A story on Google news “Video shows shocking cruelty to pigs” has pulled up an “associated” photo of veep candidate Sarah Palin and the internet is belly-laughing. Viz Buzzfeed:

In an update about cruel farming techniques used on pigs, Google News “accidentally” includes an image of Sarah Palin. Don’t you just love that the phrase, “slamming piglets on floors and leaving them still wriggling to die” immediately tags a picture of Palin in Google’s eyes?

And Blogofhilarity:

Even Google News thinks Sarah Palin is a pig… Just saw this on Digg and found it hilarious…

Hence the name.  

Even if this is all a Photoshopped hoax, it is telling that Palin, who made rape victims pay for their own rape kits, is now enjoying the same callous treatment she herself dished out.  The brutality of the conditions at the animal farm (reference intended), impacting pig and person alike are worthy of note.  Yet none is made.  Certainly Google’s foible will generate needed exposure for the issue, but lacking in decency seems a particularly ineffective method for critique of Palin.

From the News.com.au article:

Activists from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) posed as workers between June and September this year at a farm in the midwestern US state of Iowa, the Associated Press (AP)reports. The incidents include workers slamming piglets on floors and leaving them still wriggling to die, beating animals to death with metal rods and inserting rods into sows’ hindquarters. The video shows a worker viciously beating pigs with a metal rod while shouting to one of the PETA spies: “I hate them. These (expletives) deserve to be hurt. Hurt, I say!”

We’ve long said that the mechanization of animal food processing is dehumanizing. That’s not to project our own needs onto fellow beings and to yet again put ourselves at the center of the web-of-life. Humans need to recognize, as for instance did various native Americans cultures, that to take the life or spirit of another living creature is a scared act.  Which in today’s context might simply mean that one need be thoughtful.  As with any holocaust, it is the perpetrators who, long dead themselves, have ceased to live by any meaningful definition of a rich, full, human life. Now, one secret to life is to do the emotional judo of “balancing” all of one’s feelings. This is not to suggest that one need have the “opposite” of a certain feeling in equal proportion. The truth of the emotional human animal is that we can never cease to have any of our feelings. As was often said by the Stuart Smalley character created by the current Senatorial candidate from Minnesota: “and that’s — okay…” If we attempt to stuff down our feelings they sneak back to haunt us. As any nickel-and-dime Freudian such as myself knows, some of our actions may even be the result of “Jurassic feelings” leaping forth from a time when parents roamed the earth. The trick is to have ‘em all, but not to act on all of them. To be in fact piggish sopping up and enjoying every feeling ugly or otherwise, while comporting oneself with the dignity befitting what a piece of work is man.  To live without judgement of one’s own as well as the emotions of others. In brief, to exercise compassion.  Which is itself an emotional stance and not an act of reason. As with any good production of Brecht, the emotions of the audience are guided to the mind, refracted through reason and then judiciously sent back to the heart. Where one can feel the thumping, the breathing, the life, the soul. To be self-possessed, or, to have oneself.  Literally one self.

Likewise, we need to first revel in Palin’s Google comeuppance followed by the warm wash that the travesty of her past actions reminds us of what we do not wish to become: as much desensitized and cut-throat as an animal farm worker broken down, not by life, but the lack of it.  While one must remain firm that Palin’s past actions have spoken on her behalf, it is only right that we act from the same centeredness that we would wish from Palin.  Acting not with cruelty, but with a sensitive wit full of all the gentle power that has before toppled the truly weak and corrupt.

09.17.08View disturbing PETA video:
Undercover Investigation Reveals Hormel Supplier’s Abuse of Mother Pigs and Piglets
09.17.08 News.com.au: Video shows shocking farm cruelty to pigs »

via:: susty.com