They Know Pain

10. July 2010 by admin.

Our inhumane treatment of livestock is becoming widespread and more and more barbaric. Six-hundred pound hogs — they were pigs at one time — are raised in two-foot-wide metal cages called gestation crates, in which the poor beasts are unable to turn around or lie down in natural positions, and this way they live for months at a time.

On profit-driven factory farms, veal calves are confined to dark wooden crates so small that they are prevented from lying down or scratching themselves. These creatures feel; they know pain. They suffer pain just as we humans suffer pain. Egg-laying hens are confined to battery cages. Unable to spread their wings, they are reduced to nothing more than an egg-laying machine.

A twenty-three-year-old federal law requires that cattle and hogs to be slaughtered must first be stunned, thereby rendered insensitive to pain, but mounting evidence indicates that this is not always being done, that these animals are sometimes cut, skinned, and scaled while still able to feel pain.

A Texas beef company, with twenty-two citations for cruelty to animals, was found chopping the hooves off live cattle. In another Texas plant with about two dozen violations, federal officials found nine live cattle dangling from an overhead chain.

Secret videos from an Iowa pork plant show hogs squealing and kicking as they are being lowered into the boiling water that will soften their hides, soften the bristles on the hogs and make them easier to skin.

The law clearly requires that these poor creatures be stunned and rendered insensitive to pain before creatures be stunned and rendered insensitive to pain before this process begins. Federal law is being ignored. Animal cruelty abounds. It is sickening and is infuriating.

Barbaric treatment of helpless, defenseless creatures must not be tolerated even if these animals are being raised for food. Such insensitivity is insidious and can spread and is dangerous. Life must be respected and dealt with humanely in a civilized society.

According to laws passed by congress, the Secretary of Agriculture is to report on cases of inhumane animal treatment in regard to livestock production, and to document the response of USDA regulatory agencies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies have the authority and the capability to take action to reduce this disgusting cruelty, knowing that Congress expects them to do even better at enforcing the law, and also in their research for new, humane technologies.

Let us hope that in the future, those enforcing the law will not tolerate unnecessary, abhorrent, and repulsive cruelty to animals any longer.

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