tagged w/ Vegan Thanksgiving
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Video shot by hatchery employee includes scenes of chicks gasping for air as they slowly suffocate in plastic bags. While employed at a North Carolina turkey hatchery that now supplies Butterball, a COK investigator documented the conditions forced upon newly-hatched chicks.
As the investigation video shows, from the moment they're hatched, these turkeys are submerged into a world of misery. Dumped out of metal trays and jostled onto conveyor belts after being mechanically separated from cracked egg shells, the newly-hatched turkeys are tossed around like inanimate objects -- they are sorted, sexed, de-beaked, de-toed, and in some cases de-snooded before they are packed up and shipped off to a "grow out" confinement facility.
The video further reveals that not all chicks survive this harsh process. Countless chicks become mangled from the machinery, suffocated in plastic bags, or deemed "surplus" and dumped (along with injured chicks) into the same disposal system as the discarded egg shells they were separated from hours earlier.Video shot by hatchery employee includes scenes of chicks gasping for air as they... more
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10 Things Everyone Should Know About Free-range Turkeys
posted by: Angel Flinn 1 day ago
Care2.com
Over 280 million turkeys are slaughtered annually for human consumption in the United States, despite the fact that such consumption is unnecessary for humans and absolutely horrifying for turkeys. 45 million of those deaths occur for the ritual of Thanksgiving alone.
Increasingly, as consumers are becoming more aware of the extreme cruelty of animal farming, free-range, organic and ‘natural’ animal products are gaining popularity. What many people don’t realize, however, is that animals raised under these labels frequently suffer through much of the same torment as those in standard factory farming operations.
1) According to the USDA, the terms “free range” and “free roaming” can be used to describe animals that “are allowed access to the outside for 51% of their lives”. There are no other requirements, including the amount of time spent outdoors or the quality and size of the outdoor area. For this reason, contrary to popular belief, “free-range” facilities are generally no more than large sheds in which tens of thousands of turkeys are crammed together on filthy, disease-ridden floors, living in their own waste. The conditions are often so poor that many turkeys die simply from the stress of living in such an environment.
2) Lighting is often kept dim to discourage aggression, since birds can engage in feather plucking and even cannibalism when they become highly stressed. Low lighting can cause reduced activity levels and result in abnormalities in growth, such as in the eyes and legs.
3) When raised for food, turkeys (even those described as free-range) are genetically modified to grow abnormally large -- often twice their normal size -- for producer profits. This genetic modification causes severe health problems, but since turkeys are generally slaughtered five months into their natural life span of 10 years, most are killed prior to the heart attacks or organ failure that would otherwise occur after six months. (This becomes apparent when genetically modified turkeys are rescued and allowed to live out the rest of their lives in sanctuary situations.)
4) “Natural”, “free range,” and “organic” turkeys are routinely subjected to debeaking, which is intended to prevent overcrowded birds from pecking at each other. Debeaking involves slicing off about one-third of a bird’s beak with a red hot blade when the turkey is around 5 days old (or often even younger).
5) To prevent cannibalism due to stressful conditions, turkeys sold under the above labels are just as likely to be subjected to detoeing. Detoeing is a very painful procedure which involves cutting off or microwaving the ends of the toes of male turkeys within the first three days of life.
6) Free-range, organic and natural operations are also allowed to practice desnooding, which consists of the cutting off of the snood (the fleshy appendage above the beak). Desnooding is an acutely painful procedure, and is often done with scissors, or using methods that are too brutal to describe here.
7) By the time the birds are sent to slaughter, as much as 80 per cent of the litter on the floor of the shed is their own feces. This results in a buildup of ammonia, causing turkeys to develop ulcerated feet and painful burns on their legs and bodies.
8) When they reach market weight, free-range turkeys generally undergo the same horrifying conditions on their way to slaughter as does any factory-farmed animal. Workers gather these birds up to four at a time, carrying them upside down by their legs and then throwing them into crates on multi-tiered trucks. During transport, they are at the mercy of the elements, sometimes enduring extreme cold, and are denied access to food or water.
9) After transportation, free-range turkeys arrive at the same slaughterhouses as turkeys from any other facility. In these places, workers often torture the turkeys – kicking them, throwing them into walls, and breaking their necks and bones.
10) Even when turkeys are not intentionally tortured during transportation or at the slaughterhouse, the killing process itself would certainly be considered torture if done to a human being. The birds are hung upside down by the legs, and dipped in an electrical bath that is supposed to “stun” them, but often only causes convulsions and terror. If they miss the stunning bath, their throats are slit while they’re still conscious. Sometimes, because they are flailing around, they miss both the bath and the blade, and end up alive in a scalding tank designed to remove feathers.
As anyone familiar with animal sanctuary operations will tell you, turkeys are intelligent, social beings who nurture and protect their young and thrive in their natural habitat. Even when they are stressed and confined in “free-range” concentration camps, they have an amazing will to live, as do all sentient beings.
In the extremely rare cases where turkeys are raised gently in someone’s backyard, slaughter by any method is intentional killing of the innocent and clearly unnecessary for humans, and is therefore wrong and logically indistinguishable from murder.
Instead of practicing the primitive ritual of making the sacrifice of a turkey the focus of Thanksgiving dinner, consider giving thanks for all life by having a vegan thanksgiving. Being vegan inspires a new sense of self-esteem which comes from not contributing to the unnecessary and heartless killing of those who simply want to live their lives, as you do.
with Dan Cudahy10 Things Everyone Should Know About Free-range Turkeys
posted by: Angel Flinn 1 day... more
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The New York Times
November 22, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Animal, Vegetable, Miserable
By GARY STEINER
LATELY more people have begun to express an interest in where the meat they eat comes from and how it was raised. Were the animals humanely treated? Did they have a good quality of life before the death that turned them into someone’s dinner?
Some of these questions, which reach a fever pitch in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, pertain to the ways in which animals are treated. (Did your turkey get to live outdoors?) Others focus on the question of how eating the animals in question will affect the consumer’s health and well-being. (Was it given hormones and antibiotics?)
None of these questions, however, make any consideration of whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. And even when people ask this question, they almost always find a variety of resourceful answers that purport to justify the killing and consumption of animals in the name of human welfare. Strict ethical vegans, of which I am one, are customarily excoriated for equating our society’s treatment of animals with mass murder. Can anyone seriously consider animal suffering even remotely comparable to human suffering? Those who answer with a resounding no typically argue in one of two ways.
Some suggest that human beings but not animals are made in God’s image and hence stand in much closer proximity to the divine than any non-human animal; according to this line of thought, animals were made expressly for the sake of humans and may be used without scruple to satisfy their needs and desires. There is ample support in the Bible and in the writings of Christian thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas for this pointedly anthropocentric way of devaluing animals.
Others argue that the human capacity for abstract thought makes us capable of suffering that both qualitatively and quantitatively exceeds the suffering of any non-human animal. Philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who is famous for having based moral status not on linguistic or rational capacities but rather on the capacity to suffer, argue that because animals are incapable of abstract thought, they are imprisoned in an eternal present, have no sense of the extended future and hence cannot be said to have an interest in continued existence.
The most penetrating and iconoclastic response to this sort of reasoning came from the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer in his story “The Letter Writer,” in which he called the slaughter of animals the “eternal Treblinka.”
The story depicts an encounter between a man and a mouse. The man, Herman Gombiner, contemplates his place in the cosmic scheme of things and concludes that there is an essential connection between his own existence as “a child of God” and the “holy creature” scuffling about on the floor in front of him.
Surely, he reflects, the mouse has some capacity for thought; Gombiner even thinks that the mouse has the capacity to share love and gratitude with him. Not merely a means for the satisfaction of human desires, nor a mere nuisance to be exterminated, this tiny creature possesses the same dignity that any conscious being possesses. In the face of that inherent dignity, Gombiner concludes, the human practice of delivering animals to the table in the form of food is abhorrent and inexcusable.
Many of the people who denounce the ways in which we treat animals in the course of raising them for human consumption never stop to think about this profound contradiction. Instead, they make impassioned calls for more “humanely” raised meat. Many people soothe their consciences by purchasing only free-range fowl and eggs, blissfully ignorant that “free range” has very little if any practical significance. Chickens may be labeled free-range even if they’ve never been outside or seen a speck of daylight in their entireThe New York Times
November 22, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Animal, Vegetable,... more
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