PETA Vegan Starter Kit 1 | Page 12

>> A Wing and a Prayer
Millions of birds die every year before they even reach the abattoir – from heart
failure, dislocation of the hip or having their skulls crushed when the drawers on
the transporter are closed.
What’s more, it is common for chickens, turkeys and other animals to have
their throats cut without prior stunning, and some are conscious when they’re
dropped into scalding-hot defeathering tanks. Can you imagine scalding to
death an animal who has the playfulness of a puppy or the curiosity of a toddler?

>> Taking Everything From a Baby

Saving Lives
One Bite at a Time
There is only one way to help these animals,
and that is to stop eating them. When we
buy meat, eggs or dairy products, we pay
farmers to replace the animal whose body
with another unfortunate animal. It’s simple

A few years ago, a friend and I visited a pig farm in the south

economics – supply and demand. We must cut

of England. It was a spring morning, and we crossed a freshly

off the demand if we want to dry up the supply.

ploughed field between budding fruit trees to reach the farm
as the birds were just waking and beginning to sing. The farm

In fact, this is already happening. The sales of

was a large breeding unit, where hundreds of sows are kept in

Most animals are still just babies when they’re slaughtered for food. Because of

vegetarian and vegan foods are booming,

concrete pens, churning out litter after litter of piglets. It was

“modern innovations”, such as selectively breeding them so that they’ll grow

with the meat-free and “free-from” foods market

filthy, decrepit and squalid – from the main sheds, festooned

larger more quickly, pigs and turkeys are, on average, just 6 months old when

expected to grow by 44 per cent by 2016.

with cobwebs and stinking of waste, to the farrowing units,

they’re killed and chickens are just 7 weeks old. Cows who are raised for beef

That’s millions of lives saved, simply because

where sows were lined up in row after row of metal cages.

and hens raised for eggs are killed when they are just 1 to 2 years of age. Even

people opted for the pasta primavera instead

cows raised for milk are just 5 years old, on average, when their production

of the steak.

In every shed, we came across dead and dying piglets, some just
tossed into piles in the corner like broken toys. In sad contrast

These are all animals with natural life spans of 10 to 25 years who are being

You have the power to save even more lives,

was the enthusiasm of the surviving piglets: They rushed up to

slaughtered by the billions before they’ve even had a chance to live.

simply by choosing healthy, humane vegan

the gates of their pens – bundles of energy, eager to investigate

meals every time you sit down to eat. The

us with all the curiosity of puppies. Inquisitive and bright-eyed,

All they’ve ever known in their drastically abbreviated lives is the overpowering

choice is yours – do you feel like changing

these piglets would be taken away from their mothers at just

stench of ammonia from their accumulated waste, excruciatingly painful and

the world today?

3 weeks of age and sent off to be fattened for slaughter. Within

crippling bone disorders caused by their unnatural growth rate, the deafening

days of having their babies taken away, the mothers would

squawks and squeals of thousands of other animals crammed into a single

be impregnated again, and the cycle would continue. In five

windowless shed and the trauma of being poked, prodded, jabbed, burned,

months’ time, they would be back in their metal cages, where

trampled, beaten, kicked, thrown, slammed to the ground and screamed at.

they would be denied the room to nuzzle their babies, turn

Get
Active!
Visit

© Nataliia Melnychuk/Shutterstock.com

PETA.org.uk

to view PETA’s factory
farming exposé “Glass Walls”,
narrated by Paul McCartney,
and sign up to receive news
of events in your area and
information about more ways
to help animals.

Visit PETA.org.uk for more information.

© Viva!

By Alistair Currie

parts or whose milk we have just consumed

wanes, their throats are cut and they’re ground up into hamburger meat.

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T he Pi g

around or even take more than a single step in any direction.
We crossed a muddy courtyard and opened a sliding door to
another damp, cold shed – the pigs’ “home”. We walked down
the corridor to find a sequence of barren pens, each about
3 metres square. In the first two pens, small groups of young
pigs were lying on the cold, bare concrete without even a scrap
of straw bedding. In the third pen was a lone sow. She was lying
down in the back, facing away from us, and we could just barely
make out some strange blue lines on her skin.
Hearing our footsteps, she turned to look at us and slowly

finally gotten up, she crossed the couple of metres between us
slowly, limping with every step.
As she got closer, the marks on her back suddenly made sense:
in blue spraypaint, someone had scrawled the word “CULL”. After
years of being treated like a machine, churning out litter after
litter of piglets, never seeing the light of day or feeling the earth
beneath her feet, she had finally stopped being “productive”, and
so she was off to the abattoir. She would be processed into cheap
meat pies so that the farm owners could squeeze the very last
penny out of her broken body. Yet still she came up to investigate
us, to nuzzle our hands and look us in the eye, even though it was
humans like us who had done this to her and who would, within
days, cut her throat.
As we were leaving, my friend said, “I wish we’d brought an apple
with us, so just once in her life she could taste something fresh
and sweet”. Sadly, we had nothing to give her, but if telling her
story causes one person to stop eating the flesh of others like her,
some good will have come of our visit.

rose to her feet. Because pigs raised for food are bred to put on
weight quickly, they become huge, unnaturally heavy animals.
They are slaughtered for their flesh just before they are fully
mature, so they normally don’t carry that much weight around
for very long. Breeding sows, however, live for several years.
Most spend their entire lives on hard concrete or metal floors,
and the result is chronic lameness. This “old” sow had to ease

She was lying down in the back,
facing away from us, and we
could just barely make out some
strange blue lines on her skin.

herself up painfully, unsteadily, one foot at a time. When she’d
Visit PETA.org.uk for more information.

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