Suzanne's Sharebook 

Viva!’s investigations have uncovered the filth and disease found throughout the farming industry. On factory farms and in the fields, we find the same stories of disease, suffering and neglect time and time again:

Chickens are packed together in their tens of thousands, the litter beneath their feet never changed and the stink of ammonia from bird faeces rank in the air. Diseases like coccidiosis (intestinal parasites) spread like wildfire through the flock. Despite routine administration of antibiotics and other drugs, 100,000 chickens die before slaughter every day. Half of chicken carcases on shelves carry the killer bug campylobacter – 40 million contain salmonella. The most virulent form of bird flu kills 75% of the people it infects – and now it has started to pass from human-to-human.

In addition to these chronic illnesses, deadly epidemics devastate farmed animal populations on a regular basis – bird flu, BSE, swine fever and foot-and-mouth are just a few examples. The global trade in meat and livestock spreads disease across continents and borders. What will hit us next, nobody knows.

The total number of animals killed in British slaughterhouses in 2003 was approximately 900 million.

This included 9.35 million pigs, nearly 15 million sheep, 28 million turkeys, 20 million ducks, over 850 million chickens and 2.25 million cattle.

This equates to 2.4 million animals slaughtered every day; 100,000 an hour; 1600 per minute and 26 every second.

Many people shout loud when they see the dogs and cats slaughtering to eat by people in Asia countries.  I do not see any difference among the dogs, cats, chickens, turkeys, ducks, cows, pigs, sheeps, horses, & buffalo. These animals fight for their lives when it comes to slaughtering scenes.  They know the fear and scream that they want to live like the slaughtering people. 

The farrowing crate is one of the very worst of factory farming’s hidden horrors. Hundreds of thousands of pregnant sows are shut into these tiny cages a week before they give birth - and remain imprisoned until their piglets are three to four weeks old. The crate is just inches wider and longer than the sow’s own body: for up to thirty-five days, every four or five months, she can do nothing but stand up, lie down, suckle her piglets and stare at a blank wall. This terrible frustration can turn into aggression: more than one-in-eight piglets are savaged to death by their own mothers. Limbs aching from inactivity, skin rubbed raw by the bars and their maternal instincts utterly frustrated, mother pigs suffer from stress, pain and psychological torture in the crate.

Many piglets are born into their mother’s excrement. After that, they are confined to the tiny, barren “creep” area next to the cage - with nothing to do but suckle and fight over their mother’s milk. By three weeks old wild piglets are normally found up to 30 metres from the sow, exploring their environment and trying out new foods - no such stimulation for these intelligent, curious little animals in the crate. After a month of confinement and misery, the piglets are “weaned”, ie taken away to be fattened for slaughter. Weaning takes place months before it should naturally occur and the piglets, unused to solid food, suffer from scours - pitiful, wasting diarrhoea. They are then given a cocktail of drugs on a daily basis. Their mothers, meanwhile, are given just a few days before being reimpregnated, and starting the whole 16 week cycle again.

The farrowing crate is designed with one purpose only: to maximise the &lsquoroduction’ of pigs. All considerations of animal welfare are sacrificed to that goal. It is, therefore, not just an appalling practice in its own right, but a symbol of everything that is evil about factory farming. That is why this campaign is so important. Viva! is committed to the abolition of the farrowing crate not just for its own sake but as an integral part of the struggle to end factory farming and meat consumption itself.