Monthly Archive for November, 2009
Looking at an image of a happy pig eating grass on the Country View Family Farms website, you’d be inclined to think “this family farm takes care of their animals” — right?
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The latest undercover investigation by Mercy For Animals uncovered:
- Workers grabbing piglets by their fragile ears or legs and throwing them across the room and slamming them into transport carts.
- Workers tattooing sows by repeatedly driving sharp metal spikes into their flesh.
- Sows with untreated rectal prolapses and deep, infected sores and scrapes from constant rubbing against the bars of their stalls.
- Workers cutting off piglets’ tails with dull pliers and castrating them by ripping out their testes with their bare hands – all without anesthesia.
- Thousands of pregnant pigs confined in two-feet wide metal stalls so small that they could only take one step forward or backward and could not turn around or lie down comfortably.
- Injured, sick and runt piglets being tossed into overcrowded gassing kill carts, slowly suffocating from CO2.
- Workers firing steel rods into sows’ heads, sometimes as many as four separate times, before the sows fell and died.
Does that mesh well with your vision of a traditional family farm?
Believe it or not, the company has an “Animal Handling Philosophy”:
“To be responsible stewards of the animals placed in our care, educating and training our pork producers and transporters to constantly maintain the highest level of integrity in animal welfare and bio-security, while reinforcing our commitment to safe, wholesome product our consumers can trust.”
It seems as though gas chambers, tossing of babies, extreme confinement, agonizing slaughter and overall hell is now part of being a “responsible steward.”
This investigation is but another nail in the coffin of the “humane meat” myth. Consumers are frequently duped into thinking they aren’t supporting cruelty if they buy their meat from Whole Foods, a family farm, or look for a “humanely raised” sticker on the packaging.
But there is no such thing as humane animal consumption. Factory farmed or not, ALL those animals die, some just have less hellish lives than others. The word humane is a facade, like “family farm“, unregulated labels designed to fool consumers into paying higher prices for the same tortured animal products.
As is always the case with animal cruelty investigations, words will never fully convey what raw video shows. Some parts are so horrific, Fox News will not show it on the air.
(Can’t see the video? Click here.)
If this video is hard to watch, makes you cringe, makes you cry, makes you angry, or all of the above — I strongly suggest you opt out of this disgusting food system and go vegan. It’s easy to get started, click here to order a FREE vegetarian starter kit.
If you can afford it, please also consider making a donation to Mercy for Animals. They need our support in order to keep doing critical undercover investigations.
Every year, millions of turkeys are killed for the Thanksgiving holiday. How odd that the centerpiece for a day celebrating life’s blessings is a corpse on the table.
No doubt, American holidays are very meat-centric. Rather than participate in this mass slaughter, why not celebrate a compassionate holiday and serve a vegan dinner this year?
“Are You Insane?! What’s Wrong With Turkey?”
GentleThanksgiving.org provides a great overview of the life and death of most Thanksgiving turkeys:
The nearly 300 million turkeys killed each year in the U.S. spend their entire lives crammed in large sheds with little room to move. Artificially inseminated and selectively bred to gain enormous amounts of weight, they suffer heart attacks, broken limbs, lameness, and death from their genetically-induced accelerated growth rate.
Factory farm conditions are so harsh that the turkeys must be pumped full of antibiotics just to stay alive. Shortly after birth, they have their snoods and parts of their toes and beaks cut off with hot blades, without the use of anesthetic, to reduce damage from from stress-induced aggression. They are then delivered by conveyer belt to a carousel where they get a power injection, usually of an antibiotic, whacked into the back of their necks.
The rest of their lives they are forced to endure crowding, living in their own waste, and ravaging diseases. As many as 25,000 birds may be housed in a single shed. Their eyes and lungs are burned by toxic fumes emanating from their excrement. Conditions are so severe that about 9% of turkeys raised for food (or over 26 million) didn’t survive long enough to make it to the slaughterhouse.
After 16 weeks of misery, they are hung on a conveyer belt, their throats are cut, and they are dumped — sometimes still fully conscious — into scalding water to strip their feathers.
(Can’t see the video? Click here.)
What to Make Instead?
A Google search for “vegan Thanksgiving recipes” yields approximately 8,860,000 results. There is no shortage of delicious vegan Thanksgiving recipes! Here are some of my favorites:
- Vegan Thanksgiving Recipes 2009 – A Feast by Robin Robertson
- Mercy for Animals’ Thanksgiving Vegan Mealplan
- Vegan Yum Yum Thanksgiving
- Field Roast Grain Meat Company’s Celebration Roast, I LOVE this stuff! (Even better than Tofurkey, shhh.) You can find it at Whole Foods, and possibly your local grocery store.
Adopt-a-Turkey
Olive
For people who want to do even more than just prepare a vegan meal, The Farm Sanctuary has a wonderful program for people who choose to help turkeys, rather than kill them. The Adopt-a-Turkey Project “seeks to end the misery of commercially-raised turkeys by offering a compassionate alternative for Thanksgiving. Since 1986, Farm Sanctuary has rescued more than 1,000 turkeys, placed hundreds into loving homes through our annual Turkey Express adoption event, educated millions of people about their plight, and provided resources for a cruelty-free holiday.”
Mercy For Animals proudly presents a special Columbus premiere screening of Fowl Play, an award-winning documentary that exposes the plight of factory-farmed egg-laying hens through interviews with people who are fighting to save them. Fowl Play leaves viewers with a ground-breaking message of personal change and community outreach.
From FowlPlayMovie.com: National surveys show that the majority of Americans are opposed to the inhumane treatment of farm animals. In fact, Americans are in opposition to the very treatment animals face every day on factory farms. This disconnect that people have between the food they buy and the industries they support is exactly what agribusiness counts on to maintain its bottom line.
However, a growing movement of people are opposed to factory farming and the commodification of animals. They are organizing, documenting the living nightmare that animals face, and speaking out against animal agriculture.
Fowl Play illuminates the plight of factory-farmed laying hens through interviews with people who are fighting diligently to save them. A story of hope emerges as footage recorded inside battery cage and other facilities is balanced with personal accounts of the individuals working to protect the often-forgotten victims of the egg industry.
The film also introduces us to animals who survive the system: Hope, a hen left to die in a garbage can but then rescued by activists; and Consuela, a hen gassed on a farm when she was no longer useful but who survives to be rescued at a landfill.
The suffering that animals face on factory farms won’t end until enough people are motivated to change it. Fowl Play connects the dots between consumers and the practices they support, and leaves viewers with a groundbreaking message of personal change and community outreach.
(Can’t see the video? Click here.)
Date: Sunday, November 8, 2009
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Location: Studio 35 Cinema, 3055 Indianola Ave., Columbus
Tickets: $2
Screening to be followed by a Q & A session with several of the filmmakers and individuals featured in the film, including MFA’s Executive Director, Nathan Runkle.
