C) FACTORY FARMING - Pigs: Smart Animals at the Mercy of the Pork Industry
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Many people who know pigs compare them to dogs because they are friendly, loyal, and intelligent. Pigs are naturally very clean and avoid, if at all possible, soiling their living areas. When given the chance to live away from factory farms, pigs will spend hours playing, lying in the sun, and exploring their surroundings with their powerful sense of smell. Considered smarter than 3-year-old human children, pigs are very clever animals.
Most people rarely have the opportunity to interact with these outgoing, sensitive animals because 97 percent of pigs in United States today are raised on factory farms. These pigs spend their entire lives in cramped, filthy warehouses, under constant stress from the intense confinement and denied everything that is natural to them.
Breeding sows spend their entire miserable lives in tiny metal crates where they cant even turn around. Shortly after giving birth, they are once again forcibly impregnated. This cycle continues for years until their bodies finally give out and they are sent to be killed. When the time comes for slaughter, these smart and sensitive animals are forced onto transport trucks that travel for many miles through all weather extremesmany die of heat exhaustion in the summer and arrive frozen to the inside of the truck in the winter.
According to industry reports, more than 170,000 pigs die in transport each year, and more than 420,000 are crippled by the time they arrive at the slaughterhouse. Many are still fully conscious when they are immersed in scalding water for hair removal.
Pigs have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly more so than three-year-olds, says Dr. Donald Broom, Cambridge University professor and former scientific advisor to the Council of Europe. Pigs can play video games, and when offered a choice, they have indicated environmental temperature preferences.
These facts are not surprising to anyone who has spent time around these social, playful animals. Pigs, who have a great sense of smell and can live into their teens, are very protective of their young and form bonds with other pigs. Contrary to popular belief, pigs are clean animals, but they do not have sweat glands, so they take to the mud to stay cool and ward off flies.
Factory Farming Causes Suffering
Only pigs in movies spend their lives running across sprawling pastures and relaxing in the sun. On any given day in the United States, there are approximately 60 million pigs living on factory farms, and about 100 million are killed for food every year. Factory-farming conditions are no better in Canada, which annually exports more than 6 million live pigs to the U.S. for slaughter. Managers of Canadas largest pig exporter faced cruelty charges after 10,000 dead and dying pigs were found on the companys farms. Investigators found dead pigs stacked behind barns and dead piglets in manure tanks, and all the live pigs were in some form of distress.
Mother pigs (sows), who account for about 6 million of the pigs in the U.S., spend most of their lives in individual gestation crates, which are about 7 feet long and 2 feet widetoo small for them even to turn around. After giving birth to piglets, sows are moved to farrowing crates, which are wide enough for them to lie down and nurse their babies but still not large enough for them to turn around or build nests for their young.
Piglets are taken from their mothers when they are as young as 10 days old. Once her piglets are gone, each sow is impregnated again, and the cycle continues for three or four years before she is slaughtered. This intensive confinement produces stress- and boredom-related behaviors, such as chewing on cage bars or obsessively pressing on water bottles.
After they are taken from their mothers, piglets are packed into pens until they are separated to be raised for breeding or meat. Because they, too, are overcrowded and prone to stress-related behaviors (such as cannibalism and tail-biting), farmers chop off the piglets tails and use pliers to break off the ends of their teethwith no anesthetics. For identification purposes, farmers also rip chunks out of the young animals ears.
Transportation and Slaughter
Farms all over North America ship piglets (called feeder pigs) to Corn Belt states such as Illinois and Indiana for growing and finishing. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that fewer than 30 percent of weaned piglets spend their entire lives on the same farm.
During transport on trucks, piglets weighing up to 100 pounds are given no more than 2.4 square feet of space, and farmers are warned that the piglets probably will get sick within a few days after arrival. One study confirmed that vibrations, like those made by a moving truck, are very aversive to pigs. When pigs were trained to press a switch panel to stop for 30 seconds vibration and noise in a transport simulator the animals worked very hard to get the 30 seconds of rest.
Once pigs reach market weight (about 250 to 270 pounds), the industry refers to them as hogs, and they are sent to be slaughtered. The animals are shipped from all over the U.S. and Canada to slaughterhouses, which are mostly in the Midwest. There are no laws to regulate the duration of transport, frequency of rest, or provisions of food and water for the animals. Pigs tend to resist getting into the trailers, which can be made from converted school buses or multidecked trucks with steep ramps, so workers use electric prods to move them along. There is no federal law to regulate the voltage or usage of electric prods on pigs, and a study showed that when the electric prods were used, pigs vocalized, lost their balance and tried to jump out of the loading area and that their heart rate and body temperature was significantly higher when compared to pigs loaded using a hurdle movable chute. A former pig transporter told PETA that pigs are packed in so tight, their guts actually pop out their buttsa little softball of guts actually comes out. According to industry reports, more than 100,000 pigs die on the way to slaughter each year, and more than 400,000 are crippled from the journey by the time they arrive at the slaughterhouse. A Michigan State University study concluded that the number of pigs who died during transportation increased 46.7 percent over a five-year period and that the increase was attributable to rough handling and incorrect management at the time of loading and transportation.
A typical slaughterhouse kills about 1,000 hogs every hour. The sheer number of animals killed makes it impossible for them to be given humane, painless deaths. Because of improper stunning, many hogs are alive when they reach the scalding water bath, which is intended to soften their skin and remove their hair. The USDA documented 14 humane-slaughter violations at one processing plant, where inspectors found hogs who were walking and squealing after being stunned with a stun gun as many as four times. An industry report explains that continuous pig squealing is a sign of rough handling and excessive use of electric prods. The report found that the pigs at one federally inspected slaughter plant squealed 100 percent of the time because electric prods were used to force pigs to jump on top of each other. A PETA investigation found that workers at an Oklahoma farm were killing pigs by slamming the animals heads against the floor and beating them with a hammer.
PARAGRAPH 3: EATING FOR LIFE.
A) SOME SERIOUS REASONS FOR CONSIDERATION.
Some people ignore dietary advice to cut back on or cut out animal products, perhaps hoping that a ''magic pill'' will come along that will make their illnesses go away. Common sense tells us that prevention is the best medicine. More and more people are finding wonderful ways to tempt their taste buds without tempting fate.
Eliminating animal foods from your diet reduces the risk of some of our biggest killers. According to Dr T. Colin Campbell, nutritional researcher at Cornell University and director of the largest epidemiological study in history, ''The vast majority of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases and other forms of degenerative illness can be prevented simply by adopting a plant-based diet.'' Heart disease, cancer, strokes, diabetes, osteoporosis, obesity and other diseases have all been linked to meat and dairy consumption. It''s never too late to change your habits for the better. Changing your diet isn''t nearly as inconvenient as enduring a heart bypass operation, suffering paralysis from a stroke or facing chemotherapy and radiation treatments for cancer! Going vegetarian is the single best thing you can do for your health.
Vegetarians are typically slimmer than meat-eaters. A whopping 70 per cent of men and 63 per cent of women in the UK are either overweight or obese, conditions which lead to illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, gallbladder diseases, arthritis and musculoskeletal problems. In a study in the British Medical Journal, researchers studied 21,105 people and found that vegan men weighed 5.9 kilograms less and vegan women 4.7 kilograms less than their meat-eating counterparts. The study concludes, ''These data suggest that a meat-free diet is associated with a low prevalence of obesity''.
The risk of developing heart disease amongst meat-eaters is 50 per cent higher than that of vegetarians. In fact, researchers have found that the longer and more often people eat meat, the greater their risk of heart disease.
Meat, dairy products and eggs are completely devoid of fibre and complex carbohydrates, the nutrients that we''re supposed to be consuming more of, and are laden with saturated fat and cholesterol, which make us fat and lethargic in the short term and lead to clogged arteries and heart attacks in the long term.
B) MAKING THE TRANSITION Six steps to healthy life.
Many people become vegetarian overnight, whilst others make the change gradually. Do what works best for you?
Begin by ''vegging up'' meals you already eat, like spaghetti with tomato sauce, soups and salads, and by replacing the meat in favourite recipes, like lasagne, stir-fries and chilli, with beans or textured vegetable protein (TVP). Replace the beef in enchiladas with beans or grilled veggies. Bake stuffed peppers filled with rice pilaff or couscous (a type of quick-cooking pasta). Top baked potatoes with margarine, soya ''bacon bits'', or salsa. Use crumbled tofu or grated soya cheese instead of ricotta or dairy cheese in lasagne or on pizzas. Use crumbled veggie burgers or veggie mince instead of ground beef.
Check health food shops for instant soups and main-dish convenience items, as well as regular supermarkets. Many canned soup flavours that you''re probably already used to are vegetarian, like three bean, minestrone, tomato, and vegetable. Flavoured rice mixes can be made into an entr e just by adding a can of beans. Experiment with vegetarian baked beans, refried beans and different kinds of pasta. Order pizza without the cheese but loaded with vegetable toppings, like peppers, mushrooms or even artichokes!
Try meat impostors - veggie burgers, ''ham'', ''hot dogs'', and ''turkey'' made out of soya and other meatless ingredients. They taste close enough to the real thing to fool any die-hard carnivore, although you might want to try several different brands before you decide which one is your favourite.
Visit your local health food shops to find the best variety of vegetarian foods. Don''t be shy - you''ll find row after row of wonderful products that you never knew existed: veggie burgers, sausages, pies, pasties, imitation-meat products that can be used in your favourite recipes or on their own, and soya-based ''cheeses'', ''mayonnaise'', ''sour cream'' and ''milk''.
Explore the many vegetarian foods that have been popular in other countries for many years, like houmous (a tangy spread made from chickpeas), vegetable curries, falafel (a spicy mix of beans that can be made into patties and ''meatballs''), tempeh (a high-protein meat substitute), seitan (a flavourful food made from wheat that can be sliced, marinated, cubed, fried or baked) and a host of other vegetarian items. You''ll even find desserts, biscuits, sweets and snacks that satisfy your sweet tooth without the fat and cholesterol found in animal products.
Make a habit of reading labels to make sure you''re buying products that are healthy and humane. Soup may contain chicken stock, biscuits may contain animal fat and other products include animal ingredients you''ll want to avoid, like gelatine (from animal skin, hooves and bones). You''ll soon learn which brands are ''safe'', and checking labels will become second nature.
