny fraction of a percentage of cows who contribute to the more than 14 billion hamburgers eaten yearly in the United States alone benefit from these niceties, and their lives are still filled with misery and untold pain and suffering before they're killed on their to your mouth. A "better" life on a factory farm isn't close to being marginally "good." Surely, nobody would choose to send his or her dog to a factory farm.
Here are some more facts associated with one's choice to eat dead cows. Cows are sentient mammals who are very intelligent. They worry over what they don't understand and have been shown to experience "eureka" moments when they solve a puzzle such as how to open a particularly difficult gate. Cows communicate by staring and it's likely we don't understand their very subtle ways of communicating. They also form close and enduring relationships with family members and friends and don't like to have their families and social networks disrupted, nor do they like to be subjected to the reprehensible conditions to which they are exposed during their transport to the factory farm (or CAFOs, concentrated animal feeding operations) and their short stay at these filthy and inhumane facilities. They also suffer not only their pains but the pains of other cows who are their short-term roommates on the way to one's plate. Because cows are sentient one should really ask, "Who's for dinner?" not "What's for dinner?" if an animal is involved. Who we eat is a serious moral question.
Cows also carry numerous diseases they acquire while being prepared to become a burger, many of which are easily passed on to humans (for a summary of scientific research see the work of renowned physician, Michael Greger. Confinement at high densities at agribusiness factory farms require that cows be given antibiotics and hormones during their transformation from cows into burgers, and pesticides are also freely used. It's known that slaughterhouse workers may develop acute and chronic lung disease, musculoskeletal injuries, and may catch zoonotic infections (ones that transmit from animals to human beings and vice versa). Consumers also can suffer from the chemicals to which cows are subjected to control the spread of disease on filthy factory farms. Mad cow disease that causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), a fatal dementia, also is a major problem as is swine flu, so a burger can really turn out to be very dangerous to one's health. Let's also not forget recent E. coli outbreaks and the numerous recalls of hundreds of tons of cow meat that had been infected with feces. Millions of Americans are infected and thousands die each year from contaminated animal "food" products. For more on why one can safely say "eat a cow at your own risk" see CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories.
Even if you don't care about the ethics of eating a cow because you consider it sentimental or dismiss the possibility of getting seriously ill, consider the environmental impacts of factory farms and what non-animal activists are saying about the well-documented and deleterious effects that CAFOs are having on the land in surrounding communities, water, the air we breathe, and climate change (see and and)
