Running of the bulls

The annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain will take place from July 7-14 this year. In this ritual, enraged bulls are stampeded through the streets of that hilly town, preceded by daring adventurers who risk life and limb in an effort to outrun the charging bulls without getting trampled, gored, or mauled.

Though I doubt that the bulls enjoy this event, and many are probably injured, I'm no killjoy. I'm not against this display of machismo and bravado. I'm certainly not against it enough to run nude through the streets of Pamplona to show everybody how against it I am. True, many of the bulls break legs running on the cobblestone streets, but that's small injury compared with the 40,000 bulls killed slowly and painfully in the bullfighting ring every year in Spain (a fate that awaits most of the bulls who survive the running). But the suffering of even those bulls is dwarfed by the cruel practices of the meat industry right here in the U.S.A.

We make cattle stand for weeks and months on end in lagoons of their own waste. We fatten them with feed grain inappropriate for ruminants, whose systems efficiently digest grass and other pasture but bloat with grain. The corn generates tremendous, painful gas buildup in these animals, who release this methane (a highly concentrated greenhouse gas) through flatulence.

We make them stand on concrete and other hard floors that their hooves are not equipped to handle, so they become bruised and infected. To suppress infection, they're dosed with sub-therapeutic antibiotics. They're injected with hormones to promote massive muscle development (putting more weight on those injured hooves).

Finally, they're slaughtered in inhumane ways. If you couldn't watch the Humane Society's footage of a near-dead cow being propped up for the inspectors -- one of the most watched videos on Youtube -- or the animated film "The Meatrix," which I linked to in my June 16 post, you might find this tragicomic animated video somewhat milder (though not that mild) and still enlightening.

Bottom line: Choose grass-fed, pasture-raised beef, when eating beef, and cut down on meat consumption overall. And then, if you go to the running of the bulls and someone calls you cruel, you can say, "not as bad as some."

Jay Weinstein's blog posts are provided by LifeWire, a part of The New York Times Company.