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While personal health and the environment are excellent reasons to adopt a plant-based diet, for many, concern for the suffering of farmed animals is the most intimate and heart-felt reason.
Cages and crates packed with closely-confined animals make for a lifetime of misery, denying them the most basic experiences like normal movement, foraging and nesting behaviors, and even sunlight and fresh air. Painful procedures like de-horning, de-beaking, and castration are performed without anesthesia. Injuries, psychological stress, and death at a very young age are the norm. Most animals are slaughtered before they reach one year of life.
Animals sick with disease and too weak to walk are dragged or hauled to slaughter and end up on our plates. The sensitive beaks of tiny chicks are sliced off with a hot blade without anesthesia or any pain relief.
Aside from the many physical cruelties of agricultural operations, animals also suffer psychological and emotional trauma as they are forced to live in unnatural, agonizing conditions and often exhibit self-destructive behavior. Families are separated and mind-numbing monotony is endured day in and day out. But there is something that each of us can do to help.
The solution to their suffering is to reduce and eventually eliminate animal products from our diets.
The Reason For Vegan
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Egg-laying hens are crammed in tiny wire-mesh cages with only about the size of a sheet of paper to live. In these cramped conditions, natural, healthy behaviors like pecking, scratching and dust bathing are completely denied. There isn’t even room to stretch a wing.
Cages are stacked on top of one another like shoe boxes in a windowless warehouse where the stench of ammonia from urine is overwhelming. Imagine your whole life stuck in a filthy, crowded elevator. That is the life of a layer hen.
Labels like cage-free and free-range on chicken’s eggs and flesh are no better than conventional. Learn more about the humane hoax here.
All chickens and turkeys undergo the barbaric procedure of de-beaking where chicks only a few days old have the front portion of their beaks sliced off with a hot blade. No anesthetics are used. The British Parliament appointed a committee of veterinarians and other experts to investigate de-beaking.They concluded that, “between the horn and the bone of the beak is a thin layer of highly sensitive soft tissue. The hot knife blade used in de-beaking cuts through this complex horn, bone, and sensitive tissue causing severe pain.”
For more about the plight of chickens, click here.
Farmed Animals
Chickens
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A convenient and widely practiced method of killing them is to toss the chicks into plastic garbage bags and throw them out with the trash, or shovel them into dumpsters where they slowly suffocate, dehydrate and starve.
Some hatcheries have made this horror profitable by throwing live chicks into a grinder to become fertilizer or pet food. “Disposing of male chicks is an everyday practice. There are at this moment dozens of hatcheries in the US with trash bags full of struggling, suffocating baby male layer chicks.” -Erik Marcus, Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating.