The Transformation of Animals Into Food

Many people believe that animals raised for food must be treated well because sick or dead animals would be of no use to agribusiness. This is not true.

Industrialized Cruelty: Factory Farming

The competition to produce inexpensive meat, eggs, and dairy products has led animal agribusiness to treat animals as objects and commodities. The worldwide trend is to replace small fmaily farms with “factory farms” – large warehouses where animals are confined in crowded cages or pens or restrictive stalls

Bernard Rollin, PhD, explains that it is “more economically efficient to put a greater number of birds inot each cage, accepting lower productivity per cage…individual animals may ‘produce,’ for example gain weight, in part because they are immobile, yet suffer because of the inability to move…. Chickens are cheap, cages are expensive.”

            In a November 1993 article in favor of reducing space from 8 to 6 feet per pig, industry journal National Hog Farmer advised, “Crowding pigs pays.”

Transport

            Crammed together, animals must stand in their excrement while exposed to extremem temperatures in open trucks, sometimes freezing to the trailer. Approximately 200,000 pigs arrive dead at U.S. slaughter plants each year; many of these deaths are caused by a lack of ventilation on trucks in hot weather.

            Workers shock the animals with electric prods, which increases the incidence of “downers” – animals too sick or injured to stand. Downers are hauled from the trucks with skid loaders and forklifts.

If Slaughterhouses Has Glass Walls

If they survive the farms and transport, the animals – whether factory-farmed or free-range – are slaughtered.

The federal law requires that mammals be stunned prior to slaughter (exempting kosher and halal). Common methods:

Captive bolt stunning – A “pistol” is set against the animal’s head and a metal rod is thrust into the brain. Shooting a struggling animal is difficuwrlt, and the rod often misses is mark.

Electrical stunning – current produces a grand mal seizure; then the throat is cut. According to industry consultant Temple Grandin, PhD, “Insufficient amperage can cause an animal to be paralyzed without losing sensibility.”