Animals
Conditions for animals in commercial factory farms can be terrible, depriving them of light, space, food and water. But even farms with better conditions still put animals through painful procedures like tail docking, de-horning, removing testicles, clipping ears and cutting beaks, all without anaesthetic.
And regardless of how well any animals are treated during their life, all of them will be slaughtered, often years or decades before their natural lifespan. Transportation to slaughterhouses can be abusive and painful. In their final moments, cows and pigs experience violent deaths, often struggling whilst tied up or hung upside down and having their throat cut open to bleed out. Chickens are hung by their legs and moved over a spinning saw that cuts their throats.
This 4 minute trailer for the documentary Dominion provides a visual sense of the scale of human domination over animals across multiple industries. WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT.
Fish suffocate out of water and their bodies can decompress in the lower air pressure causing their organs to expand inside of them. Bycatch is the non-targeted marine life and birds that get caught in nets and on lines, that are often discarded back into the ocean, dying or dead. Hundreds of millions of animals become bycatch each year including, turtles, seals, sharks, dolphins and whales.
Considering that meat is not required for human health, and increases the risk of chronic disease, this cruelty is completely unnecessary. If we purchase meat products, we finance the unnecessary suffering and killing of animals.
And the suffering of animals like cows, pigs, chickens and fish should matter no less than the suffering of animals like dogs, cats and dolphins. They all feel pain, and there is no legitimate reason to love and care for certain animals, and to pay for the unnecessary torture and slaughter of others.
These two 4 minute videos by PETA and Animal Liberation shows common animal living conditions and slaughter house practices. WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT.
