Welcome to the factory farming page. Here you will find more information about factory farming because methods differ depending on the animal involved. If you read all the information, you will find certain similarities. All of the animals are kept in dirty, overcrowded conditions and suffer from terrible physical and emotional pain caused by their situation. All are treated as machines and however much meat/milk/eggs they produce it's never enough. Also, all are killed as soon as they become 'worthless' or get fat enough, often in the most inefficient ways.
If you think about it, there are lots of similarities between the way these animals are treated and the way slaves and prisoners of war were treated. I hope this makes you as disgusted and angry as it makes me. To find out more about this issue or to give you a reason to go (or stay) veggie or vegan, order 'Eat This', a 20 minute undercover film produced by Animal Aid. It's available free of charge on video or DVD from www.eatthis.org.uk Click on one of the links below to go straight to the right paragraph.
The majority of the sausages and bacon rashers we eat start life as factory farmed pigs. These pigs spend their extremely short lives trapped in overcrowded sheds, standing in their own urine and faeces. The sows (females) are continually made pregnant artificially and forced to produce piglets. Until recently, they were often trapped in metal 'farrowing' crates to give birth. These crates are now illegal in Britain but sows are still chained up, given inadequate bedding to make a nest and prevented from nursing their young properly. The piglets can reach their mother only to suckle. At two months old they are removed to fattening crates. Packed in together, they are given nothing to do but eat. Three months later they are often killed. A few piglets may be selected and kept for breeding purposes.
These chickens are reared for meat. Thousands are crammed into a windowless shed which is soon thick with the smell of stale droppings and urine. The chickens are kept in artificial lighting with just half an hour of darkness in every 24 hours and fed on a protein rich diet to make them grow unnaturally quickly. This diet often includes chicken meat making them cannibals. The chickens grow so quickly their hearts fail or their legs break under their weight. Unable to move, they then die from starvation and dehydration. Those who survive to execution are manhandled into crates containing no bedding, food or water and transported by lorry to wherever they are to be killed.
The journey can take hours and the chickens are not unloaded until they reach the factories euphemistically called 'processing plants'. 'Killing factory' would be more appropriate. Here they are strung upside down on a conveyor belt and either dragged through electrified water or dragged past a machine which blows in their eyes before their throats are cut. Both are inefficient methods. Many chickens raise their heads as they pass the water and miss it and the air blower only causes them to blink momentarily. Neither prevent the chickens feeling the blade which is supposed to cut their throats. In reality, it seldom does as it is set at 'average' height and not all chickens are the same size. Most arrive fully conscious and badly injured at the scalding tank. The chickens are dunked into this, supposedly dead, so their feathers are loosened before plucking Obviously, most are not dead and are boiled alive.
Virtually all of the eggs we eat come from battery hens. These hens live in sheds, crammed into bare metal cages which are stacked on top of each other. It is very common for five hens to be imprisoned in a cage the size of a microwave oven and amongst battery farmers 20 000 hens per shed is considered a small number. Obviously with five hens to a cage, not even one can open her wings fully. The frustration this causes can lead to the hens pecking at each other so the farmers often remove the tips of their beaks. This causes great pain as unlike fingernails beaks are not dead. There are many sensitive nerves there and the shock of de-beaking can kill. Those who survive are forced to stand continually on the metal bares causing horrendous ulcers or else suffer from osteoporosis caused by a lack of calcium which is leeched from their bones to produce egg shells. Free range hens don't suffer this torture but the inevitable by-products of all egg producing systems are male chicks. Too thin to be killed for meat and unable to lay eggs, they are gassed or crushed to death at just one day old.
These cows are farmed for meat and they provide the majority of our burgers. These cows require a lot of food to enable them to produce good meat so multi-national corporations, including all the largest fast food chains, pay farmers from the Third World a pitiful amount to grow food for them. The crops they grow could be used by them and their families but instead they're exported as animal feed. Even at the height of the Ethiopian famine, the country was exporting crops destined to become animal feed and there are still children dying of starvation beside crops growing for our livestock.
Despite their massive food intake, the cows still need drugs to improve the amount of meat they produce so they're injected with growth hormones. These hormones are still present in the meat when the cows are killed so if you eat beef they end up inside you. What's worse is that selective breeding and the feeding of cow meat to cows has created a string of previously unknown diseases such as BSE. These cows often have a bolt fired through their brain when it's time for them to be slaughtered. They are seldom properly anaethetised first and can be made to watch each other die. The skin of the dead cows is used as leather for clothes and shoes.