Veganism in a Nutshell: Animal Welfare by Bruce Friedrich, PETA The fourth reason for adopting a vegan diet is a recognition that eating animal products supports cruelty to animals. If we do not want to pay people to inflict gratuitous abuse on animals, a vegan diet is the only diet that makes sense. I want to be clear: Even if veganism were no better for the planet and even if a vegan diet were not healthier than one with meat and dairy products, a vegan diet is still the only clear and consistent ethical choice we can make where animals won’t be bred, abused and inevitably butchered on our behalf. We share the planet with an array of amazing beings, and if we would prefer not to contribute to their extreme suffering, we should not eat them. Twenty years ago, scientists, the ones who were telling us we could smoke low tar cigarettes, were still telling us that other animals don’t feel pain in the same way that humans do. Now, no reputable scientist believes that. Everyone now understands that cattle, pigs, chickens, fish—all farmed animals—feel not only pain but joy, sorrow, fear, distress, and an array of other emotions as well, just as we do. They share these and other capacities with us. As just a few examples, among many: Scientists at the University of Guelph have learned that pigs and chickens will choose to turn on the heat in a cold barn if given the chance and to turn it off again when they are too warm, and University of Bristol researchers have observed that chickens will complete a difficult maze to reach a nest instead of laying their eggs on the barn floor. Perhaps you read the recent New York Times article about the ability of sheep to recognize the faces of 50 or more other sheep or humans from photographs, even if they haven’t seen the other sheep or humans in two years? In Pennsylvania, a farm welfare researcher has shown that sows like to play video games, and that they play the games better than some primates. And a researcher in Saskatchewan is studying the complex social lives of cattle, finding that they interact in ways very similar to the ways we interact. These scientists join sanctuary owners and many small farmers in recognizing that animals are individuals, with feelings just like our own. Science and understanding may have progressed, but factory farming hasn’t. As Senator Robert Byrd told the U.S. Senate, “Our inhumane treatment of livestock is becoming widespread and more and more barbaric.” He went on to detail the suffering of pigs in tiny stalls, hens in cages, calves in crates, and the inhumane—and inhuman—slaughter of all these animals. Senator Byrd stated, “These creatures feel; they know pain. They suffer pain just as we humans suffer pain.” I hope that everyone listening will watch PETA’s short “Meet Your Meat” video, which you can watch or order online. Once you have a copy, please make more copies for everyone who you think might profit from watching it, and encourage them to do likewise. The video shows you what you’re supporting if you consume meat, dairy products, or eggs. Every practice shown on the video is standard across the animal-agriculture industry. The indisputable fact of the matter is that the production of all animal foods in modern agriculture settings, no matter if they are meat, dairy or eggs, always involves killing the animals when they are no longer profitable, and this is always a gruesome and violent process. Furthermore, factory farms are abusing animals—they are treating animals in ways that would be illegal, were dogs or cats treated so abusively. Everything natural to animals is denied them; their entire lives, from birth to death, are characterized by unmitigated misery. Alice Walker has a phrase for eating animal products: She calls it “eating misery.” In the rush for profits, abnormal breeding practices are used so that animals will grow far more quickly than they would naturally, and their organs and limbs can’t keep up. So, for example, chickens’ upper bodies grow seven times as quickly as they did just 25 years ago, but their lungs, hearts, and limbs can’t grow that fast. These factory-farmed animals live for fewer than two months before they’re at full slaughter weight, and yet they still suffer from high rates of lung collapse, heart failure, and crippling leg deformities. Chickens and turkeys are naturally inquisitive and would normally spend their lives actively dust- and sun-bathing, digging in the underbrush, building nests, playing with their chicks, and so on. Walk into a factory shed today, with tens of thousands of chickens, and you’ll find that, after just a month, the animals have become so debilitated that they can barely move. Similar conditions exist for all animals raised for food: Cattle and pigs have their testicles ripped out with no painkillers. Cattle have their horns cut from their heads and have third-degree burns, branding, inflicted on them, often three or four times during their short lives. Pigs have their ears, tails, and teeth mutilated. The beaks of laying hens are seared off with a hot blade. The animals are pumped full of hormones or antibiotics, both to make them grow more quickly and to keep them alive through the horrible conditions that would kill them from stress and disease if they were not drugged. After very short lives, the animals are shipped to slaughter, often through severe weather extremes and always without food or water. Conditions are so bad that some animals arrive at the slaughterhouse crippled or dead. According to the USDA, more than 100,000 cattle per year, mostly dairy cows, arrive at slaughterhouses unable to walk off the backs of the transport trucks. According to the National Pork Board, more than 400,000 pigs each year arrive for slaughter unable to walk off the trucks. More than 100,000 pigs arrive dead from the harsh traveling conditions. As for those who do make it, imagine how bad the conditions must be to kill and injure so many others. Gail Eisnitz wrote an excellent book entitled, Slaughterhouse, and you can read extensive excerpts on the Web by using the Slaughterhouse link on the GoVeg.com site. Ms. Eisnitz interviewed USDA slaughterhouse veterinarians, slaughter workers, and truck drivers as well as others who are intimately familiar with conditions in U.S. slaughterhouses. These experts testified that animals routinely arrive for slaughter frozen to the sides of transport trucks, frozen to truck bottoms in their own feces and urine, crippled from the journey, and so on. Near-dead, they are simply hooked to chains and dragged from the backs of the trucks. The animals who live through transport invariably suffer an awful death. Workers and veterinarians from inside the plants testify that animals are routinely conscious through the entire slaughter process—their throats are slit, their limbs hacked off, and their skin torn from their bodies, while they are still conscious. Pigs routinely go into the scalding hot water for hair removal still conscious. Chickens are scalded alive in the feather removal tank. This is an inevitable result of the fact that pig slaughter lines in the U.S. move at a rate of 1100 animals per hour. Cow slaughter lines move at 400 animals per hour. In the European Union, the maximum rate is 300 for pigs and 75 for cows. So, U.S. lines are moving three to six times as quickly as European lines. Obviously, animals are still going to be conscious as their throats are slit and their limbs hacked off. In PETA’s “Meet Your Meat” video, we show slaughter at its “best”—cows and pigs slaughtered in a small slaughterhouse in Massachusetts, by a trained worker who is in no hurry at all. And yet, you can clearly see that the animals are still conscious as their throats are slit. With lines moving at the rates they do and workers making so little money and having so little training, one can assume that gratuitous abuse is the norm, rather than the exception. Sometimes people ask about dairy products, since the animal abuse in the dairy industry isn’t as obvious It may be surprising to hear that animal abuse in dairy production is worse than that in most other animal product-based industries. Cows give milk for the same reason all animals give milk—for their babies. But we take their babies away from them within 24 hours of birth and add the females to the dairy herd. Many of the males are raised for veal. You might say that there is a hunk of veal in every glass of milk. But that’s not all: Not only do those who consume dairy products support the veal industry, they support the abuse of the cows as well. Most dairy cows spend their entire lives on concrete and often become lame as a result. And dairy cows now give about four times as much milk as they did just 25 years ago. Imagine a human mother giving four times her normal milk output. The animals’ udders are so overloaded that they sometimes drag on the ground, and fully one-half of all dairy cows suffer from mastitis, a painful udder infection. There is no way of getting around the fact that the production of dairy and meat involve very similar aspects of pain and suffering for the animals. It is best not only for us but also the animals if we can transition as quickly away from these products as we are able to do. Thanks to the creation of so many fantastic soy products in recent years, it is now easier to do then ever. One of the most incredible facts about the animal abuse I’ve just discussed is that it’s all routine. It’s inspired by profit; it’s standard agricultural practice. The industry will tell us that only happy animals produce, but that’s nonsense: Stressed animals eat more. Animals unable to move grow more quickly than animals who can move around. Mutilating animals and dosing them with hormones and antibiotics allows them to live through conditions that would normally cause them to kill one another from the stress or to get sick and die. And, of course, cramming animals into transport trucks, even though it kills a lot of them, is more economically viable than using more trucks and giving the animals more space. Once they’re at the slaughterhouse, the low-wage, high-turnover workers are forced to kill at such a pace that animal welfare is entirely discounted. Profit is king; animal welfare is not a concern. Okay, then, what about fish? As we discussed earlier, fish may not scream out in pain, but they feel pain every bit as much as mammals and birds. This is a physiological fact, and it’s not disputed in scientific circles. And although we may have trouble empathizing with fish, their methods of sonic communication, their senses of smell, their ability to navigate, all put human beings to shame. In fact, marine biologists like Jacques Cousteau and Sylvia Earl tell us that fish are individuals with unique and interesting personalities. Regardless of who’s bringing in the catch, the methods of raising and killing fish are undeniably abusive. Commercial fishing trawlers, as I’ve mentioned, can net 800,000 pounds of fish; the fish are killed by crushing, or by decompression as they are dragged from the ocean. Think about death by decompression or crushing. Have you ever felt claustrophobic in a crowd of people on a subway train or at a concert? Imagine how it would feel to be killed by being crushed. Or decompression—it’s like stepping onto the moon without a spacesuit. Decompression often ruptures fishes’ swim bladders and causes their eyes to pop out of their heads. Aquaculture may be even worse, and it accounts for close to one-third of the fish consumption by human beings. Aquaculture involves cramming thousands of fish into tubs or confining them to roped-off areas of the sea or ocean, each animal with just a bit more room than the space taken up by his or her body. An aquaculture tank looks sort of like a massive tub of writhing Spam; you can’t believe that there are fish in there, and you have to wonder how a single animal could survive. The answer is that they’re drugged with antibiotics, but the death losses are massive nonetheless. And, as I mentioned, producing 1 pound of farmed fish requires 4 pounds of wild-caught fish. Make no mistake: If someone eats meat, dairy, or egg products, that person is contributing to serious animal cruelty, no matter how good of a person they are in the rest of their life. And it’s animal cruelty that, if it were done to a dog or a cat, would warrant felony animal abuse charges against everyone involved. This isn’t a comfortable thing to deal with, I know, but it is the truth. And how can we turn our backs once we know this?