Extreme Torture of Animals — and Humans: A Thanksgiving Prayer for Mercy

Extreme Torture of Animals — and Humans:
A Thanksgiving Prayer for Mercy
by Suki Falconberg Ph.D.
November 18, 2007 Link to full article below

I have seen it all before but it still shocks me. The Humane Farming Association recently shot undercover video at an Ohio pig farm which shows animals living and dying in conditions far more horrifying than one finds in any torture camp. And what I am about to describe in this article is typical of the lives of the 10 billion 'food' animals raised for slaughter in America each year.

Pigs with broken legs and broken backs; pigs with prolapsed vaginas and abscessed tumors; pigs crowded so closely together they cannot move or turn around, living in their own excrement; pigs bashed with hammers and shocked with electric prods.

At this Ohio farm, the pigs are killed through strangulation. We see a worker kicking and then beating a pig with a metal bar. The pig cannot walk either due to broken legs or partial paralysis, and so the man relentlessly bashes and bashes and bashes her to make her crawl down a corridor until he kicks her off a four-foot ledge onto a muddy yard. She is then chained around the neck and hoisted by a fork-lift. It takes her about five minutes to die as she struggles desperately. During her last few seconds of life, you see one of her feet waving feebly in the air. While this is happening, the men are joking around, as if it is all good fun.

A few feet away, a group of pigs are huddled together, waiting their turn. Some are lying on top of others, forming a pile of animals too weak to move. They are covered with excrement; one has a broken leg sticking out at an odd angle; they look near death already, from the conditions of torture they were raised in.

Like all other animals, pigs feel. Pigs are extremely aware, intelligent, conscious of their surroundings. They experience a range of emotions equal to that of the human animal. This pile of what humans would call ‘near dead meat’ has watched what the men just did to one of their kind.

Read the full article: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=43247