And I'm Welcome to Food for Thought, The Place to Explore, Celebrate and Manifest, a life motivated and defined by unconditional compassion and optimal wellness.

My name is Colleen Patrick Gudro.

You can find me at Colleen Patrick Gudro.com or on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and of course you can

subscribe to Food for Thought at iTunes Stitcher Google Play or wherever you listen to podcast.

If you're enjoying this free podcast thank you so much for supporting it you can do so at patreon

com slash Colleen Patrick Godro and join the others who are making

this podcast possible. This podcast being an award-winning podcast. It won once again best podcast from Veg News magazine. So thanks to all of you who

voted for it. And I just ask that you share food for thought with those who might be interested and of course thank you for

leaving ratings and reviews on iTunes. Word of mouth is the best way to increase

its listenership. Disperse between and among our regular Food for Thought episodes are special episodes in which I sit down with other animal advocates to talk about what it means to be a voice for those whose voices we need to hear and how to change the world for animals. I've talked a lot about

the effects of ranching over the years, an industry that is particularly prevalent here

in the West, I'm in California, and one that affects more lives than just

the direct victims, the sheep, the cattle, the goats, for instance, who are bred, raised,

and ultimately killed for commercial purposes, either for human consumption of their flesh and

fluids or for their hair and skin. Ranchers also raise elk, bison, ostriches, emus, alpacas for the same purpose, commercial use.

Obviously the direct victims of ranching are herd animals who are kept on large tracks of land, primarily in temperate climates such as in parts of South

America, the Prairie provinces of Canada, the Australian Outback, and the Western United States, where ranching is the primary use of land out here.

Ranching animal agriculture and its associated cowboy culture have been much romanticized over the centuries when in reality it's far

from romantic for the animals who are herded, rounded up, ear tagged, castrated, branded,

impregnated, sheared, driven that is moving a large herd

from one place to another, transported and ultimately slaughtered.

It's also far from romantic for the victims of rodeos, a cruel form of entertainment

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