About Animals

The production of meat, dairy and egg products causes great suffering. Huge factory farm operations confine billions of feeling, sensitive, intelligent beings to what amounts to a living hell. 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 immediate and heart-felt reason. These animals, after all, give their entire life for us yet they have no say at all in this arrangement. Understanding the incredible sacrifice they make is the very least we owe them.

Hope Bohanec, one of the founders of CLO has been working to help animals for 20 plus years. Following are excerpts from some of her research.

Hope for the Animals

Gentle Cows

Cows are extremely slow, docile, peaceful creatures. Their ancestry is linked with the buffalo. Because of their gentle nature, cows have been the slaves of man for millennia. In the last 50 years, however, factory farming has turned this forced domestication into concentration camps for cows. Steers (male cattle raised for flesh food) endure castration, branding and dehorning without Anastasia. Then, one by one, they line up for slaughter, smelling the stench from the blood of their brothers. One back leg is chained and his massive body lifted off the ground. This often dislocates or breaks the leg as his throat is slit and the lifeblood drained out. With eerie parallels to human culture, the females of the species are exploited to an even greater degree.

If you want to stop using the animal products which cause the most suffering, you might want to cut out dairy and eggs first. The misery that female cows endure is just as great as that of their brothers slaughtered for beef. A visit to a dairy facility definitely opened my eyes. It was a gigantic machine-filled building, more like a factory than a farm. There were about 300 cows (I have since learned this is considered a fairly small operation.) The animals were being prodded into the milking room single file to be hooked up to the machines. Each cow had a number tagged in her ear. One cow was having difficulty walking; her hooves appeared twisted and deformed. She eyed me with a tired, sad glance. The prodding man forced her to quickly stumble into her place in line. These animals were treated as production machines, with no room for sensitivity to their comfort or simple needs. All these cows were either pregnant or lactating, yet there were no baby cows anywhere.

Forced Pregnancy

Like all mammals, female cows only lactate when pregnant. To maximize milk production, dairy cows are kept pregnant their entire short life. A cow's natural life span is about 20 years. In this highly intensive factory, however, the stress on her body will diminish her milk output after 3 to 5 years. She is then what the industry terms "dried up." It is cheaper and more lucrative to send her to slaughter and replace her. Her body will be sold as ground beef. Each year, she will be artificially inseminated on what industry terms a "rape rack" or with the farmers own arm. To insure the highest profit, the calf is taken away From her immediately after birth. Even in seemingly "alternative" or "humane" dairy production, to maintain a profit, cows are sent to slaughter and the calves taken away. This is also to avoid the "mother/calf" bonding. Mother cows have been known to break down the stall in an attempt to find their offspring. Imagine for a moment being kept pregnant every year of your life, just to have every baby taken away from you and your milk pumped into machines. What happens to this "by-product" of baby cows? A female calf will follow in her mother's hoof-prints, yet she will never know her mother or suckle her milk, being raised on a bottle formula. But what of the males?

A male calf born to a dairy cow is the wrong breed to profitably be raised for beef. His fate, unfortunately, is much worse. Veal is the soft, pale, anemic flesh of a calf. Veal calves are kept inside in a crate barely bigger than themselves. Chained at the neck, they can't even turn around. They are fed a liquid diet deficient in iron, so their muscles can't develop properly. These babies never see their 1st birthday. Many people recognize the cruelty in raising veal and will not eat it, yet are unaware of the intimate connection between the dairy and veal industries. Supporting one supports the other.

Chickens

Sometimes children have the clearest view on things. Last spring, I overheard a father and daughter while near the egg section of a market. The young girl asked, "Why don't they let the eggs hatch?" Her father said something like, "So people can eat them." She replied "that's sad."

Unfortunately, "sad" is an accurate description of modern egg and chicken production. In this industry, chickens are placed into two categories: "Broilers" for meat; "Layers" for eggs. A chicken's natural life-span is about 10 years. Broilers are slaughtered at about 3 months, and a layer hen is lucky to see her 3rd birthday. The USDA recommends that each bird receive only four inches of space to live. Layer hens are cramped 6 to 8 in tiny wire-mesh cages about the size of an album cover. Natural, healthy behaviors like pecking and scratching the earth 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 crowded elevator. That is the life of most layer hens.

De-Beaking

With all natural behaviors denied, this intensive confinement begins to drive the birds insane and they peck at one another. Rather than have a damaged product, the industry practices "de-beaking." The amazing film "Baraka" contains rare footage of this barbaric procedure where chicks, only a few days old, have the front portion of their beaks sliced off with a hot soldering 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."

Forced Molting

Chickens do not naturally lay eggs in the winter. Their bodies go into a "molting" period to conserve energy through the cold and barren season. This inconvenient instinct has compelled producers to develop a procedure called "forced molting." Forced molting simulates a tough winter in just a few weeks by altering the lights in the hen's indoor world. The lights are turned off and all food is withheld for two to three weeks. The sudden deprivation of light and food causes severe stress and results in the death of 5-10% of the hens. This process shocks the bird's body into another laying season. She will only be able to endure this extreme deception of nature for a couple of years. Her "production" will begin to decline and she will be hung upside-down with her sisters for an assembly-line beheading.

What About the Male Chickens?

Like the dairy cow/veal calf connection, the production of eggs also harbors a terrible secret. Over 400 million chicks a year are born in artificial "hatcheries." Half of these, of course, are male. The male chicks born to the layer hens don't grow large enough to be profitably raised for meat. They aren't too good at laying eggs either so they are considered a useless by-product of the industry. These 200 million newly hatched chicks are always "disposed of." A convenient and widely practiced method of killing is to toss the chicks into plastic garbage bags and throw them out with the trash where they slowly suffocate or 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.

What About "Free-Range" Chickens and Eggs?

I am frequently asked what are the "most ethical" eggs to buy. I have done extensive research in supposedly the best local egg production and my findings have been extremely disheartening. The law only requires that the birds cannot be in cages to be called "free range." Many producers call the chickens "cage free" yet most of these birds do not have access to the outside. They are kept in large windowless warehouses with hundreds of thousands of birds crowded on the floor. Being so overcrowded, these birds are also de-beaked. Even companies with names like "Humane Harvest" de-beak their chickens, give them no access to the outside and force molt them. When I asked the producers about the male chicks, the answer was always the same: they buy their hens from the hatchery and they don't know what becomes of the males. When I asked at what age they send the birds to slaughter, all answered under 5 years. I was denied a tour of all the facilities that I investigated (and I asked nicely). I only found two producers that didn't use these terrible practices. Both were very small "back yard" operations that don't sell eggs in the winter. They did, however, slaughter the birds. Neither is able to afford organic feed. Upon completion of my research, I am convinced that the term "humane egg production" is an oxymoron.

Some Thoughts on Hunting

In Pleasant Hope, Missouri, two young brothers were enjoying a popular outdoor recreational activity. This "sport" however, almost always has a tragic outcome. The older boy accidentally shot and killed his 9-year-old brother, Tyler, while they were hunting squirrels. Why was a gun in a child's hands? Why is a gun EVER in anyone's hands? Why aren't we teaching our children reverence for nature, respect for all beings, and love of life?

Number of animals killed by hunters and trappers each year in the U.S. alone:

• 134 Million

That is only animals reported--how many unaccounted for? How many injured, maimed, stumbling in agony, bleeding to death? How many young left to starve in the den?

Death Toll by Species Per Year:

• Deer 6 million
• Quail/Partridges 12 million
• Rabbits 13 million
• Ducks/Geese 17 million
• Squirrels 27 million
• Mourning Dove- symbol of peace 35 million

Sometimes people will express to me their dislike of factory farming, but defend hunting as more "natural." I wonder how many of these "wild defenders" have ever actually tracked and killed their own dinner. They say we need to go back to our ancestor's hunting/gathering habits. Many anthropologists have now suggested that we change the term to gather/hunter as most of these tribes hunted only when other food was scarce due to winter or bad weather. Yet I am not a big supporter of "going back." What our ancestors did brought us to where we are now. I have no respect for a hunter using his evolutionary advantage of an opposable thumb to kill with a weapon- gun, bow and arrow, or spear. We are the only creatures on earth that cross this line, and I believe it has led us down a annihilative path. If a human animal authentically wishes to kill another animal, I invite them to hunt as all carnivores do. Use their senses, sniff out their prey, hunt with the chase, plunge their teeth into the jugular and eat the raw, bloody flesh. If this is unpalatable, the forest provides an abundance of greens, weeds, nuts, seeds, berries, fruits, veggies, roots and other juicy plant sources of food.