factory farming

By Dan Paden

Most of us — even those of us who eat meat — know that life on a factory farm is no picnic for animals. Chickens are crammed together with thousands of others inside dark sheds that reek of ammonia. Piglets are castrated without being given any painkillers. Terrified calves are torn away from their mothers within hours of birth.

Here’s what you may not know: While for most animals, this life of misery will end with a terrifying death in a slaughterhouse, many will be injured or killed in a traffic accident on their way to slaughter. That’s because the meat industry has a history of hiring drivers with records that read like rap sheets. And until industry officials enact strict safe-driver policies, all of us—humans and animals alike—are at risk.

Just last month, for example, a truck loaded with pigs ran off U.S. 258 in Isle of Wight County, Va. Several pigs were ejected, and 55 were killed. Others were left to suffer in the hours following the crash. PETA discovered that the driver involved in this accident has been charged with at least 15 traffic offenses in North Carolina since 1995, including reckless driving, speeding (five violations) and seeking to evade federal safety regulations.

Also last month, a tractor trailer carrying nearly 1,000 turkeys for a company called Circle S Ranch, Inc., crashed in Henry County, Va., killing hundreds of the birds. And again, PETA found that the driver had an abysmal driving record, including a conviction for driving while impaired and driving while his license was revoked. His past charges also include felony manufacture of a controlled substance.

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By Deb Young

Factory farming is built on an attitude that regards animals and the natural world merely as commodities to be exploited for profit.

Corporations have turned family-farming methods into cost-saving, mass-production strategies, which endanger public health and treat animals cruelly.

Also known as large confined animal feeding operations factory farms treat animals like production units, and the result is poor food quality for you, and inhumane conditions for the animals.

Consider some of the ingredients commonly used in factory-farmed animal feed:

Excessive grains, fed to animals designed to eat grass

Plastic pellets, fed to animals as “roughage” because the factory diet doesn’t contain natural fiber

Meat from their own species, turning farm animals into cannibals (this practice has also been linked to the spread of mad cow disease)

Animal byproducts, such as feathers, blood, intestines, euthanized cats and dogs, and road kill

Drugs and chemicals, including antibiotics (an estimated 13.5 million pounds each year) and antimicrobials (which promote the accumulation of arsenic in chickens)
Antibiotics fed to factory-farmed animals are so grossly overused that they are contributing to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the United States.

Approximately 95% of factory-raised animals are subject to deplorable conditions such as overcrowding, hunger, thirst, and sometimes-fatal weather extremes. Many times, they are kept conscious or even skinned alive during the process of slaughtering.

“Free-range” evokes a positive image of chickens, turkeys and cows living outdoors with plenty of fresh air, sunshine and open space to roam in.

Animals raised for meat may be sold as “free-range” if they have government certified access to the outdoors. The door may be open for only five minutes and the farm still qualifies as “free-range.” Apart from the “open door,” no other criteria such as environmental quality, number or space per animal, are included in the term “free-range.”

Free-range hens are typically debeaked as chicks at the hatchery . Debeaking is a painful facial mutilation that impairs a hen’s ability to eat normally and preen her feathers. Typically, 2,000 to 20,000 or more hens – each hen having one square foot of living space the size of a sheet of paper – are confined in a shed with little or no access to the outdoors. If the hens can go outside, the exit is often very small, allowing only the closest hens to get out. And the “range” may be nothing more than a mudyard saturated with manure

Sadly the public is led to believe that ‘Cage-Free” animals live a happy, natural life, this is simply not so!

When you buy “free-range” or not – you support an industry that exploits and abuses animals in an absolutely horrifying way.

Buyer Beware! Know where your food comes from and how it got to your table.

By Paula Moore

Red meat in the morning, diners take warning. Red meat at night — nope, that’ll kill ya too.

As if anyone needed another reason to eat their veggies, here’s one: According to a new Harvard School of Public Health study, eating red meat increases your risk of early death. OK, here’s one more: Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, recently warned that antibiotic resistance could bring about “the end of modern medicine as we know it.” In other words, if the hamburgers don’t kill you, the superbugs spawned on factory farms will.

Unless you want to eat yourself into an early grave, maybe it’s time to go vegan.

After analyzing nearly 30 years of data collected from 121,000 participants, the Harvard researchers found that people who regularly eat red meat are significantly more likely to die prematurely from multiple causes, including heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Click to continue »

By Rosalie Tirella

We have eaten about 4 hamburgers in 25 years. We only eat fish these days – have jettisoned chicken from our diet. AND: I have never eaten veal, lamb, lobster, etc.

The way we (USA)  kill our “farm” animals is brutal (there are no real farms – just agri businesses/factories where animals are basically tortured). The way this country handles/preps  meat is horrific/deadly (e colli deaths, Mad Cow Disease, anyone?). No wonder Japan and other countries over the years have said NO to American meat.

We have also read that rejected meat makes its way to senior citizens via the MEALS on WHEELS program for low income elderly, and of course, this garbage, gets fed to the US prison population.

The insanity must stop.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/05/pink-slime-for-school-lun_n_1322325.html

By Jennifer O’Connor

Some years ago, when I interned at a sanctuary for farmed animals, I’d sit in the barn, and a turkey named Fern would back up into my lap and demand to be petted. When I’d stop, she’d look over her shoulder imploringly as if to say, “More, please.” I always think of Fern this time of year, when supermarket bins are filled with the frozen bodies of her relatives. If people got a chance to know these interesting and personable birds, I believe they’d balk at baking and eating their wings, legs and breasts.

Turkeys on farmed-animal sanctuaries quickly prove themselves to be intelligent and industrious, as well as outgoing at times and shy at others, much like human children. As I sat in the barn watching them, the birds’ distinct personalities were immediately clear. Some, bold and hilarious, would walk right up and look me square in the eye as if to challenge my right to invade their space. Others, like a coy debutante, would peer over their shoulders, aloof but not wanting to miss anything exciting. Many, like Fern, would actually purr when being petted.

In a game of “one does not belong,” one wild turkey integrated herself into the rescued flock. Her plumage was iridescent and she stood out like a beacon. Her robust health contrasted painfully with the crippled legs, mutilated beaks and unnatural white feathers of those around her who had been saved from slaughter. Even though the rescued birds were safe and tenderly cared for, their hideous past had left them physically and emotionally scarred for life. Click to continue »

Dale the Turkey Is Among Top Rescued Fowl in Thanksgiving Competition

Mendon— Dale would have joined the millions of turkeys who become Thanksgiving dinner every year if Maple Farm Sanctuary hadn’t rescued him from a local turkey farm and given him a lifelong home. Now, the handsome, white-feathered Dale spends his time with his mate, Daphne, of whom he is very protective. Dale is vocal and friendly and loves to show off—so he’ll relish the attention that comes with being named the second runner-up in PETA’s first-ever Turkey of the Year contest for rescued birds. Starting this week, Dale will be among the rescued turkeys featured on PETA.org.

“Thanksgiving is murder on turkeys, but compassionate rescuers like Maple Farm Sanctuary give lucky birds like Dale something to be thankful for,” says PETA Vice President Daphna Nachminovitch. “Rescued turkeys have been given a second chance at a life free from suffering on crowded factory farms—and that’s the real prize.”

More than 250 million turkeys are killed in the U.S. every year—including more than 40 million for Thanksgiving dinners alone. In nature, turkeys are protective and loving parents as well as spirited explorers who can climb trees and run as fast as 25 miles per hour. But most turkeys slated to be killed for food are crammed into filthy warehouses, where disease, smothering, and heart attacks are common. Turkeys are drugged and bred to grow such unnaturally large upper bodies that their legs often become crippled under the weight.

The winner of PETA’s contest, Jake, lives in North Carolina. Dale’s fellow runner-up, Tomas, lives in Rhode Island.

By Heather Moore

Worried that you have a sasquatch-sized carbon footprint? Eat less meat and cheese. That’s the advice of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which recently calculated the ecological impact of 20 conventionally grown foods. The figures show that many animal-based foods have a supersized carbon footprint—in addition to a whopping amount of fat and calories. In fact, according to the EWG, if every American stopped eating meat and cheese for one day a week, it would be the same as if we collectively drove 91 billion fewer miles a year.

Imagine what a difference we could make for animals, our own health and the health of the planet if we stopped eating meat and cheese entirely—or at least for a couple of days a week.

The EWG found that in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, eating a pound of lamb is equivalent to driving about 39 miles. Every pound of beef represents a 27-mile trip, Click to continue »

By Heather Moore

America just got a little bit greener. Earlier this month, Aspen, Colo. — John Denver’s “sweet Rocky Mountain paradise” — became the first city in the U.S. to launch a comprehensive Meatless Monday campaign. Local restaurants, schools, hospitals, charities and businesses, including the Aspen Valley Hospital, the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Aspen Elementary School, have signed on to promote plant-based meals on Mondays.

For our own health and the health of the planet, the rest of us should go meat-free as well—at least for one day a week.

According to Dawn Shepard, who is heading Aspen’s Meatless Monday campaign, Aspen is a very health-conscious community, and residents are also concerned about the environmental costs of meat production. A 2010 United Nations report revealed that meat and dairy products require more resources and cause higher greenhouse-gas emissions than do plant-based foods. Click to continue »

By Lindsay Pollard-Post

The White House recently announced that its annual Easter Egg Roll event will feature “green” eggs. They’ll come in a variety of pastel colors, but they’ll all be “green” because they’ll be made from Forest Stewardship Council–certified hardwood and packaged in environmentally friendly materials. Not only are these eggs better for the environment, they’re also better for chickens. Everyone who celebrates Easter can follow the White House’s lead and be green, not mean, by choosing faux eggs instead of chicken eggs this spring.

For hens who are forced to lay eggs, Easter is nothing to celebrate. Most of the eggs that Americans dye and decorate for the holiday come from chickens who are confined to filthy factory farm sheds containing row upon row of tiny, multitiered wire cages.

These hens spend their lives crammed into cages with four to 10 other birds. Each bird’s average living space is smaller than a letter-sized sheet of paper. Hens on egg factory farms never breathe fresh air, feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or engage in any of their natural behaviors.

They can’t even stretch a single wing.

The birds are crammed so closely together that these normally clean animals are forced to urinate and defecate on one another.

The stench of ammonia from the accumulated feces under the birds saturates the air and burns the birds’ feathers. Disease runs rampant in the filthy, cramped sheds. Many birds die, and the survivors are often forced to live with their dead and dying cagemates, who are sometimes left to rot.

Due to extreme crowding, stress and boredom, the miserable hens peck at the only thing available: each other. Farm workers “solve” this problem by slicing off a portion of each hen’s sensitive beak with a hot blade—without giving the birds any painkillers. Many birds, unable to eat because of the pain, die from dehydration and weakened immune systems.

The light in the sheds is constantly manipulated in order to maximize egg production. Periodically, the hens’ calorie intake is restricted for two weeks at a time in order to force their bodies into an extra laying cycle. When hens are “spent” and their egg production drops at about two years of age, they’re sent to slaughter, where their throats are cut open while they’re still conscious.

Meanwhile, male chicks are considered worthless to the egg industry because they don’t produce eggs and are too small to profitably be used for their flesh. So every year, millions of male birds are thrown into macerators and ground up alive or tossed into trash bags to slowly suffocate.

Luckily, kids don’t care whether their Easter eggs came from a chicken. Having fun and spending time with family and friends is what matters, and neither of these requires real eggs.

Most craft stores sell paper or wooden eggs that are perfect for painting or decorating with crayons, stickers, glitter or markers. They are mess-free and won’t crack if dropped, and kids can display them for as long as they’d like because, unlike real eggs, they won’t rot. For kids who are dying to dye something, making tie-dyed T-shirts is always a hit.

Brightly colored plastic eggs are ideal for Easter egg hunts. They can be filled with candy, small toys, coins, stickers, love notes or any other small surprise you can imagine. They are inexpensive, can be reused year after year and are much more exciting for kids to find than a hard-boiled egg.

Real eggs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. This Easter, why not follow the First Family’s lead and have a first-class Easter celebration—without harming hens.

Lindsay Pollard-Post is a staff writer for The PETA Foundation.