How This Little Piggy Gets to Market
Pigs are one of the most intelligent of the domesticated beasts, friendly and gregarious. Those who raise pigs – the ones who care about their animals – say that they’re as smart and as loving as dogs or cats, enjoying music, basking in the sun and playing with toys. They’re also very clean animals who only "wallow" in mud to cool off and keep away flies. All of which makes it especially horrifying when you learn how they’re treated in factory farms.
Mother pigs on farms in the United States live out most of their lives in "gestation" crates that are just 7 feet long by 2 feet wide, too small for them to even turn around. They display signs of boredom and stress when contained in such a manner, biting the bars of the cage and gnashing their teeth – piglets’ tails are often routinely cut off so they won’t bite each other’s tails, a neurotic behavior that only occurs in confinement. Piglets are taken away from their mothers three weeks after birth, then packed into pens until they are singled out to be raised for breeding or for meat. Often, the piglets’ teeth are chipped off with pliers to further discourage them from biting each other.
For transport, pigs are stuffed into trucks with no food or water and without any temperature regulation, subjecting them to extremes of heat or cold. During the freezing midwestern winters, they often freeze to the sides of the trucks or die from dehydration. According to numbers provided by the pork industry, over 100,000 pigs die on their way to slaughterhouses each year, and over 400,000 arrive crippled due to barbaric transport practices. At the slaughterhouse, the pigs are stunned with an electrical charge to their brain or heart which, when done correctly, renders them immediately unconscious before they’re tossed into tanks of scalding water which softens their skin and removes their hair. Stunning is often done incorrectly, however – meaning that the pigs are still conscious and already in severe pain when they’re thrown into the scalding water. Audits of factory farms by the USDA and independent organizations continually find scores of humane slaughter violations, including one PETA investigation that uncovered a plant in Oklahoma where workers killed pigs by slamming the animals heads against the floor and beating them with hammers.
Vegetarianism – The Thoughtful Alternative
There are many, many benefits that you’ll see immediately by becoming a vegetarian, including clear skin, shiny hair and lower risk of high cholesterol, diabetes and kidney disease. But the wider benefit is the one you can’t see – the benefit to the rest of the world. Keep the following in mind when you feel tempted to go back to eating meat ...
You’re helping to conserve water. Water is the earth’s most precious resource, and currently about 50 percent of the water in the United States is used to grow crops for grain-fed animals – as opposed to 35 percent that’s used to grow food crops for humans to eat. It takes roughly 15 times as much water to produce the same amount of protein from an animal that we can get from plant sources. Switching to a vegetarian diet is the single biggest thing that you can do to cut down on your consumption of water.
You’re helping to protect the land. Livestock grazing erodes topsoil, drying out the land and making it unusable for other farming. This is one reason why forests are clear-cut at an alarming rate to make room for more cattle grazing – agriculture accounts for nearly 90 percent of the 30 million acres of rainforest that are destroyed each year. Nearly 25 percent of all prescription drugs have a basis in rainforest plants – destroying the rainforest may mean destroying our chances of curing cancer or AIDS.
You’re helping to conserve fossil fuels. In this supply-and-demand world, less demand means less production, which means less consumption of fossil fuels. More than a third of the fossil fuels used in the United States are used by animal agriculture – a calorie of animal protein requires ten times as much fuel as needed to produce a calorie of plant protein. Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the amount of fossil fuel needed to cultivate and process various foods, fuel that’s used to operate agricultural machinery, provide food for livestock and irrigate crops. They also factored in emissions of methane and nitrous oxide produced by cows, sheep and manure treatment. According to the findings, the average American diet that consists of about 28 percent animal foods generates the equivalent of 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide each year than a comparable vegan diet. The researchers pointed out that driving a hybrid car rather than an average vehicle would conserve a little over one ton of carbon dioxide per year – meaning that living a vegan lifestyle reduces more emissions than driving a hybrid car!
You’re making a more compassionate choice. Now that you’ve read about the horrors of factory farming, is that slice of bacon really worth it? There’s a famous quote from George Bernard Shaw: "When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity." Many people believe that we have a natural right to kill and eat animals, but think of it this way – imagine a time when an alien species visits our planet. They’re smarter than we are, and have technology far more advanced of our own. And they like to eat meat. So humans become the factory-farmed animals, taken to slaughterhouses – as we cry and scream and fight to no avail – and we’re shoved into pens until such time as we’re marched onto the killing floor, bashed in the head and stripped of our flesh, which is then neatly packaged up for market. It’s a horrible thought – yet that’s what humans do to animals every day. St. Francis of Assisi said, "If you have men who will exclude any of god’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." Choosing a vegetarian lifestyle is choosing the path of compassion.
