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Facts on Animal Rights and veg*n issues: Factory Farming
Knowing is better than believing!

No light, but rather darkness visible
serves only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end...John Milton, Paradise Lost

Animals at the farm Up

• Chicken More

  The biggest losers in industrial farming. They loose by number as around 98% animals killed a year are birds.¹ More than 95% of these birds have the misfortune to be born as a chicken. Turkey scores 4% due to Thanksgiving.

  • Egg machines: Around 95% of the eggs available come from egg factories, where the birds are held in battery cages -very small with slanted wire floors. Five to eight birds are crammed in 14 square inches cages. To prevent agression (due to the stress) chicks are debeaked. To lift the production up the hens live in constant light.
  • Broiler Chickens: As male chicks are not useful for the broiler industry, and 50% of chicks hatched are males, they need to be disposed and killed at bird. Broiler chickens are selectively bred and genetically altered to produce bigger thighs and breasts, the parts in most demand. This breeding creates birds so heavy that their bones cannot support their weight. As they are bred to grown fast they reach market weight of 3 1/2 pounds in seven weeks. Broilers are raised in overcrowded broiler houses instead of cages to prevent the occurrence of bruised flesh which would make their meat undesirable. Their beaks and toes are cut off and the broiler houses are usually unlit to prevent fighting among the birds.

• Pigs More

  Our closest relatives at the factory farm. Many never see the daylight, others are used as living breeding machines. Pigs are born and raised inside buildings that have automated water, feed and waste removal. Dust, dirt and toxic gases from the pigs' waste create an unsanitary environment that encourages the onset of a number of diseases and illnesses, including pneumonia, cholera, dysentery and trichinosis.

  • Hog Farms: As piglets, they are taken away from their mothers when they are less than 1 month old; their tails are cut off, some of their teeth are cut off, and the males have their testicles ripped out of their scrotums (castration), all without any pain relief. They spend their entire lives in overcrowded pens on a tiny slab of filthy concrete. more than 170,000 pigs die in transport each year, and more than 420,000 are crippled by the time they arrive at the slaughterhouse.² Many are still fully conscious when they are immersed in scalding water for hair removal.
  • Breeding Sows: Breeding sows spend their entire lives in tiny metal crates so they cannot turn around. Shortly after giving birth, they are once again forcibly impregnated. This cycle continues for years until their bodies finally gives up and they are sent to be killed.

• Cattle - Cows More

  The giant of the bunch, gentle, curious and clever.

  • Dairy Cows: As dairy cows only produce milk for about 10 months after giving birth, they are impregnated continuously to keep up the milk flow. Female calves are kept to replenish the herd and male calves are usually sent to veal crates where they live a miserable existence until their slaughter. When cows become unable to produce adequate amounts of milk they are sent to slaughter so money can be made from their flesh.
  • Veal Calves : Calves are kept in small wooden (to prefent iron intake) crates which prevent movement and inhibit muscle growth so their flesh will be tender. They are fed a iron deficient diet to keep their flesh pale and appealing to the consumer. Veal calves spend whole his life confined, alone and deprived of light for a large portion of their four-month lives.
  • Beef : Most beef cattle spend the last few months of their lives at feedlots, crowded by the thousands into dusty, manure-laden holding pens. The air is thick with harmful bacteria and particulate matter, and the animals are at a constant risk for respiratory disease.
    Before they are hung up by their back legs and bleed to death, the cattle needs to be rendered unconscious. This 'stunning' is usually done by a mechanical blow to the head, but as the procedure is terribly imprecise, adequate stunning isn't aquired a lot of times. As a result, conscious animals are often hung upside down, kicking and struggling, while a slaughterhouse worker makes another attempt to render them unconscious. Eventually, the animals will be "stuck" in the throat with a knife, and blood will gush from their bodies whether or not they are unconscious.

• Sheep

  Shortly after birth, lambs are subjected to two painful mutilations: castration and tail-docking. Some four million newborn lambs - about one in five of the total - die every year within a few days of birth, mostly from disease, exposure, or malnutrition.³ And about a million adult breeding animals (out of about 17.5 million) also die in the fields annually.

  Current EU rules allow sheep to travel for 14 hours without a rest or water. They must have a rest period of one hour after a 14 hour journey, after which, they may be transported for a further 14 hours.

• Rabbits

Although rabbits aren't yet as common at the factory farm, there have been experiments in battery systems similar to does from hens. Young rabbits have a high deathrate. The does (female rabbits) are as laying hens disposables. When a doe can't have seven litters a year anymore, she is slaughtered.

Factory Farming, Disease and Antibiotics Up

Vitamin and Nutritional Deficiencies

A mix of convinment, little moving space, to little or no sunshine, to little vitamins and dietary deficiencies can result (whith is quit common in modern factory farms) in a variety of health conditions and diseases.

Veal is deliberately breeded with a iron deficiency so the meat is pale.
In poultry factories this can lead to retarded growth, eye damage, blindness, lethargy, kidney damage, disturbed sexual development, bone and muscle weakness, anemia, brain damage, deformed beaks and joints, paralysis, internal bleeding, swollen joints, fragile bones, twisted legs and necks,...

Stress

Darkened rooms and close convinment result in animals being bored, frustrated and fearful.
In reaction to this 'stress' animals burn up available energy and nutrients that would otherwise go toward growth, resistance against diseases, lactation and gestation.

The cause of stress has a variety of origines. Occasional stress can come from debeaking birds, prematurely weaning calves or pigs,...
In these situations some animals die at the spot from shock.
The continuous stress can be found in having no relief from crowding and monotony.
Whith can result in more aggression and abnormal behavior. This can go from being so scared that they dare not to move, eat or drink to cannibalism.

Air pollution and contemination

The air of pig an poultry factories contain dust from mechanical feeders and excited animals, as well as ammonia and other irritating gases from the manure pits. Most hogs have signs of respiratory disease. Even powerful ventilators can't stop a disease from spreading fast.

Antibiotics Up

In the 1940s Dr. Thomas Jukes discoverd that chickens grew faster when fed the mash left over from the antibiotic manufacturing process. To this day no one really knows why antibiotics speed growth, but within years after Juke's discovery they became standard feed additives for poultry, cattle, calves and pigs.

In the fifties and sixties animal scientists mapped out the role of hormones in growth and reproduction and started to make hormone effecting products as feed additives and implants.

The farmer first defence against bacterial disease is antibiotics. Penicillin and tetracyclines are the most extensively used.
Nearly all poultry, 90% of veal calves and pigs get antibaterial additives in their feed. About 70% of the antibiotics are used to prevent diseases.⁴

• ¹ Animals Killed for Food in the United States in 2000 (millions)
• ² Joe Vansickle, "Quality Assurance Program Launched," National Hog Farmer, 15 Feb. 2002
• ³ Henderson, Lamb Survival, Farming Press
• ⁴ An overview of the disease problems in the various types of confinement systems : Farm Animals - by veterinarian and ethologist Dr. Michael W. Fox
  The air they breathe by Brodus

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