FACTORY FARMING

All farming is a confidence trick since farmers pretend to be the animal's friend and then send it off to the slaughterhouse. He is playing the same trick the witch plays in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretal. However factory farming is simply gross. Let's take a trip to 'Foul Farm' to see what goes on:-

There are about 30 million egg-laying hens n the U.K. Around 70% are kept in battery cages. The remaining 30% are either in 'barn' or 'free-range' systems. However 'barn' just means dirty, overcrowded sheds where hens have no daylight, fresh air or ability to exercise their natural instincts. 'Free-range' is also often not a cruelty free option. Labelling eggs 'free-range' is a clever way of conning the public into thinking they are buying eggs from hens which have strutted around happily outside pecking and dust-bathing. However this is completely false. To label their eggs 'free range' all producers have to do is pack hens in a shed which has access to the outside. However often the hens are so tightly packed that the majority of them cannot even get near the exit to get any freedom. And battery cages are even worse exacerbating physical and mental cruelties. The wire floor causes problems for hens' feet as their claws can become twisted around the mesh, sometimes preventing them from reaching the food and water supply.Their tortured existence often causes aggression and the hens attack each other in desperation. Because of this they can have part of their beaks removed with a red-hot blade. Another little known product of the egg industry is that each year in the U.K. about 30 million day-old male chicks are gassed or tossed alive into giant industrial shredders because they are considered 'too scrawny' for broiler chickens. And those 'lucky' enough to survive to become 'broiler' chickens are bred to grow so quickly that their heart and skeletal frame cannot support their body mass and millions spend the last weeks of their short lives in pain, forced to limp and struggle to reach food and water.

Pigs and cattle also receive horrendous treatment due to intensive farming. Pigs often are kept on a concrete floor with no straw in the dark with their teeth and tails clipped with no anaesthetic. Cows have their calves cruelly taken away from them so they can be forced to product milk for human consumption at far greater quantities than is natural and hence they end up with swollen, painful sore udders. Geese and ducks are also victims of factory farms and are force fed with enormous quantities of fatty corn pumped down their gullets to produce foie gras in Europe and further afield and Britain still imports this for sale in the U.K.

95% of British pigs are raised on factory farms. Pigs are highly intelligent animals that need affection, touch and social interaction. They also have a natural urge to 'root' for which they require straw, sawdust or something similar. And what do they get from us? Confinement to filthy sheds on concrete. Pregnant cows are kept in metal farrowing crates so that they cannot even turn around and cannot reach her piglets when they are born. Piglets often die unable to reach their mother. To top all this pigs are finally shipped off to the slaughterhouse where tongs are used to fire an electrical current through their brain to stun them - often the abattoir workers miss and give them painful shocks to the head or face. Also they may not be stunned properly but are still shackled upside-down by one leg and left hanging, still conscious, waiting for their throat to be cut. They wait knowing what is going to happen to them since they have seen their friends and family go before them.

The ways that animals are slaughtered for their meat or for use as clothing are barbaric and China and the Philippines have a particularly awful record. Dogs and cats are sold in markets for their meat or supposed medicinal properties. Cats are often boiled alive and dogs are brutally crushed on top on one another in cages before slaughter.