Why Veg?
Food
The research done on animal agriculture is not based on isolated cases or a specific type of slaughterhouse. There are literally hundreds of hours filmed on videotape exposing the horrible, inhumane conditions these animals endure. As Bruce Friedrich says below, "Abuse on factory farms is the absolute norm, not the exception." Cages are so small that an animal cannot turn around; animals are beaten and spit on when they don't obey or even if they do. Force-feeding, electrical stunning, starvation, branding, and hormone injections are typical ways farmers coerce animals. And the worst of all: a life spent within the confines of a cage.
"The footage, shot covertly by an undercover investigator with the group Mercy for Animals, shows workers kicking and stomping on chickens and snapping the necks of sick hens. It also shows birds left with untreated wounds and crowded into cages, sometimes amid rotting corpses."
(Los Angeles Times, Eric Bailey, May 6th 2008)
"Hogs, unlike cattle, are dunked in tanks of hot water after they are stunned to soften the hides for skinning. As a result, a botched slaughter condemns some hogs to being scalded and drowned. Secret videotape from an Iowa pork plant shows hogs squealing and kicking as they are being lowered into the water."
(The Washington Post, J. Warrick, Apr. 10th 2001)
"Normally, cows can live as long as twenty years, but milking cows generally die within four."
("Earthlings")
"Farmed fish are kept in concentrations never seen in the wild (e.g. 50,000 fish in a two-acre area)."
(Carla Helferrich in Alaska Science Forum, "Fuss Over Farming Fish")
"Imagine a standard sheet of paper: 8 1/2 by 11 inches. A battery cage hen is given less than this amount of space to live her entire life."
(NYU's Go Cage Free! Campaign)
"On the video, obtained by The Associated Press, a supervisor tells an undercover investigator for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that when he gets angry or a sow won't move, 'I grab one of these rods and jam it in her [anus]�I hate them. These [expletives] deserve to be hurt. Hurt, I say!...Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! Hurt!...Take out your frustrations on 'em.'
'Abuse on factory farms is the absolute norm, not the exception.'"
(CNN, PETA Video Shows Pigs Abused at Iowa Farm, Sept. 16 2008)
Baby male cows (calves) are separated from their mothers at birth and are sold as Veal.
"The veal calf... is kept in a narrow crate (22 inches wide by 54 inches long), unable to turn around, lie down normally or move more than a few inches for a period of 16 weeks. The calf's diet is designed to cause an anemic condition so as to produce the pale meat typical of a very young calf. The veal calf is kept alive by the antibiotics automatically included in his feed."
(Jean Bodfish Brown in The Gory Price of Glorious Veal, New York Times)
"There are more than 9 billion animals a year slaughtered in the US alone. Just during the week I was writing this chapter, 599,000 cattle were slaughtered in the US, along with 1.8 million pigs, and almost 50,000 lambs. Some of these animals produced commodities and then became the commodity of meat; others were simply raised as commodities, and ended up that way through slaughter. None of these figures count animals killed in experiments or for testing products, marine life, "unwanted" animals euthanized in shelters, animals killed by hunters, or any of the other multitude of animals that are killed for human ends."
(Bob Torres in Making A Killing. Bob got his numbers straight from the USDA's website: http://marketnews.usda.gov/portal/lg)
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