Archive for January, 2010
During the last bull market, a newspaper editor I know became increasingly frustrated with his father, who stubbornly refused to add a single stock to his portfolio, which was 100% invested in bonds. At seventy-two, he simply wasn’t interested in doing a thing that might jeopardize his retirement savings. To him, bonds, bonds, and more bonds were the answer.
So what’s a bond?
Simply put, bonds are like IOUs. When you buy a bond, you’re essentially loaning money to the government or to a corporation. In return, you get regular income in the form of interest payments (thus the term fixed income) as well as the promise that your entire investment will be returned when the bond matures. In theory, if you buy a $10,000 bond that pays a 5% yield and matures in March 2009, you will receive annual income of $500 until March 2009, at which time the original $10,000 investment will be returned.
Notice that I said “in theory.” As a category, bonds fall somewhere between cash-equivalent investments (such as CDs or money market mutual funds) and stocks on the risk/reward continuum. In general, you get higher yields from bonds than from cash investments, but you don’t have the same potential for growth that comes with stocks. Depending on the bond you purchase (with U.S. government bonds on the safe end of the spectrum and riskier, higher- yield corporate bonds on the other), you also assume more risk with bonds than you do with cash investments. This includes the risk of default as well as the risk that rising interest rates will erode the bond’s value. Nonetheless, bonds are generally less volatile than stocks—provided they are high-quality issues that you hold until maturity. But if you deviate from this reliable strategy and start to trade bonds—or sell them prior to maturity—you are assuming a higher level of risk.
I have met quite a few people who seem to think that chickens are vegetables. When someone says he or she is a vegetarian, these people reply with something like, “Yes, but you do eat chicken, don’t you?” I feel reasonably confident that most of today’s poultry producers know their stock well enough to realize that chickens aren’t vegetables. But they seem unable to grasp the fact that they are animals, and as such have profound territorial needs.
At the Hainsworth Farm in Mt. Morris, New York, naturalist Roy Bedichek found four and even five hens squeezed into cages 12 inches by 12 inches.’1 Under these conditions, the birds are unable to lift a single wing. In fact, they are squeezed together so tightly that they have a great deal of difficulty even turning around in place. This is not seen by the factory managers as a bad thing, though. With their bodies in forced contact at all times on all sides with other chickens, they absorb heat from their fellow inmates, so this cuts down on heating costs.
The Hainsworth farm is an extreme example. But the industry norm isn’t much better. A surprisingly large percentage of the eggs eaten in Los Angeles come from the 345 acre “Egg City” in Moorpark, California.” Here, some 2,200,000 eggs are laid daily by 3 million hens. The hens are housed five to each 16-by-iS cage.”
To get a chicken’s eye view of these conditions, picture yourself standing in a crowded elevator. The elevator is so crowded, in fact, that your body is in contact on all sides with other bodies. Even to turn around in place would be difficult. And one more thing to keep in mind—this is your life. It is not just a temporary bother, until you get to your floor. This is permanent. Your only release will be at the hands of the executioner.
By the way, in your picture of the elevator, you may have imagined the other people trapped with you as doing the very best they can to hold still, and not make things difficult for you. But what if all the others do not have the ability to understand what is happening? What if they react to the terror of it all with raw instinct, without even a trace of a civilized veneer? What if, like you, they have powerflul territorial needs, and the utter frustration of the situation has driven them literally insane, prone to erupt into violehce with or without provocation?
Now imagine ffirther that the floor of the elevator is slanted sharply, so gravity tends to push you all in one direction. The ceiling is so short that you and the others can only stand upright towards one side, and the floor is made of a wire mesh that is terribly uncomfortable to everyone’s feet. And to complete this approximation of the living conditions in today’s factory farms, what if some of the others trapped with you in the elevator have, in their madness, become cannibalistic?
These are the conditions which the industry tells us is a “chicken heaven.” This is the actual living situation of the chickens whose flesh and eggs Americans eat.
Despite being treated consistently as machinery in today’s chicken factories, the chickens still stubbornly refuse to settle down and devote themselves singlemindedly to producing as many eggs as possible and growing as fat as they can, in the shortest possible length of time. Instead, they insist on thinking of themselves as animals, with drives and needs.
But today’s chickens are allowed no expression of their natural urges. They cannot walk around, scratch the ground, build a nest, or even stretch their wings. Every instinct is frustrated. The bizarre lighting manipulations allow these light-sensitive creatures no vestige of a natural sleep cycle. They cannot establish a pecking order, or any sense of social identity. They cannot keep out of each other’s way, and weaker birds have no escape from the stronger ones, already maddened by the grotesque conditions in which they live.
The result is that these passionate creatures live in a state of perpetual panic. They fly into an uproar at the slightest disturbance, and show every sign of having been driven completely out of their minds. One naturalist noted:
“The battery chickens I have observed seem to lose their minds about the lime they would normally be weaned by their mothers and off in the weeds thasing grasshoppers on their own account. Yes, literally, the battery becomes a gallinaceous madhouse.”
Another reporter states:
“The birds in the laying house are hysterical. . . Birds squawk, cackle and cluck as they scramble over one another for a peck at
the automatically controlled grain trough or a drink of water. This is how the hens spend their short life of ceaseless production. stampedes. With no apparent caus a wave of hysteria sweeps over the whole battery; wild, unnatural chirps, jumbled screams, and a fluttering as if every feather on every chicken had become possessed and frantic.
In their panic, the birds will sometimes pile on top of each other and some will smother to death. Poultry producers are not by and large what you would call sentimental types, but since smothered birds represent a “waste of feed” this is the type of thing that will definitely spur them into action. Not to be outsmarted, they have found the piling problem can be decreased by crowding the chickens so tightly into wire cages they can hardly move. This way, when they panic, they can’t pile on top of each other as readily.
The cages produce a few problems of their own, however, that make the calling of them “chicken heavens” even more deceitful: the caged hens still try to behave as if they were designed by Nature to live on the earth, instead of in wire cages. For instance, their toenails continue to grow. With no solid ground to wear the nails down, they become very long, and can get permanently entangled in the wire. The ex-president of a national poultry organization wrote in the Poultry Tribune about the many times when, on removing a batch of hens from a cage:
we have discovered chickens literally grown fast to the cage. It seems the thickens’ toes got caught in the wire mesh in some
manner and would not loosen. So, in time, the flesh of the toes grew completely around the wire. “
Needless to say, those birds who get stuck in the back of the cage, where they cannot reach food or water, starve to death.
Once again, howevei the minds that created this whole situation have come up with an ingenious solution to prevent such a distressing “waste of feed.” The idea is simply to cut off the toes of the little chicks when they are a day or two of age.
Anistoriton is an electronic journal published only on the Internet. It is a free and independent magazine of History, Archaeology and Artflistory edited by D. I. Loizos and an Editorial Committee. Anistoriton is the Greekword for “ignorant in history”. The journal is an attempt to bridge the gap between professional historians and archaeologists and their specialized research, on the one hand, and the general public, the true history and archaeology lovers, on the other. Contributions of undergraduate and graduate students (papers, analysis etc) as well as other non-specialists are also welcome and encouraged. Anistoriton publishes essays on any topic related to History, Archaeology and ArtHistory of any era and any part of the world provided it is of interest to the general educated public and undergraduate students. Also, it includes student Viewpoints, Archaeology News and History News, Internet Meesages from the major electronic Mailing Lists related to History and Archaeology, Primary Sources, and the sections In Situ and An Object of Art. It also contains a special page with announcements of Conferences worldwide. Anistoriton welcomes submissions of electronic manuscripts for any of its sections especially by trained Historians, Archaeologists and ArtHistorians who would like to reach a broader public. Other Scholars, Researchers, or Students are also invited to submit their manuscripts for the section entitled “Viewpoints.”