Excrement:

Production of excrement by total US human population: 12,000 pounds/second.

Production of excrement by US livestock: 250,000 pounds/second (including 25 pounds of manure per cow per day).

Sewage systems in US cities: Common.

Sewage systems in US feedlots: None.

Amount of waste produced annually by US livestock in confinement operations which is not recycled: 1 billion tons.

Where feedlot waste often ends up: In our water.

Gallons of oil spilled by the Exxon-Valdez: 12 million.

Gallons of putrefying hog urine and feces spilled into the New River in North Carolina on June 21, 1995, when a "lagoon" holding 8 acres of hog excrement burst: 25 million.

Fish killed as an immediate result: 10-14 million.

 

Antibiotic Resistance:

Antibiotics administered to people in the US annually to treat diseases: 3 million pounds.

Antibiotics administered to livestock in the US annually for purposes other than treating disease: 24.6 million pounds.

Antibiotics allowed in cow's milk: 80

Percentage of staphylococci infections resistant to penicillin in 1960: 13%

Percentage of staphylococci infections resistant to penicillin in 1988: 91%

Reason: Breeding of antibiotic resistant bacteria in factory farms due to routine feeding of antibiotics to livestock.

Response by entire European Economic Community to routine feeding of antibiotics to livestock: Ban.

Response by American meat and pharmaceutical industries to routine feeding of antibiotics to livestock: Full and complete support.

 

Numbers of Animals Slaughtered for Food in US:

Number of cows and calves slaughtered every 24 hours in the US: 90,000

Number of chickens slaughtered every minute in the US: 14,000

Food animals (not counting fish and other aquatic creatures) slaughtered per year in the US: 10 billion

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Slaughterhouse:

Transcript of a New York Times full page ad published June 22, 2001 detailing the horrors of our modern-day slaughterhouses. With 309-330 cows per hour coming by on the ‘disassembly’ line, there are many who are still fully conscious with eyes wide open when skinned and cut apart. They die literally piece by piece.

Factory Farm Animals with Diseases from Intensive Conditions:

A report by the USDA estimates that 89% of US beef patties contain traces of the deadly E. coli strain. Reuters News Service 8/10/00

US pigs raised in total confinement factories where they never see the light of day until being trucked to slaughter: 65 million (total confinement factories are banned in UK).

US pigs who have pneumonia at time of slaughter: 70%

Primary source of Campylobacter bacteria: Contaminated chicken flesh.

People in the US who become ill with Campylobacter poisoning every day: More than 5,000

American turkeys sufficiently contaminated with Campylobacter to cause illness: 90%

Americans sickened from eating Salmonella-tainted eggs every year: More than 650,000

Americans killed from eating Salmonella-tainted eggs every year: 600

Increase in Salmonella poisoning from raw or undercooked eggs between 1976 and 1986: 600%

90% of US chickens are infected with leukosis -- chicken cancer -- at the time of slaughter.

Average lifespan of a dairy cow - 25 years; average lifespan when on a factory dairy farm - 4 years.

 

Water:

Water needed to produce 1 pound of wheat: 25 gallons.

Water needed to produce 1 pound of meat: 2,500 gallons.

Cost of hamburger meat if water used by meat industry was not subsidized by US taxpayers: $35/pound.

When water shortages occur, citizens are often requested to not wash cars, water lawns and to use low-flow shower heads. However, cutting back on meat consumption would save much more water given that the water required to produce just ten pounds of steak equals the water consumption of the average household for a year.

About 70% of the water used in the 11 western states is dedicated to the raising of animals for food.

Years until the Ogallala Aquifer runs dry (formed by glaciers, the largest underground lake in the world and source of fresh water beneath an area from Texas to South Dakota, and Missouri to Colorado): 30 to 50.

The amount of water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a (Naval) destroyer. (Newsweek article 'The Browning of America').

 

Advertising:

Amount spent annually by Kellogg's to promote Frosted Flakes: $40 million.

Amount spent annually by the dairy industry on "milk mustache" ads: $190 million.

Amount spent annually by McDonald's advertising its products: $800 million.

Amount spent by the National Cancer Institute promoting fruits and vegetables: $1 million.

All statistics and information compiled from The Food Revolution by John Robbins (2001), Diet for a New America by John Robbins (1987), Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet and the Rainforest Action Network.

 

Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them. J. M. Coetzee

When you hear the words ‘farm’ or ‘farming’ it conjures up quaint thoughts of country life; of chickens running around, of sheep and cows grazing in fields. In reality of course, those notions of farm life couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re a fairy tale that are as authentic as a ‘Ploughman’s Lunch’ which was itself dreamed up by marketing men in the early 60’s to encourage more people to eat in pubs. Most of the meat consumed in the West is produced in factory farms where animals are treated as commodities. Living machines trapped in a Fordian nightmare of mass production and profit maximisation.

 

Even the term meat sanitises reality. The word meat is derived from the Old English mete which simply means food. That shrink-wrapped cut of flesh with barely a splash of blood on it disassociates the commodity from the reality, and makes it acceptable for the masses to eat it. Most people don’t have a clue either where their meat comes from, or how it was produced. They’re not privy to the overcrowding, the suffering, the slaughter, the blood and the guts. We need to wake up to the fact that that £1.99 chicken sitting on our local supermarket shelf was produced under conditions not unlike a Nazi concentration camp.

 

We’re sheltered from the truth, and in reality most people don’t want to be confronted with it, then they would have to deal with the knowledge. Ignorance is bliss so they say. The meat industry, like all big businesses have developed insidious marketing and PR schemes to take us in from an early age. Take city farms.

 

For more than 30 years city farms have provided enjoyment for more than 500,000 Londoners a year. They have provided the only opportunity for inner city children to make the connections between basic facts such as milk comes from cows. Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London)

 

City farms were allegedly designed to give inner city kids access to animals. It was said that a more ‘natural’ setting would somehow give these kids a better understanding of how farming and the countryside works. What a sham. These faux farms are little more than a PR exercise for the meat and dairy industries. If Ken Livingstone wants to show kids where their food really comes from he should encourage schools to take them to a Bernard Matthews factory instead.

 

My father was the person who first got me thinking about the morality of eating meat. Or should I say, something that happened to him did. Dad was a hard man. He was brought up during the war on the kind of council estate where you had to fight to survive. He was in the army. He was a small-time gangster, who did time. He was the sort of man you wouldn’t want to argue with in a pub believe me.

 

After he went straight Dad worked as a builder. On one job he was relaying a road outside the local abattoir. Two days into the job he quit. He never set foot inside the grounds of the slaughterhouse, but the smells emanating from it coupled with the cries of the animals reduced this hard man to jelly. He was particularly affected by the pigs. He noted that out of all the animals he saw being delivered to their deaths the pigs were the only ones who really seemed to know what was in store for them, and they had to literally dragged kicking and screaming off the trucks.

 

Despite, not really knowing what a vegetarian was, that’s exactly what he became. I remember Mum making him his favourite steak and chips shortly afterwards, and it going in the bin. Dad said the smell made him feel ‘sick to his stomach’. He always used to say that prison officers (or ‘screws’ as he used to call them) were the lowest of the low. After this incident he revised his opinion and raised them in rank slightly above slaughtermen. John Ellis

 

Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals. Theodor Adorno

 

Chickens

Probably the most abused animal on the planet. In factory farming chickens are used as either layers (basically egg machines) or broilers (meat chickens). There are 200 million laying hens and 6 billion broilers reared for slaughter in the EU every year.

 

Laying Hens

Laying hens are kept in battery cages. Under EU law, each hen has an allocated floor space allowance of 550cm² (equivalent to less than an A4 sheet of paper). These 'prisons' are where the hens will spend the entirety of their short lives. Thousands of cages are stacked high into windowless sheds with artificial lighting for about 17 hours a day to promote egg laying. Up to 90,000 birds are packed into these sheds so you can imagine how squalid the conditions are. Birds of 18 weeks old are put into these cages and are not removed until they are 18 months to two years old, when they are killed. In their natural environment hens will often live for 10 years or more. Slaughtered battery hens are processed into soups, baby foods, stock cubes, school dinners or used in the restaurant trade.

 

Broiler Chickens

Broiler chickens are selectively bred and genetically altered to produce bigger thighs and breasts, the parts in most demand. This breeding creates birds so heavy that their bones cannot support their weight, making it difficult for them to stand. The birds are bred to grow at an astonishing rate by the use of growth promoters. Because of this they are ready for the slaughterhouse in around six weeks, half the time it once took. Broilers are raised in giant sheds known as broiler houses instead of cages to prevent the occurrence of bruised flesh which would make their meat undesirable. Up to 50,000 birds at a time are crammed into these hells holes. The floor is concrete and laid with sawdust, wood shavings or chopped straw but soon becomes covered with the animals' excrement. The windowless sheds are artificially lit for 23 hours a day. This deters the birds from sleeping and instead makes them eat more, thus they grow fatter and more valuable.

 

Pigs

Pigs are highly social and affectionate animals, who are widely regarded to be more intelligent than dogs. Many never see the daylight, others are used as living breeding machines.

 

As piglets, they are taken away from their mothers at less than a month old. Their tails are cut off, some of their teeth are cut off and the males are castrated; all without the benefit of pain relief. Pigs are born and raised inside buildings known as ‘fattening units’ that have automated water, feed and waste removal. They don't see daylight until they are shipped for slaughter. Dust, dirt and toxic gases from the pigs' waste create an unsanitary environment that encourages the onset of a number of diseases and illnesses, including pneumonia, cholera, dysentery and trichinosis. Many pigs are fully conscious when they are immersed in scalding water for hair removal.

 

Breeding sows spend their entire lives in tiny metal cages known as farrowing crates. The bars on the crates stop the sow from being able to turn around, move forward or backward. The bars also stop them from reaching their babies when they give birth, although the babies can reach their mother's teats to suckle. The piglets are taken away after a month and taken to the ‘fattening units‘. Shortly after giving birth, the sows are once again forcibly impregnated. This cycle continues for years until their bodies finally give up and they are sent to be slaughtered.

 

Cows

Dairy cows are bred today for high milk production. For cows who are injected with Bovine Growth Hormone, their already high rate of milk production is doubled. Half of the cows in the national dairy herd are raised in intensive confinement, where they suffer emotionally from being socially deprived and being prohibited from natural behaviour. Dairy cows produce milk for about 10 months after giving birth so they are impregnated continuously to keep up the milk flow. Female calves are kept to replenish the herd and male calves are usually sent to veal crates where they live a miserable existence until their slaughter. The cows are kept in a holding facility where they are fed, watered and have their waste removed mechanically and are allowed out only twice a day to be milked by machines. Because of the strain on their bodies due to constant pregnancy coupled with continuous overproduction of milk a quarter of dairy cows never make their third year. Despite a life expectancy of over 20 years, most dairy cows live between 4 and 7 years. Regardless of how hard a cow works during it’s short life, when they become unable to produce adequate amounts of milk they too are sent to slaughter.

 

Beef Cattle

In the most intensive form of beef production calves are taken from their mothers at birth and reared in pens on milk replacement and feed pellets. During the first week of their lives they are usually castrated and have their horn buds chemically burnt out. In the case of older cows a hot iron might be used usually without anaesthesia.

 

To put weight on before slaughter they are taken to fattening sheds and fed on high quality cereals. There may be straw bedding but it is becoming common to use slatted concrete floors on which cattle find it difficult to stand, often resulting in lameness. Some farms keep up to 8,000 animals this way, cramming them into sheds to stop them from moving around and "wasting" energy in keeping warm. They gain weight quickly and are ready for slaughter at only 11 to 12 months old, half the time it took in pre factory farming days.

 

Veal

The veal industry is the notorious by-product of the dairy industry. Male calves that are no good for dairy or beef production are taken away from their mothers and start a new ‘life’ of confinement in veal crates. The unfortunate calves are kept in small crates which prevent movement and thus inhibit muscle growth so their flesh will be tender. They are also fed a diet deficient of iron to keep their flesh pale and appealing to the veal consumer. Veal calves spend each day confined alone with no companionship and are deprived of light for a large portion of their pitiful four month lives.