Companion animals

Most puppies in pet stores come from puppy mills. Puppy mills contain dogs used a ‘breeding machines’ they are in small, usually overcrowded cages with no socialisation and no veterinary care.

A female dog in a puppy mill will usually never leave the 2 metre area she is confined to for the entirety of her life. She will never feel the warmth of the sun and never feel the grass under her paws.

There are on average 25 million stray animals per year.
9 million stray animals die on the streets every year from disease, injury and starvation to name a few.
50% of the animals in shelters are turned in by their caretakers.
60,000 animals per day are euthanized.
To save money kill-shelters use gas chambers to kill the animals.
The animals can take up to 20 minutes to die a painful death by carbon monoxide gas.

“Are we keeping companion animals in THEIR best interests or OUR best interests?”

 

 

 

Farmed animals

Farmed cattle are slaughtered at a staggering 10,000 times per minute in the US alone.
The cattle is branded, dehorned using pliers and during transportation the cattle are piled on top of one another.

Many do not survive the journey to the slaughterhouse and the ones that do are so weak due to dehydration and exhaustion from the journey they are dragged over the abattoir floor.
Before slaughter a ‘captive bolt’ is used, this is a steel bolt which is fired into the brain.
It is supposed to cause a lack of consciousness before the cow is bled. This is usually doesn’t work and many times the cows are still alive even after they have been ‘bled out’ and are on their way to be butchered.

 

(Pigs in individual gestration crates)

Piglets shortly after birth have their tails and ears cut off, all teeth are pulled out and the males are usually castrated as it produces a fattier type of meat. This is all carried out without anaesthesia or pain relievers.
The pigs endure overcrowded confinement buildings for their entire lives - until they reach a slaughter weight of 250 pounds at 6 months of age.

 

 

 

Mother pigs (sows) spend most of their lives in individual "gestation" crates, which are approximately seven-feet-long and two-feet-wide--too small for them to even turn around. Just before giving birth, they are moved to "farrowing" crates, which are not large enough for them to even turn around or build nests for their young. "A pregnant sow's biological need to build a nest before having her litter is so great that some sows confined in modern hog buildings will rub their snouts raw on the concrete floor while trying to satisfy the drive."
The air in hog factories is laden with dust, dander, and noxious gases which a reproduced by the animals' urine and faeces.
Studies of workers in swine confinement buildings have found 60% to have breathing problems, despite their spending only a few hours a day inside confinement buildings. For pigs, who live their entire lives in factory farm confinement, respiratory disease is rampant.

For more information: http://www.exploreveg.org/issues/pork.html

 

 

The largest poultry slaughterhouse kills 8.5 million chickens per week.
The chickens are debeaked with a hot bloody blade at one day old with no aesthetic and are placed in overcrowded conditions, even the chickens that are classed as ‘free range’ usually have no more than an A4 size sheet of paper to move around.
Many chickens die in free range environments because the living conditions are so poor.

 

Battery hens are kept in tiny cages without enough space to spread their wings causing sores from rubbing against the cages.
A chicken ready for slaughter is usually only 6 weeks old and have been giving numerous growth hormones to cause rapid growth. When the chickens are slaughtered they are thrown against walls, stepped on or clubbed before the following:

 

Shackling: At the slaughterhouse, the birds sit in the trucks without food or water for 1 to 9 hours or more waiting to be killed. Inside the plant, in the “live-hang” area, they are violently jammed onto a movable metal rack that clamps them upside down by their feet. Suspending these heavy birds, most of them already crippled, upside down by their feet puts an intensely painful strain on their legs and hips. In addition, many birds are hung by only one leg, adding to their agony.

 

Electrical Immobilization: The birds’ heads and upper bodies are then dragged through a splashing electrified water trough called a “stunner.” This water, which is cold and salted to conduct the electricity, does not actually stun the birds. Its purpose is to immobilize them to keep them from thrashing on the slaughter line and to paralyse the muscles of their feather follicles so that their feathers will come out easily after they are dead. For these reasons, 25 million chickens, turkeys, and ducks are tortured every day in the U.S. with volts of electricity in federally-inspected slaughterhouses.

 

 

Neck-Cutting: Following the electrified “stun” bath, the paralysed but fully conscious birds’

throats are cut by a rotating machine blade and/or a manual neck cutter. Although both carotid arteries should be severed quickly to ensure a relatively rapid death, these arteries, which carry the oxygenated blood responsible for consciousness to the brain, are deeply embedded in the bird’s neck and are therefore often missed.

 

Bleed out Tunnel and Scald Tank: Still alive – the industry intentionally keeps the birds alive during the slaughter process so that their hearts will continue to pump blood -- they then hang upside down for 90 seconds in a bleedout tunnel where they’re supposed to die from blood loss. However, millions of birds do not die and many drown in pools of blood when the conveyer belt dips too close to the floor.

 

Dead or alive, the birds are then dumped into tanks of scalding water. According to a former slaughterhouse worker, when chickens are scalded alive, they “flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads. They often come out of the other end with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they’ve struggled so much in the tank”

For more information: http://www.upc-online.org/slaughter/poultry_slaughter.pdf)

“If slaughterhouses had walls made of glass we would all be vegetarian.”

 

Dolphins are still slaughtered by the Japanese today. They can be packaged as whale meat.
In Japan, the hunting is done by a select group of fishermen. When a pod of dolphins has been spotted, they're driven into a bay by the fishermen while banging on metal rods in the water to scare and confuse the dolphins. When the dolphins are in the bay, it is quickly closed off with nets so the dolphins cannot escape. The dolphins are caught one by one and stabbed usually with spear like objects.
Dolphins never abandon injured family members so families of dolphins are killed one by one.

 

The dolphin then dies an agonizing death after its throat is slit. This practice continues today which shows Japanese have little respect for the world’s oceans.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leather:
In India during the transport of cows to the abattoirs they don't bother with trucks or trains: they tie them and beat them and take them on foot, 20,000 to 30,000 per day.
Because they have walked and walked and walked the cattle have lost a lot of weight, so to increase the weight and the amount of money they will receive, the traffickers make them drink water laced with copper sulphate, which destroys their kidneys and makes it impossible for them to pass the water - so when they are weighed they have 15kg of water inside them and are in extreme agony.
To keep them moving, drivers beat the animal across their hip bones, where there is no fat to cushion the blows. The cows are not allowed to rest or drink. Many cows sink to their knees.
Drivers beat them and twist their battered tails to force them to rise. If that doesn't work they torment the cows into moving by rubbing hot chili peppers and tobacco into their eyes.

Half the cows die on the long journey before they reach the slaughterhouse.

 

When they finally make it to the slaughterhouses the end they confront is unspeakable, they beat their heads to a pulp with a dozen hammer blows.
A well-intentioned visitor from the West, trying to improve slaughterhouse practice in Kerala, exhorted them to use stun guns, saying that the meat of an animal killed in this fashion (rather than having its throat slit) tasted sweeter. The stun guns that she left behind quickly broke and fell into disuse, but the belief that the meat was sweeter took hold - which explains this horrible method of slaughtering.

 

For more information: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/how-indias-sacred-cows-are-beaten-abused-and-poisoned-to-make-leather-for-high-street-shops-724696.html

 

 

Fur: There are no laws regarding the killing of wild animals in fur farms and 100 million wild animals are murdered for their fur every year, 25 million is the US alone. These wild animals are either trapped while out in the wild or they are bred in captivity in ‘fur farms.’

 

Traps: There are several methods used to trap animals in the wild. The most common is the steel-jaw leg hold trap. Animals caught in a hidden steel jaw trap suffer a slow, excruciating death. The trap snaps down on the limb of an unsuspecting animal, sometimes breaking the limb.
The trapped animals often freeze to death or are attacked by predators from whom they cannot flee. Many frantically chew off their own legs to escape the agonizing pain. If they are still alive when the trapper returns to the scene, they are bludgeoned or strangled to death. The leg hold trap is not just cruel; it is also indiscriminate.

Trappers discard millions of "trash animals" not wanted for their fur, including domestic pets and endangered species. Trapped animals sometimes leave behind dependent young who are doomed to starvation, adding to the death toll for each coat.
Companion animals, such as dogs and cats, have been trapped and killed after wandering into a trap.

 

Fur farms: Animals raised on ranches are kept in cramped confinement and deprived of anything resembling a natural life, until finally they are killed, often by crude and painful means. Methods used include gassing, suffocation, or electrocution through the mouth and anus so that the “product”—the pelt—is not singed or stained with blood.
Far from being “humane,” fur ranching is characterized by barren wire-mesh cages, isolation, and environmental deprivation so intense that animals often go insane, as animals used to roaming 15 miles each day go crazy from life in a cage.
Animals are forced to endure all weather extremes, and veterinary care is typically non-existent since it is not cost effective to treat an animal whose fate is to be turned into a coat. Animals who are naturally solitary are caged together, often resulting in cannibalism, and animals are often left to decompose in cages with live animals.

For more information: http://www.idausa.org/facts/furfacts.html

“As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”

 

 

Hunting

To this day hunters still kill over 200 million animals per year.

 

Circus animals

In circuses animals only perform because they fear punishment. They live in tiny cages, travelling from location to location for the circus and are usually chained 95% of their lives.

 

 

Animal testing
Testing methods are determined by manufacturers. The very unreliability of animal tests may make them appealing to some companies, since these tests allow manufacturers to put virtually any product on the market.
Companies can also use the fact that their products were tested to help defend themselves against consumer lawsuits.
Others believe that testing on animals helps them compete in the marketplace: Consumers demand products with exciting new ingredients, such as alpha-hydroxy acids, and animal tests are often considered the easiest and cheapest way to "prove" that new ingredients are "safe."
Assumption that results on animals are applicable to mankind is an insult to mankind and science as the testing must be tried out again on humans.
40,000 animals per day die as a result of animal testing with tests sometimes lasting 7 to 18 days.
10 billion animals per year are killed by vivisection - The term is sometimes more broadly defined as any experimentation on live animals. This is done without the use of pain killers or anaesthesia. Human vivisection has been perpetrated as a form of torture.

For more information: http://www.mercyforanimals.org/cosmetic_testing.asp)