Vegetarianism in a Nutshell: Animal Welfare

The fourth reason for adopting a vegetarian diet is that eating animal products supports cruelty to animals. If we don't want to pay people to inflict gratuitous abuse on animals, a vegan diet is the only diet that makes sense.

Twenty years ago, some scientists were still telling us that other animals don't feel pain in the same way that humans do. Now, no reputable scientist believes that. Everyone now understands that cattle, pigs, chickens, and fish feel pain in the same way, and to the same degree, as humans. We also know that they have emotions, and even though we don't tend to know chickens in the same way that we know cats and dogs, the science is clear: Chickens, fish, pigs, and cattle are individuals, just like the animals we know a bit better.

In fact, both pigs and chickens do better on cognition tests than dogs or cats, and pigs perform better than 3-year-old human children. When Cameron Diaz learned that pigs are more intelligent than 3-year-old children, she decided to stop eating them, exclaiming, "Oh, my God, it's like eating my niece."

Scientists at the University of Guelph have learned that pigs and chickens can figure out how to turn on the heat in a cold barn if given the chance and turn it off again when they are too warm. University of Bristol researchers have observed that chickens will complete a difficult maze to reach a nest instead of laying their eggs on the barn floor. In Pennsylvania, a farm welfare researcher has shown that sows like to play video games and that they play the games better than some primates. And a researcher in Saskatchewan is studying the complex social lives of cattle, finding that they interact in ways that are very similar to how we interact. And don't even get me started on fish—fish can use tools, learn from each other, and recognize one another, and they have long-term memories. These scientists join sanctuary owners and many small farmers in recognizing that animals are individuals, with feelings just like our own. You can watch videos of pigs playing video games and chickens navigating mazes in the education section of PETATV.com, and read more about all these amazing animals in the "Amazing Animals" section of GoVeg.com.

Science and understanding may have progressed, but the treatment of animals in factory farms has gotten worse. As Sen. Robert Byrd told the U.S. Senate, "Our inhumane treatment of livestock is becoming widespread and more and more barbaric." He went on to detail the suffering of pigs in tiny stalls, hens in cages, calves in crates, and the inhumane—and inhuman—slaughter of all these animals. Sen. Byrd stated, "These creatures feel; they know pain. They suffer pain just as we humans suffer pain."

PETA's short "Meat Your Meat" video, which you can watch at Meat.org, shows you what you're supporting if you consume meat, eggs, and dairy products. Every practice shown on the video is standard across the animal agriculture industry. Please download the video, make more copies for everyone who you think might do well to watch it, and encourage them to do likewise.

Factory farms are abusing animals—they are treating animals in ways that would warrant felony cruelty charges if the animals were dogs or cats. Animals are deprived of everything that is natural and important to them; their entire lives, from birth to death, are characterized by unmitigated misery. Alice Walker has a phrase for eating animal products: She calls it "eating misery."

In the rush for profits, abnormal breeding practices are used so that animals will grow far more quickly than they would naturally, and their organs and limbs simply can't keep up. For example, chickens' upper bodies grow seven times as quickly as they did just 30 years ago, and their lungs, hearts, and limbs can't keep up, so these factory-farmed animals who live for fewer than two months still suffer from very high rates of lung collapse, heart failure, and crippling leg deformities.

Chickens and turkeys are naturally inquisitive and would normally spend their lives actively dust- and sun-bathing, digging in the underbrush, building nests, playing with their chicks, and so on. Walk into a factory shed today, containing tens of thousands of chickens, and you'll find that after just a month, the animals have become so debilitated that they can barely move.

Michael Specter, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, visited a chicken farm and wrote, "I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs, and I could neither see nor breathe…. There must have been 30,000 chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn't move, didn't cluck. They were almost like statues of chickens, living in nearly total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six-week lives that way."

Similar conditions exist for all animals raised for food: Cattle and pigs have their testicles ripped out without any painkillers. Cattle have their horns cut off and have third-degree burns—also known as branding—inflicted on them, often three or four times during their short lives. Pigs have their ears, tails, and teeth mutilated. Laying hens' sensitive beaks are seared off with a hot blade. The animals are dosed with hormones or antibiotics, both to make them grow more quickly and to keep them alive through the horrible conditions that would kill them from stress and disease if they were not drugged. Mother pigs, or "breeding sows," as the industry calls them, are kept in metal and cement "gestation crates," cages so small that they can't take a single step forward or backward. They are confined to cages like this continually for four to five years before being killed. One pig-flesh industry journal summed it up: "Crowding Pigs Pays."

Animals are shipped to slaughter without any food or water, often through severe weather extremes. Conditions are so bad that some animals arrive at the slaughterhouse crippled or dead. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), more than 200,000 cattle per year—mostly dairy cows—arrive at slaughterhouses unable to walk off the backs of transport trucks. According to the National Pork Board, more than 1 million pigs arrive dead or crippled from the harsh traveling conditions. Imagine how bad the conditions must be for so many animals to become injured and killed. But the meat industry accepts that some animals won't make it to slaughter if it means that it can make a higher profit. It's cheaper to let some pigs die in transport than to buy more trucks and give animals more space and better conditions. One industry expert explained the coldhearted calculation used by the egg industry when it crams so many hens into tiny wire cages—causing many to die—by stating that "chickens are cheap, cages are expensive."

Gail Eisnitz wrote an excellent book called Slaughterhouse, and you can read extensive excerpts on the Web by doing a Google search for "slaughterhouse excerpts." Eisnitz interviewed USDA slaughterhouse veterinarians, slaughter workers, and truck drivers as well as others who are intimately familiar with conditions in U.S. slaughterhouses. These experts testified that animals routinely arrive for slaughter frozen to the sides of transport trucks, frozen to truck bottoms amid their own feces and urine, crippled from the journey, and so on. Near-dead, they are simply hooked to chains and dragged off the backs of the trucks.

The animals who survive transport invariably suffer an awful death. Slaughterhouse workers and veterinarians testify that animals are routinely conscious through the entire slaughter process—while they are still conscious, their throats are slit, their limbs are hacked off, and their skin is torn from their bodies. Pigs are routinely forced into tanks of scalding-hot water for hair removal while they are still conscious. Chickens are often scalded to death in defeathering tanks.

This is an inevitable result of the fact that slaughter lines move at a pace that is too rushed for slaughterhouse workers to keep up with. Pig slaughter lines in the U.S. move at a rate of 1,100 animals per hour. Cow slaughter lines move at a rate of 400 animals per hour. In the European Union, the maximum rate is 300 for pigs and 75 for cows. U.S. lines move three to six times as quickly as European lines. Obviously, many animals will still be conscious as their throats are slit and their limbs are hacked off.

In PETA's "Meet Your Meat" video, we show slaughter at its "best"—cows and pigs slaughtered in a small slaughterhouse in Massachusetts by a trained worker who is in no hurry at all. Yet you can clearly see that the animals are still conscious as their throats are slit. With lines moving at breakneck speeds and workers making little money and having little training, one can assume that gratuitous abuse is the norm rather than the exception. And that is exactly what investigative journalists have found.

Sometimes people ask about dairy products, since the animal abuse in the dairy industry isn't as obvious. It may surprise you to hear that animal abuse in dairy production is worse than that in most other animal-product industries. Cows give milk for the same reason that all animals do—to feed their babies. But their babies are taken away from them within 24 hours of birth, and the female babies are added to the dairy herds. Many of the males are raised for veal. You might say that there is a hunk of veal in every glass of milk.

But that's not all: Not only do people who consume dairy products support the veal industry, they also support the abuse of dairy cows. Most dairy cows spend their entire lives on concrete or standing in muddy feedlots, and they often become lame as a result. And dairy cows now give about four times as much milk as they did just 25 years ago. Imagine if a human mother gave four times her normal milk output. The animals' udders are so overloaded that they sometimes drag on the ground, and one-half of all dairy cows suffer from mastitis, a painful udder infection.

The worst industry regarding animal welfare is the egg industry. Hens are crammed into tiny cages that are stacked on top of each other. The birds can't even spread a single wing in these cages for their entire lives. To keep the birds from pecking at each other in the cages, the egg industry cuts off the tips of birds' sensitive beaks. After two horrific years, the birds who have survived are yanked out of the crates, trucked to a slaughterhouse, and slammed upside-down into shackles to have their throats slit. Their bodies are too beaten up to be sold as regular chicken flesh; they are turned into pet food or chicken soup instead. And have you ever wondered what happens to male chicks on egg factory farms? They don't lay eggs, and they are too small to be used for meat, so they are generally tossed into a high-speed grinder while still conscious.

One of the most incredible facts about the animal abuse that I've just discussed is that it's all routine. It's inspired by profit, and it's standard agricultural practice. The industry will tell us that only happy animals gain weight and produce, but that's nonsense that can't be backed up by science: The science proves that stressed animals eat more and thus grow faster. Animals unable to move grow more quickly than animals who can move around. Mutilating animals and dosing them with hormones and antibiotics allows them to live through conditions that would otherwise cause them to kill each other from stress or get sick and die. And cramming animals into transport trucks, even though it kills a lot of them, is more economically viable than using more trucks and giving animals more space. Once the animals are at the slaughterhouse, the low-wage, high-turnover workers are forced to kill at such a rapid pace that animal welfare is entirely out of the question. Profit is king; animal welfare is not a concern.

What about fish? As we discussed earlier, fish may not scream out in pain, but they feel pain every bit as much as mammals and birds do. This is a physiological fact, and it's not disputed in scientific circles. Although we may have trouble empathizing with fish, their method of sonic communication, their sense of smell, and their ability to navigate all put human beings to shame. A few years back, an article in the scientific journal Fish and Fisheries cited more than 500 research papers on fish intelligence, proving that fish are smart, that they can use tools, and that they have impressive long-term memories and sophisticated social structures. Dr. Sylvia Earle, one of the world's leading marine biologists, said, "I would never eat anyone I know personally. I wouldn't deliberately eat a grouper any more than I'd eat a cocker spaniel. They're so good-natured, so curious. You know, fish are sensitive, they have personalities, they hurt when they're wounded."

Regardless of who's bringing in the catch, the methods of raising and killing fish are undeniably abusive. Commercial fishing trawlers, as I've mentioned, can net 800,000 pounds of fish; the fish are killed by crushing or by decompression as they are dragged from the ocean. Think about death by decompression or crushing. Have you ever felt claustrophobic in a crowd of people on a subway train or at a concert? Imagine how it would feel to be killed by being crushed. Or decompression—it's like stepping on the moon without a spacesuit. When fish experience decompression, their swim bladders often rupture and their eyes pop out of their heads.

Aquaculture is even worse, and it accounts for almost half the fish consumed by human beings. Aquaculture involves cramming thousands of fish into tubs or confining them to enclosed areas of the sea or ocean surrounded by nets, giving each animal just a bit more room than the space taken up by his or her body. An aquaculture tank looks somewhat like a massive tin of writhing anchovies; you can't believe that there are fish in there, and you have to wonder how a single animal could survive. The answer is that they're drugged with antibiotics, but the death toll is still massive. And as I mentioned, producing 1 pound of farmed fish requires up to 5 pounds of wild-caught fish.

Make no mistake: If someone eats meat, eggs, or dairy products, that person is contributing to serious cruelty to animals, no matter how good of a person he or she is otherwise. And it's cruelty to animals that, if done to a dog or a cat, would warrant felony animal abuse charges against everyone involved. This isn't a comfortable thing to deal with, I know, but it is the truth. And how can we turn our backs on it once we know this?