The images in the following program are highly sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals, praying that you will help to stop it.

How would you feel if the moment you were born, somebody else had already planned the day of your execution? Yes, if you’re an animal, it's been planned. You're in the dairy industry, you get seven years, that's it. You're in the beef industry, we'll give you two and a half to three (years). Hey, pigs, you get six months, maybe a year, chickens, 49 days; 49 days.

This is the Stop Animal Cruelty series on Supreme Master Television, where this week we’ll hear once again from dedicated animal protector and vegan Gary Yourofsky of Detroit, Michigan, USA, founder of Animals Deserve Absolute Protection Today and Tomorrow (ADAPTT), a non-profit organization that firmly opposes the use of animal products.

Each year Gary conducts over 200 lectures on animal rights and veganism in the US. To date he has spoken to more than 60,000 students in 170 schools and universities; through real-life stories, indisputable facts and personal accounts, Gary reveals the horrendous truth behind the world’s biggest lie – the animal agriculture industry.

I am always amazed that meat eaters can love a dead cow, a dead pig, or a dead chicken, but they can’t even show common decency to a living one. My goal is simple, all I want to do is re-connect people with animals, awaken some emotions and some feelings and some logic that has been buried and suppressed intentionally by our society.

In his early years Gary was unaware of the enormous cruelty and abuse that millions of animals around the world silently endure each day.

I did not choose the path of animal rights and fighting for justice and liberation; it chose me.

I understand your lifestyle. It used to be mine.

When Gary Yourofsky was 23, his stepfather invited him to go backstage at a circus. There, he saw the heart-wrenching reality of how animals are treated behind the glamorous veneer of the circus industry and began to ask questions.

What else was going on? Where’s my food come from, where do my shoes come from? So I told this story to my best friend Darren as you would tell your best friend, “Darren, you won’t believe what I saw yesterday at the circus. These elephants were in chains!” And he said, “If you think they mistreat elephants, you should see what they do to pigs at the slaughterhouse.”

And let me tell you something, when I started hearing about this, I was like every other stubborn, addicted meat eater. I didn't want to hear about it either. I didn't want to believe it, didn't want to think about it. I said, “Get out of here, man, (you are a) exaggerator, extremist, and liar. No way it’s going on like that.” Unlike everybody who feels that way when they first hear about this, then they blow it off. I did not blow it off. I went and looked to see what was going on.

I spent six weeks at Thorn Apple Valley pig slaughterhouse, Detroit, Michigan in 1993, and I've been to dozens more since then. Some of that footage you saw; that's my footage. I broke in animal research labs to see what was going on. I broke inside of fur farms too and liberated animals from those hellhole concentration camps. I went behind the scenes of every circus and rodeo that ever went through Michigan.

The scale of death occurring each day behind slaughterhouse walls is absolutely unimaginable. The desperate cries of the victims never cease.

Ninety-eight percent of animals who are abused and killed on this planet are abused and killed by the meat, dairy and egg industries. Every year in America, without mercy, we murder 10- billion land animals, and18-billion marine animals, not for health, survival, sustenance or self-defense. People eat meat, cheese, milk and eggs for four reasons: habit, tradition, convenience, taste; all unjustifiable reasons.

Let me break meat down for everybody. Five components to meat: blood, flesh, veins, muscles and tendons: the cut-up corpse of a dismembered body. How does meat not qualify as gross and disgusting to everybody? The animals have not done one, single thing to us to deserve the wrath and the cruelty that we hurl on them.

A dairy cow is repeatedly artificially inseminated, her calves are stolen and her milk is taken for another species, humans, to drink. When her milk productivity is too low for the dairy operator, she is not sent to the fields to live out the rest of her days in peace. The opposite occurs – she is immediately sent to an abattoir to be murdered for beef.

A liquid that oozes out of a cow’s udder, a secretion that drips from the mammary glands of another being that’s loaded with pus by the way. When you hook machines up to the udders of cows three times a day to suck them dry, those machines cause massive amounts of infections and irritations on the inside and outside of the udder.

Then when you add all the bovine growth hormone we put in cows to make sure they produce huge quantities of milk, which always leads to another infection. The machine doesn't know what not to suck out, pus and mucus and infections, right into the milk.

And yes, your milk is pasteurized. But when did pasteurization become a removable process? It's a sanitation process. You’re only sanitizing pus. If you want to look this up online, you don't think the dairy industry would ever use the word “pus” when they write about this problem in their own trade journals, do you?

No, they're going to deceive you again. Look up the scientific term for pus, “somatic cell count.” And did you know that our government allows the dairy industry to have one eye dropper full of pus in each eight-ounce glass of cow’s milk? Hey, drink up!

This body of ours has absolutely no need for cow milk, like it has absolutely no need for giraffe milk, and zebra milk, rhinoceros milk, hippopotamus milk, camel milk, deer milk, antelope milk, goat milk, horse milk, pig milk, dog milk or cat milk. The only milk that we ever need is our own mother's breast milk when we’re born. That's it. And when we're done weaning, we never need a drop of milk ever again. No species on this planet needs milk after weaning.

Now if you want to include some kind of milk in your diet like I do, it's finally time for some good news. There are seven vegan milks on the market right now: Soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, hemp milk, coconut milk, oat milk, and hazelnut milk.

Anybody know what an egg actually is from a hen? Unfertilized eggs through a female system, it's part of her menstruation cycle. It's a hen's period! And what about vomit? Better give this one a pretty name though, no one’s going to want to eat vomit, unless we call it honey instead. Honey comes directly from a bee's stomach. It's regurgitated right through a bee's mouth. Look it up with any wildlife biologist. But nobody wants to eat “Bee-Vomit-Nut Cheerios.”

We want Honey Nut Cheerios, so we delude ourselves and play euphemism games. The standard diet of a meat-eater is blood, flesh, veins, muscles and tendons, cow secretions, hen periods, and bee vomit.

When I step into a classroom, I want to flick on that compassionate switch. You didn’t start out this way. You used to be in awe of animals. You used to love animals. What happened? Why do you ignore the suffering of cows and pigs and chickens and turkeys and fish? Why have you labeled them food? You don’t label dogs and cats as food.

Depending on the part of the world you’re in, this part of the world, you don’t label whales and dolphins as food. You’ve been taught in this part of the world, whales and dolphins and dogs and cats are your friends. And you’ve been taught that cows and chickens and turkeys aren’t. But that’s cruelty that you’ve been taught. That’s not reality. Because animals are not food, they’re not clothing, they’re not research specimens.

They’re not here to be commodified and turned into an inanimate object. I have spoken in elementary schools, middle schools and high schools over the years. Here’s the problem with when I go younger:

The teachers in young schools tell me, “You can’t show slaughterhouse videos. The kids could have nightmares.” My response is always, "You’re just proving my point, our point, that we’re correct." They wouldn’t have nightmares if I showed broccoli farmers. If I showed people picking apples from trees, nobody’s going to start to cry and run out of the room screaming. They’re just proving the point. And why do we have to hide the truth? It’s so upsetting that you can lie to children, but you can’t tell them the truth without getting in trouble.

Please think twice the next time you order a meal or make a food purchase; there are only two choices: cruelty or compassion. We’re all on a journey in life, we all have different likes and dislikes, different nationalities and religions, too, but there is one thing that we need to have in common with each other, and that’s genuine compassion and genuine peace for our planetary companions.

Animals do not belong to us. They are not commodities. If you were in the animals’ situation, your family members were, you’d hope somebody would go out of their way and make a little extra effort so you didn’t have to suffer and die, so you weren’t being tormented. Make an effort.

Many thanks, Gary Yourofsky, for your courageous, steadfast efforts to protect our animal co-inhabitants and encourage people to adopt a plant-based diet. Your work has saved the lives of countless fellow beings. May your message of kindness to animals reach many, many more students in the future.

For more information on Gary Yourofsky, please visit: www.ADAPTT.org

Thank you for joining us on today’s program. May we soon rejoice at the coming of a peaceful, vegan world.