Animal suffering in the food industry ( I need quick facts & stats)?!
Animal suffering in the food industry ( I need quick facts & stats)?
Answers:
www.peta.com
www.peta2.com
www.FishingHurts.com
www.GoVeg.com
www.JesusVeg.com
www.KFCCruelty.com
www.LettuceLadies.com
www.LobsterLib.com
www.MeetYourMeat.com
www.MilkSucks.com
www.VegCooking.com
Check out PETA's website. Peta.org i think.
Broken beaks on chickens.
Hormones in cows to produce milk.
Cruel ways of killing animals (slowly and painfully).
Do you wear shoes? Are they real leather? Is every thing you own man-made synthetic? Be a vegeterian if you want, but please let us meat eaters be. By the way I live on a cattle ranch and when 2 bulls fight, and trust me they will, sometimes one ends up hurt. Do I let it suffer or can I shoot it as fast as possible so it doesn't suffer?
You should absolutely visit the PETA website. They show videos of the torture animals endure including being boiled in oil alive, suffering broken bones and dehydration in transport. Animals from factories are stuffed in cages so small they cannot move, they are fed hormones that make them so obese they cannot walk.
Here is tons and tons of information!
The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today's factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise their families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything that is natural to them. They won't even feel the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.
Animals on today's factory farms have no legal protection from cruelty that would be illegal if it were inflicted on dogs or cats: neglect, mutilation, genetic manipulation, and drug regimens that cause chronic pain and crippling, transport through all weather extremes, and gruesome and violent slaughter. Yet farmed animals are no less intelligent or capable of feeling pain than are the dogs and cats we cherish as companions.
The factory farming system of modern agriculture strives to maximize output while minimizing costs. Cows, calves, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and other animals are kept in small cages, in jam-packed sheds, or on filthy feedlots, often with so little space that they can't even turn around or lie down comfortably. They are deprived of exercise so that all their bodies' energy goes toward producing flesh, eggs, or milk for human consumption. The giant corporations that run most factory farms have found that they can make more money by cramming animals into tiny spaces, even though many of the animals get sick and some die. Industry journal National Hog Farmer explains, "Crowding Pigs Pays," and egg-industry expert Bernard Rollins writes that "chickens are cheap; cages are expensive." They are fed drugs to fatten them faster and to keep them alive in conditions that would otherwise kill them, and they are genetically altered to grow faster or to produce much more milk or eggs than they would naturally. Many animals become crippled under their own weight and die within inches of water and food. While the suffering of all animals on factory farms is similar, each type of farmed animal faces different types of cruelty.
Around eight billion animals are killed for food every year in the U.S. alone -- a number greater than the entire human population of the planet. Each meat-eating American eats the equivalent of about 24 animals per year. What's worse, modern agricultural methods mean that animals are raised in cramped confinement operations instead of the pastures from childhood picture books -- a practice known as factory farming. Chickens are crammed into cages with no free space, and are debeaked to keep them from pecking each other to death. Animals are pumped full of various powerful drugs to kill diseases resulting from filthy living conditions, and to make them grow or produce faster than nature intended. When cows and chickens stop producing as much milk and eggs as the younger animals, they're unceremoniously slaughtered and made into low-grade meat (fast food and pet food). For some, vegetarianism and veganism are ways to refuse to participate in the commodification of animals.
Hope this helps.
Happy holidays!
Ill tell you what is cruel is when vegetarians take ripe living vegetables and fruits from there mothers and then eat them in front of the trees in which they have just raped them from. They take beans and corn and rice and deprive them of water and dry them out and then boil them in water, or grind them to make "flour". Have you ever stopped to wonder just what is a bean, corn kernel, or grain of wheat or rice? well I'll tell you they are plant fetuses, yes the undeveloped plant in the fetus stage ripped from there mother plants and tortured and ground up to feed the so called PC crowed. How do we know that plants don't feel pain, if you tear them do they not bleed sap?
Vegans are plant murderers!
Gelatine is cows feet!!
In the official words of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), The Animal Welfare Act, as passed by the US Congress, "specifically excludes animals raised for food or fiber." With virtually no protection of farm animals (at either the federal, or on the state level), institutional cruelty and abuse have become the norm. In legal terms--which is where it counts in a for-profit environment--cruelty and abuse of farm animals is, for the most part, simply not against the law in the United States of America.
Propped up with the aid of official government policy, farming in the US has been allowed, over the last generation, to grow into a grim corporate monstrosity, the scale of which is hard to comprehend, or even to be believed. Virtually all of the over 7 billion animals slaughtered for food in the US every year are today the product of a highly mechanized factory-like system, incorporating dangerous, unprecedented, and unsustainable methods of efficiency.
Pigs in today's factory indoor facilities are likely to be stacked two and three decks high, each solitarily imprisoned in a bin--a cage just a bit larger than a pig's body. Those pigs who live through their stress and fright will adopt coping behaviors--from pacing, to repetitive rocking, to incessant biting of, or banging on, the bars. Industry blames the animals; it calls these behaviors "vices"
Worldwide demand for fish, along with advances in fishing methods--sonar, driftnets, floating refrigerated fish packing factories--is bringing ocean species, one after another, to the brink of extinction. In the Nov., '95 edition of Scientific American, Carl Safina writes, "For the past two decades, the fishing industry has had increasingly to face the result of extracting [fish] faster than fish populations [can] reproduce." Research reveals that the intended cure--aquaculture (fish farming)--actually hastens the trend toward fish extinction, while disrupting delicate coastal ecosystems at the same time.
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), dubbed Mad Cow Disease because of the apparent mental torture cows display before death, is an always-fatal neuro-degenerative cattle disease caused by incredibly virulent and mysterious infectious proteins called prions. An outbreak in Great Britain had by early 1996 stricken around 160,000 cows. Circumstantial evidence pointed to the British practice of mixing the remains of sheep, including brains and bones, into cows' feed as the cause of the outbreak. This apparent species-to-species inoculation is what makes all forms of spongiform encephalopathy (known to affect other mammals as well) so alarming. Are cow-eating humans the next victims? At press-time, evidence pointed to a certain strain of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) as being the human variant of spongiform encephalopathy. Grim predictions tell of up to 500,000 Britons a year falling to this disease due to their past consumption of BSE-infected cows. Prion-based diseases often have incubation periods in terms of decades, so the saga is sure to continue. In the meantime, since using the remains of dead animals in feed has been integral to agricultural operations in the US for years, BSE, or the chance of some future American version of it, is one more reason to think twice before biting into that char-broiled burger.
Jim Mason and Peter Singer write in their book Animal Factories, "Instead of hired hands, the factory farmer employs pumps, fans, switches, slatted or wire floors, and automatic feeding and watering hardware." As with any other capital intensive system, managers will be concerned with the "cost of input and volume of output ... [T]he difference is that in animal factories the product is a living creature
Trees are being cut down at an alarming rate in the US, as well as around the world, for meat production. If tomorrow people in the US made a radical change away from their meat-centered diets, an area of land the size of all of Texas and most of Oklahoma could be returned to forest
So-called "redskins" are those chickens which--on the conveyer belts to their deaths--missed not only the brine-filled electrified stunning trough, but the knife that was to cut their throats. Their deaths occurred in the scald tank where feathers are loosened before plucking. Industry throws aside piles of them every day
Chicken feed is routinely laced with antibiotics, sulfa drugs and other chemical substances. Only by maintaining the birds on drugs, a practice which began about mid-century, is agribusiness allowed the luxury and efficiency of massive flocks and intensive confinement. Today's medicated feed also pumps out market weight birds in half the time from two-thirds the feed of 50 years ago
It is estimated that livestock production accounts for twice the amount of pollution in the US as that produced by industrial sources. Livestock in the US produce 20 times the excrement of the entire US population. Since farm animals today spend much or all of their lives in factory sheds or feedlots, their waste no longer serves to fertilize pastures a little at a time. One poultry researcher, according to United Poultry Concerns literature, explains: "A one-million-hen complex will produce 125 tons of wet manure a day." To responsibly store, disperse, or degrade this amount of animal waste is simply not possible. Much of the waste inevitably is flushed into rivers and streams. Becoming a vegetarian does more to clean up our nation's water than any other single action.
In the words of John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, a dairy cow living in today's modern milk factory "is bred, fed, medicated, inseminated and manipulated to a single purpose--maximum milk production at minimum cost." She lives with an unnaturally swelled up and sensitive udder, is likely to be kept inside a stall her entire life, is milked up to 3 times a day, and is kept pregnant nearly all of her life with her young taken from her almost immediately after birth. "Contented" is the characteristic most often attributed to the cow. However, cows in today's factories have to be fed tranquilizers to calm their nerves.
Steers are castrated to make them more docile. Castration also promotes a fattier, more profitable, animal. Castration can be done radically, all at once, or over a longer period of time with a ring, causing the testicles to eventually fall away. Drugs are an integral part of today's agriculture, but in the US for this procedure, anesthetics are rarely used.
By concealing a hidden camera on his body, an employee of a Rapid City, SD slaughterhouse was able to obtain a videotape for CBS-TV's 48 Hours. The tape showed how a plant with over 300 employees that processes an average of 50 cows per hour with only 4 USDA inspectors "keeps the line moving." It showed workers taking dangerous shortcuts in cleaning up fluid that had broken out of an abscess from a piece of chuck beef, a severe violation of USDA rules that would require an extended clean-up procedure. Comments from a seasoned USDA veterinarian: "I can say from my experience of nine years and in talking to other food inspectors around the country, this probably goes on on a daily basis."
It is not unusual in today's factory henhouse for 4 or 5 hens to be squeezed into a 12" x 18" cage. It is standard for poultry producers to de-beak chicks with hot-knife machines--not a painless procedure. De-beaking is industry's solution to birds, driven to crazed pecking, inflicting harm upon the fellow "product
Farm animals in our factory sheds today are supposed to have their drug intakes stopped at proscribed intervals prior to slaughter to avoid residues ending up in the final consumer product. Withdrawal schedules, however, are not always properly followed. With so many different drugs, the regimens can be complex, with written instructions often not very coherent. Due to the mechanized nature of today's conveyer belt feeding systems, troughs of old, drug-laden feed may not get cleaned away when withdrawal should begin. In addition, since farm animals are often fed animal waste as well as animal flesh, drug and pesticide residues continue to be recycled
About 98% of all milk in the US is produced using factory methods. Part of factory life for a cow includes dangerous levels of drugs administered to boost milk output. Due to selective breeding, cows already produce at least two and a half times the amount of milk of yesterday's pastured counterpart. Then, as of February, 1994, farmers were given the go-ahead to use the genetically engineered hormone Bovine Somatotropin (BST) on their herds. Designed to boost milk output by an additional 15 percent, milk per cow statistics are already showing the effects nationwide. A cow naturally has at least a 20-year lifespan; today's stressed out cows, however, become hamburger in less than 4 years, as a cow's ability to give milk quickly diminishes under modern conditions
In today's factory henhouse, certain lighting schedules will be employed to maintain an illusion of eternal spring--a technique that keeps egg production up to speed. When production drops off, the birds may be put through a brutal forced molt, induced by days of starvation and darkness. Some, and often many, of the birds will inevitably die in the process.
Cruelty can be a regular occurrence at stockyards. Sick and crippled farm animals, called "downers," may lie suffering for days until dragged by chain to slaughter. The downer phenomenon would drastically be reduced if all stockyards refused to allow ranchers to make any money on them. (Slaughter of a living creature affords a rancher a better price than "dead-on-arrival" meat.)
Of all the antibiotics administered in the US to people or farm animals, farm animals receive over 95% of them--not so much to treat infection, but to make the animals grow faster on less feed
Animal health on the farm of old came from exercise, sunlight and freedom to peck or root in the soil. Today, animals are packed indoors and kept alive with drugs and vitamin injections. The battle against bacteria in the factory farm shed is a constant concern. Cages are automatically misted with insecticides. Chickens are even fed chemicals which stay active in their droppings, a method designed to kill the larvae of flies that harbor in piles of manure
The agony of life for food animals is only surpassed by the terror of death at the hands of the butcher. Neat and tidy plastic wrapped packages of hamburger and T-bone steak mask the horror of cattle being sent to slaughter: the nauseating stench, the frenetic mooing, the waiting chute, the prolonged electric prodding of terrified victims (who often are allowed to see others who have gone before them), the panic in the killing stall, the stunning and hoisting, the torrent of gushing blood, and the piercing whine of saw blades cutting flesh and bone. Few people ever see the piles of severed heads, hooves, milk sacks and udders. Indeed, one trip to a slaughterhouse often is enough to transform anyone into a vegetarian.
A US Congressional committee report, published in 1985, charged that there were 20-30 thousand animal drugs in use at the time, and that as many as 90% had not been approved by the FDA.
With every one of their natural instincts restricted and unfulfilled, pigs in today's factories will take to "tail-biting." Insane, bored and frustrated, these naturally intelligent and playful creatures may be driven to gnawing neurotically on one another's pig tails and hind ends. If not prevented, a mauled pig may die from an attack. Mauled pigs cannot be sold, so they become a problem to the producer. The answer? Pig tails are routinely amputated, and pigs are kept in total darkness except for feeding time
In egg factories all over the country, male chicks are weeded out and disposed of by "chick-pullers." Over half a million chicks a day are stuffed en masse into plastic bags where they are crushed and suffocated. Or they may be ground up while still alive to be fed to livestock or used as fertilizer
A major part of the horror of a pig or chicken farm is the noise. Inside a hog barn of a thousand animals, workers wear ear protection against the din of squealing animals banging against their metal cages. To hear what this sounds like, call: 919-549-5100 x4647.
What we have today is a "meat industrial complex." A press release promoting a $2,000 publication produced by a publisher of high-tech research reports reads like a page out of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Entitled "US Food-Animal Health Product Markets: Consolidation of End-Users Spurs Biotech Development," the report intends to inform readers about emerging markets in support products to the new assembly-line world of corporate farms. The press release stated: "Management sophistication is growing along with the size of food-animal production facilities. Computers have introduced highly technical breeding, immunization and other maintenance schedules into the barnyard. ... New products will use genetic engineering to increase milk and meat production, produce improved animals and improve vaccines. ... End users are demanding species-specific products and broad-spectrum ones that attack multiple problems with single doses."
A male calf born to a cow--what does the farmer do with this useless by-product of the dairy industry? After the calf's birth, if he is not immediately slaughtered, more than likely he'll be taken to a veal factory. There, he will be locked up in a stall and chained by his head to prevent him from turning around for his entire life. He'll be fed a special diet without iron or roughage. He will be injected with antibiotics and hormones to keep him alive and to make him grow. He will be kept in darkness except for feeding time. The result? A nearly full-grown animal with flesh as tender and milky white as a newborn's. The beauty of the system from the standpoint of the veal industry is that meat from today's so called "crate" veal will still fetch the premium price it always did when such flesh came only from a baby calf, just a lot more of it
Bacteria in meat and poultry processing is a constant concern, and a very big business. The proliferation of antibacterial rinses (chlorine and saline) and sprays (for cow udders), as well as steam pasteurization (beef), ammonia neutralizers (poultry litter) and contaminant vacuums--just to name a few, all serve to allow the meat and poultry industries the luxury of cheap and filthy operations. A USDA-approved pilot test of a chemical de-hairing process went into effect in early 1996. The procedure--which will give stunned cattle a burning, bacteria-eliminating shave before slaughter--will probably prove effective in the pilot test. In practice, however, the chance for a percentage of still-sentient animals being chemically burned will most certainly exist.
Farming today is fully concentrated in the hands of a few. In the US, eight firms control half (approximately 3.5 billion birds) of the poultry industry, and four meat packers control 90 percent of meat processing. The so-called Freedom to Farm bill, which came into law in early 1996, schedules $36 billion to be given over 7 years, in essence, to the wealthiest of America's agribusinessmen--regardless of prices in the market, nor with requirements to farm anything at all. The law will ultimately act to shake out small and moderate sized farms once and for all
A method used to crank up pork production is to take piglets away from their mothers soon after birth. The forced weaning allows the sow to end her lactating period so she can become pregnant again. To prevent piglet death due to the emotional loss, a mechanical teat may serve as a substitute. Tending to the mother's emotional loss has no economic value and so is given no consideration.
Chicken feathers, guts, and waste water, which normally need to be discarded during processing, are routinely "recycled" back to the layer and broiler houses as feed. Industry experts believe that along with unclean slaughtering and processing techniques, this forced cannibalism is leading to the rampant salmonella epidemic in poultry plants
There are no laws to regulate transport of animals for food consumption, specifically via truck--so this is the meat industry's preferred method of transport. That many of the animals are dead after their brutal trip is calculated as a cost of doing business
The American farmer, as our storybook image of him suggests, simply no longer exists. Today, the person who actually gets close to farm animals is just a hired hand of agribusiness. In the broiler or layer shed of tens of thousands of birds, for instance, the main job to attend to is culling dead birds from cages. Through careful calculations, conditions are maintained intense enough to keep costs down, but not so intense that mortality rates cut into profits
Due to growing commercial specialization in the several developmental stages of cattle production, and due to producers seeking the best price at every step of the animals' maturing process, your hamburger may have come from a steer that suffered relocation between Mexico and the US. Feeder cattle are shipped to Mexico to graze; Mexican cattle are shipped to the US to be fattened in US feedlots; and US cattle are transported to Mexico to be slaughtered and processed. The USDA and the financial community hail this animal shuffling as a development which shows how the various "cattle sectors" can "complement" each other with "free trade." It's not likely that the steers who suffer the trip would agree
Trade in animal food puts needless pressure on world governments straining to get along. For instance, the US allows the implantation of hormones into beef cattle. For this reason, since the late 1980s, the European Union has banned all imports of US beef. With the advent of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the USDA has vowed to step up pressure on the EU to force it to accept US beef. The controversy could possibly even have to be settled by the Geneva-based World Trade Organization's dispute settlement body. A similar scenario between the US and Russia with respect to poultry was being played out at press-time. Intense pressure from the poultry industry was put on the USDA and even Vice President Gore to intervene when all poultry imports were rejected outright by Russia due to safety concerns.
More than a third of the veal calves tested in a 1995 undercover investigation done by the Humane Farming Association came up positive for clenbuterol--an acutely toxic and illegal animal drug. Subsequently it was found that many veal producers in the US had knowingly purchased and used the drug for their herds over a five-year period. This in itself is frightening; but worse is the revelation that the FDA and the USDA worked to protect the veal industry from scandal by maintaining a coverup about the clenbuterol use of which it became aware
Poultry processors are not required by the USDA to check for salmonella bacteria in poultry. A 1978 USDA rule still in effect accepts a "chill tank" bath for bird carcasses as a sufficient counter-measure. Dunking a chicken carcass through this bath, now known as the "fecal soup," has been likened to a rinse in your toilet. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, 25% of all chicken sold in the US carry the salmonella bacteria--a conservative estimate. The USDA says that salmonella poisoning may be responsible for as many as 4 million illnesses and 3 thousand deaths per year
To produce foie gras, a duck or goose is force-fed huge quantities of grain three times a day with a feeder tube. This torturous process goes on for 28 days before slaughter, causing stomachs sometimes to burst. Livers, diseased and swollen to several times normal size by this process, are considered a delicacy which sell for about $12 an ounce. About 7,000 tons are produced worldwide per year.
Hens are starved for 30 hours before their slaughter. Any food given during this time would not be converted into flesh
Visit these websites and you will have more than enough:
? MYM Chickens http://goveg.com/factoryfarming_chickens...
? MYM Cows http://goveg.com/factoryfarming_cows.asp...
? MYM Fish http://www.fishinghurts.com/fishfarms.as...
? MYM Pigs http://goveg.com/factoryfarming_pigs.asp...
? MYM Turkeys http://goveg.com/factoryfarming_turkeys....
? MYM Ducks and Geese http://goveg.com/factoryfarming_ducks.as...
? What is gelatin? http://www.askcarla.com/answers.asp?ques...
? More http://www.peta.org/mc/facts.asp...
Yes it is a tragedy that 180,000 animals die each day in the harvesting of vegetables. PETA won't mention that. I am a member of PETA. People Eating Tasty Animals. Gimme a cheeseburger and run it through the garden.