Animal Agriculture - Meat And The Environment - Animal Testing
Fur - Puppy Mills - Animals In Entertainment

Animal Agriculture

When most of us picture a farm we envision a red barn, green pastures and open sky. But for the billions of animals raised for food each year in the United States, the stark reality of modern factory farming couldn't be more different.

Today 90-95% of all meat and dairy products come from factory farms, industrial warehouses where animals are treated like units of production rather than living beings. The instinctual needs of animals are completely denied, and most spend their entire lives in filthy, cramped conditions inside immense warehouses. Most farmed animals will never feel the sun on their backs or the grass beneath their feet. Many are confined so tightly that they will never be able to turn around without hitting cage bars or another animal. Animals are bred by artificial insemination, and they are bred to grow at a rate much quicker than would ever occur naturally. This leads to animals that have trouble walking and breathing due to their unnatural girth, and that suffer a host of other painful and debilitating health problems.

Farm animals are specifically excluded from the animal cruelty laws of each state, and as a result behaviors that would constitute felony animal cruelty if done to a cat or dog are perfectly legal when done to farm animals. 95% of farmed animals have no protection at all when it comes to how they are killed, and so animals are sometimes slaughtered by being tossed alive into wood chippers or left to suffocate in dumpsters. Even those 5% of animals that have some small protection during slaughter are often fully conscious when they are dropped into vats of boiling water or have their throats slit. Even animals from small-scale "family farms" meet the same grisly fate, as they are typically killed in the same slaughterhouses.

As a result of the incredible cruelty that occurs on today's farms, more and more people are choosing to leave animal products off their plates in order to spare farmed animals a lifetime of daily suffering.