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Activist Seeks Rehabilitation Over Animal Exploitation for Canadian Prisoners
While doing animal rights and vegan outreach, I am often confronted with the argument that human rights issues are more important than animal rights. What many people don’t understand is that these issues are interconnected. Slaughterhouse workers are some of the most exploited employees, and there is documented evidence of employees being subject to PTSD, becoming violent toward family members when they were previously non-violent, developing suicidal tendencies, being underpaid, being exposed to dangerous inhalants and machinery and large animals who are trying to escape their fate, and in some circumstances, even wearing diapers on shift as there is no one to cover their position on a production line.
Calvin Neufeld is an independent speaker, writer, thinker and social justice advocate, transgender vegan, as well as an advocate of life and quality of life for oppressed species, for sexual and gender minorities, racial minorities, the physically, mentally, and economically disadvantaged, and absolutely everybody else. Along with his mother, Calvin advocates for prisoners and animals on the issue of prison farms with their campaign, Evolve Our Prison Farms advocates plant-based prison agriculture enhanced by farmed animal sanctuary as a non-violent and non-exploitative model of prisoner-animal therapy. It is their belief that Canada’s prison farms should model health, environmental sustainability, and offer compassion-based rehabilitation.
The Canadian government is currently establishing prison dairy operations, ignoring all evidence against animal agriculture as a rehabilitative model. This dairy operation that will see prisoners inseminating animals, separating mothers and babies, and sending animals to slaughter. The milk will be sold to the Feihe infant formula factory where it will be processed and shipped to China.
