Mercy For Animals’ Investigations: Deadly Factory Farms   
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Part 2 Play with windows media ( 47 MB )

The images in the following program are very sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals.

Today on Stop Animal Cruelty, we bring you undercover footage taken by Mercy For Animals that exposes the absolutely horrific conditions hidden behind the walls of factory farms.

Mercy For Animals is a US-based non-profit animal advocacy organization that was founded in 1999 by Mr. Nathan Runkle. Since then, the group has grown tremendously and now has over 35,000 members and supporters. As one of the leading organizations of its kind in the United States, Mercy For Animals focuses on research, undercover investigations, rescue missions, and community outreach and advertising campaigns to raise public awareness of animal suffering and the need to immediately end it.

The first Mercy For Animals video we will present excerpts from is entitled “Hatchery Horrors.” Some may not associate egg production with violence, abuse and killing, but that is the reality of this unconscionable industry.

Hatchery Horrors

The footage you are about to see was recorded with a hidden camera at the world’s largest hatchery for egg-laying breed chicks. For two weeks our Mercy For Animals investigator covertly documented the systematic cruelty chicks at this hatchery are subjected to.

These workers called “sexers,” roughly separate the male chicks from the females. These male chicks are worthless to the industry, because they will not lay eggs and will not grow large or fast enough to be raised profitably for meat. These male chicks are killed by being dropped into a grinding machine while still alive. Such killing methods are standard within the industry. Nearly 150,000 male chicks meet their deaths this way each day at the facility.

This machine uses a laser to remove part of the chicks’ beaks. Chicks are placed head first into this rotating machine. Birds’ beaks are filled with nerve endings; this procedure can cause both acute and chronic pain. This industrial machine separates newly hatched chicks from their egg shells. Chicks are roughly dumped onto moving conveyer belts, which haul them off to be sorted, de-beaked, and for the males, killed.

Many chicks are injured and killed by the sorting machine. This chick fell through the sorting machine, and was left to die in a heap of egg shells on the factory floor. Still alive, this chick fell through the sorting machine, and was sent through a scalding wash cycle.

Some of them get caught in there. (Yes) Some of them get on the floor and get wet and then they’re no good. That end of the machine is for washing trays. And so if they’re stuck in there, they get washed out and that’s how come they’re in there.

Workers roughly handle the animals with little regard for their welfare. These workers roughly sort the chicks, searching for sick, injured and deformed birds. The cruelty you have witnessed is not isolated but rather inherent and widespread within the entire industry. Please remember these chicks the next time you sit down to a meal. You can help end this needless cruelty by adopting a compassionate vegan diet.

The next Mercy For Animals video we present excerpts from is entitled “Dairy’s Dark Side.” The treatment of the gentle cows at this dairy operation is extremely heartless and deeply distressing.

Dairy’s Dark Side

A new Mercy For Animals undercover investigation takes you behind the closed doors of New York’s largest dairy factory farm, exposing cows too sick or injured to stand, calves having their horns burned off and tails cut off without pain killers. Cows suffering from untreated infections and open wounds, new born calves being dragged away from their mothers, and cows subjected to overcrowded and filthy living conditions.

Here a worker uses a hot cautery device to painfully burn off the calf’s horns, a common dairy industry practice known as disbudding. No anesthesia was used to reduce the calf’s pain during this harsh and invasive mutilation. The worker forcefully shoves his finger into her eye in a cruel attempt to restrain and control her. This calf’s suffering is evident by her vocal bellowing, labored breathing, and frantic attempts to escape.

Tail docking involves cutting through the calf’s sensitive skin and tail bones. The American Veterinarian Medical Association has condemned tail docking as unnecessary and painful. Cows with bloody open wounds, puss filled infections, swollen joints and other injuries were a common sight on this factory farm.

This cow suffers from a prolapsed uterus. MFA’s (Mercy For Animals) investigator brought this cow’s painful condition to the attention of co-workers. Yet she was left to suffer for over two weeks. Many wounds were caked with feces. No veterinary care was apparently provided to most of these injured animals as evident by the advanced stages of their injuries.

Puss drips from this infected wound. Cows too sick or injured to walk are called “downers.” At this factory farm many downed cows were left to suffer for days or weeks. Tracks can be seen in the straw surrounding this downed cow, evidence of her prolonged struggle to stand. This exhausted cow stumbles to the ground on her way to the milking area. Workers kick and hit her as they force her to stand.

We’ll return after this brief message with more excerpts from “Dairy’s Dark Side,” an undercover investigation of the barbaric dairy industry. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

This is the Stop Animal Cruelty series on Supreme Master Television. Our program today presents footage from undercover investigations conducted by Mercy For Animals.

We focus on protecting farmed animals because this is the area of animal abuse in our society where the largest number of animals are killed and exploited. Over nine billion cows, pigs and chickens in the United States are killed for food every year. If we look at the global level we’re talking about over 50 billion farmed animals!

And each one of these animals are unique individuals with their own personalities and needs and interests. So Mercy For Animals sets out to expose the cruelty that’s taking place in factory farms and in slaughterhouses and inspire consumers to adopt a healthy and compassionate plant based diet.

Recently a Mercy For Animals investigator documented the operations of the largest dairy factory farm in the state of New York, USA which imprisons over 7,000 cows. Some of his findings included workers violently beating cows and calves and the use of electric shock devices. The innocent bovines rarely, if ever, saw the sun or breathed fresh air. We now continue with further excerpts from “Dairy’s Dark Side” that shows the inside of this utterly inhumane facility.

Dairy’s Dark Side

Cows are extremely gentle and affectionate animals, forming strong bonds, particularly between mother and child. Like all mammals, cows produce milk for their young, yet calves born in the dairy industry are dragged away from their mothers within days of birth. Here workers separate new born calves from their mothers, dragging the babies into isolated pens.

This is the last time these young calves will see their mothers. Many mother cows bellow in distress after their calves are taken. Workers in the dairy industry acknowledge the psychological trauma such separation causes.

Do they (cows) ever get mad when you take their kids? (Yes.)

Some cows yes, (Yes) become crazy

What? They?

Some cows become crazy when I take their babies.

This dying calf bellows out in distress as he slowly dies. Male calves unwanted by the dairy industry because they do not produce milk are often confined and then killed for veal. Frightened and panicked animals are often loaded onto transport trucks by workers who hit, kick, and electrically shock them.

On the left a worker can be seen abusively shocking the cows with electric prods. These panicked cows slip on the concrete floors as they jump off the transport trucks. Such dangerous unloading can injure the animals. Abusive handling of animals is common on factory farms.

So while he was down and cold, I walked around behind him and I started kicking him in the balls.

That’s the fifth time. You’re going to get the fist the next time.

That’s probably why I got arthritis big time in this hand.

From punching cows?

Probably.

Approximately nine million cows are used for milk production annually in the United States, the vast majority of living conditions similar to this. Day in and day out cows at this factory farm are forced to stand on concrete flooring, covered with a mixture of feces and urine.

Unable to access open pasture, nearly all of the cow’s natural behaviors are denied or frustrated on industrial factory farms. Filthy living conditions are an industry norm. Manure coats the floor surrounding the milking area. The majority of today’s dairy cows endure milking several times a day in an area like this.

Rows of small stalls confine cows. A worker moves down the line attaching the milking devices to the cows’ udders. Suffering from leg injuries, caked in manure, these cows are forced to stand on hard concrete during the milking process.

The average cow at this factory farm produces over 80 pounds of milk a day, an unnaturally high quantity induced by genetic manipulation and hormone injections. Cows were routinely injected with posilac, a growth hormone used to increase milk production. Studies suggest that the use of such growth hormones increases lameness in cows and cancer risks in humans.

The bodies of dead cows and calves were a common sight at this factory farm. For these cows conditions on the factory farms were simply too much. At around five years of age, a mere fraction of their natural life span, the worn out cows are shipped to the slaughterhouse. The lifeless bodies of these dairy cows illustrate the cruel and exploitive nature of modern dairy production.

Cows are curious, intelligent, and playful animals who are fully capable of experiencing joy, fear and pain in the same way as dogs and cats. Consumers hold enormous power in ending this abuse. If you are at all disturbed by what you have seen, please choose kindness over cruelty at your next meal by adopting a vegan diet. For more information, please visit ChooseVeg.com.

Our deep gratitude, Mercy For Animals investigators, Nathan Runkle, and all other staff and volunteers for your selfless, brave and determined work to reveal the horrors of the egg, dairy, and meat industries. Next Tuesday on Stop Animal Cruelty will be part two of our program which will focus on other Mercy For Animals investigations.

May humanity be awakened and blessed with unconditional love and compassion for all beings so that the types of facilities we have seen today soon close permanently. Please adopt the wholesome and loving organic vegan diet today and be a true champion of life!

For more details on investigations by Mercy For Animals, please visit www.MercyForAnimals.org/Investigations.aspx
Information on the vegan diet is available at ChooseVeg.com

Thoughtful viewers, thank you for joining us for today’s program. Enlightening Entertainment is next after Noteworthy News. May all animals be forever blessed by Heaven.

Chantal Cooke co-founded "Passion for the Planet" a UK-based radio station that uses engaging programming to encourage listeners to live sustainable lives and to be the leaders of a greener tomorrow.

The absolute best thing you can do is, to quote (Mahatma) Gandhi, “Be the change you want to see.” Take those actions, inspire somebody else. If somebody else sees you doing some composting or some recycling, they’ll go, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that?” Well, that’s an opportunity to talk.

Hear more from the vibrant Ms. Cooke on part two of a two-part series, “Chantal Cooke's Passion for the Planet,” Sunday, July 18, on Good People, Good Works.
The images in the following program are very sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals.

Today on Stop Animal Cruelty, in the second of a two-part series we bring you further undercover footage taken by Mercy For Animals that exposes the absolutely horrific conditions hidden behind the walls of factory farms.

Mercy For Animals is a US-based non-profit animal advocacy organization that was founded in 1999 by Mr. Nathan Runkle. Since then, the group has grown tremendously and now has over 35,000 members and supporters.

As one of the leading organizations of its kind in the United States, Mercy For Animals focuses on research, undercover investigations, rescue missions, and community outreach and advertising campaigns to raise public awareness of animal suffering and the need to immediately end it. Their ultimate goal is to create a society where animals live freely and are always treated with respect and love.

The footage from our undercover investigations really speak for themselves. And these animals are living oftentimes in their own excrement. And these inherent problems with factory farm systems, when you take hundreds of thousands of animals or millions of animals and confine them intensively in any given area, there is bound to be diseases and infections that run rampant, because these are breeding grounds for disease and filth. These animals are all creating an enormous amount of excrement and urine.

Last week, we presented videos by Mercy For Animals undercover investigators that showed the nightmarish world of a hatchery and a dairy factory farm in the United States. This week we introduce excerpts of videos that document what Mercy For Animals investigators found in two other factory farms.

Another recent investigation that we conducted was at a pig breeding facility and this was in Pennsylvania (USA), one of the largest pig breeding facilities in the country; thousands of sows or mother pigs locked inside of two feet wide metal stalls called gestation crates. And these stalls are so restrictive that the sows can’t turn around, they can’t even lie down comfortably.

Pigs are kind, loving and intelligent beings. As you will now see in the short film “Breeding Misery: Inside the Pork Industry,” these gentle pigs suffer immensely every minute of their lives and are treated savagely.

Beaten, thrown, confined and neglected, mutilated, gassed, and killed. These are the shocking conditions a Mercy For Animals investigator documented in one of Pennsylvania’s largest pork producers. The hidden camera footage you are about to see reveals the daily horror occurring behind the closed doors in Fannettsburg, Pennsylvania (USA).

Workers roughly handle the pigs. With apparent disregard for the animals, workers hastily throw the pigs, handling them by their legs and ears. When they’re only a few days old, piglets are castrated and their tails are sliced off, all without any pain killers. Veterinarians and animal welfare experts agree that these piglets suffer extreme pain during this process.

This invasive procedure commonly ruptures piglets’ intestines, a painful, and if left untreated, fatal condition. This piglet herniated from his castration. Workers painfully tattoo the sows by striking them with sharp, metal spikes that are fixed to mallets. The animals squeal in distress while trying to escape the attack.

Workers tag the animals’ ears, driving a dull spike through the ear to create a large hole. Many of the sows develop deep sores where their skin repeatedly rubs against the metal bars of their cages. Veterinary care is virtually non-existent. Sick, injured, dying and dead piglets are commonplace. This sow suffers from a rectal prolapse, an excruciatingly painful condition.

Although the Mercy For Animals investigator repeatedly brought this animals’ painful condition to the attention of supervisors, she was left to suffer for at least 13 days before being killed. Sick, injured or underweight piglets are killed by being thrown into a gassing cart. The mobile cart is filled with diluted CO2, slowly suffocating dozens of pigs at a time.

A worker slams a piglet into a doorframe on the way to the gassing cart. This prolonged and painful killing method leaves some piglets injured but still alive. Management at the facility knew about the faulty machine, yet continued to allow piglets to suffer prolonged painful deaths.

Grown sows are killed by a captive bolt gun. After being bolted the first time, the sow staggers back and forth from massive head trauma before receiving a second bolt. She thrashes in a pool of her own blood for minutes. These pregnant sows are so intensively confined that they have no room for even basic movement such as turning around or comfortably lying down.

Citing the inherent cruelty of gestation crates, the European Union and seven US states have outlawed their use. These curious and intelligent animals are subjected to these harsh and deprived conditions. In this frustrating environment many develop neurotic behaviors, such as compulsively chewing on the metal bars of their crates or banging their heads from side to side.

Shortly before giving birth the sows are moved to farrowing crates, narrow metal enclosures barely larger than the animals’ bodies. This sow died when she broke her neck under the bars of her cage. In factory farming environments premature death is all too common. These bodies are a reminder of the cruel and violent nature of pork production.

Farmed animals currently have no federal protection from abuse during their lives on factory farms. It’s time that the United States banned the inherently cruel gestation crate, as other civilized nations have already done. Please reject the abuse of pigs and other farmed animals by adopting a healthy and compassionate vegetarian diet.

We’ll return after this brief message with covert footage of the extreme abuse that egg-laying hens endure in factory farms. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

This is the Stop Animal Cruelty series on Supreme Master Television where we are showing what the hidden cameras of Mercy For Animals investigators recorded when they went inside various factory farms in the US. We now present excerpts from the short Mercy For Animals film “Cheap Eggs: The Rotten Truth” which reveals the ghastly and chilling lives of egg-laying hens.

Sick or injured birds were forcibly yanked from their cages. Here a worker attempts to kill a sick hen by breaking her neck. She flaps and struggles before being kicked into the manure pit. Many of these birds struggled for minutes after their necks were broken. Such killing methods are standard within the egg industry.

Here a worker grabs a sick hen from the shed floor and then throws her into a nearby trash can. This live hen flaps her wings as a worker throws her from one trash bin to another. On nearly a daily basis the investigator discovered live hens discarded in trash cans and on dead piles. Buried under dozens of dead hens, this bird was neglected to die by suffocation or being crushed. Many hens, fully alert and clearly alive, were neglected in trash cans without access to food, water or veterinary care.

On numerous occasions, MFA’s (Mercy For Animals) investigator alerted supervisors and co-workers of live hens in trash cans. He was met with a callous attitude.

Sometimes there’s live ones in there. Does that matter? (Yeah?) Sometimes there’s live birds in there.

No, it’s okay.

So if they’re alive in there, you just throw them away anyway?

No matter, leave it there.

Over 90% of the egg-laying hens in the United States are forced to spend their lives crammed in tiny wire cages. Each hen is given less floor space than a notebook size piece of paper to live her entire life. These unfortunate birds are so overcrowded that they are unable to perform even the most basic natural movements, such as perching, walking or even fully stretching their wings.

Here an employee blows cigarette smoke into a cage with hens. Hens confined to cages with holes in the flooring are susceptible to injury from the sharp cage wire. Holes in cage flooring put hens at risk for falling into manure pits below. Many birds become trapped when their head, neck or feathers become lodged under the feeding trays or stuck in wire of the cage.

This hen gasps for air as she slowly dies. Once a hen becomes trapped it is nearly impossible for her to free herself from the cage wire. She is left to suffer the constant physical assaults of her cage mates as they climb over her body. Her skin bloody and raw, this trapped hen suffered severe physical injuries when she was trampled by her cage mates.

Like most factory farms, hens who become sick and injured at this facility were denied individual veterinary care. Many birds suffer tremendously for long periods of time with untreated illness. This hen is still alive and struggling to breathe, was presumably removed from her cage by a factory worker, and hung on the feeding trough by her leg where she was left to suffer and die.

On a daily basis, the Mercy For Animals’ investigator discovered the decomposing bodies of hens who have died in their cages. Many of the dead hens were left to rot in cages with hens still laying eggs for human consumption. Unfortunately, the cruelty you have just witnessed is not isolated. Millions of egg laying hens in the nation endure similar conditions on a daily basis.

Consumers hold enormous power in ending this abuse. If you are at all disturbed by what you have seen, please help stop this cruelty by adopting a compassionate vegan diet. For more information, please visit: ChooseVeg.com.

As we have just seen, not a single living being deserves this kind of horrific fate. If we all change to the organic vegan diet, the callous and heartless egg, pork, and other animal exploiting industries will immediately cease to exist, with factory farms closed forever and all animals living once again in tranquility and love.

We salute you, Nathan Runkle, Mercy For Animals investigators, staff, and volunteers for your brave and compassionate endeavors to show the public that our animal friends must always be humanely and lovingly treated. May your beautiful vision soon be realized with humanity embracing love and compassion for all beings.

For more details on investigations by Mercy For Animals,
please visit www.MercyForAnimals.org/Investigations.aspx
Information on the vegan diet is available at ChooseVeg.com

Peaceful viewers, thank you for joining us for today’s program. Enlightening Entertainment is next, after Noteworthy News. May Heaven’s light shine on all beings in our world.

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