The Retort

A Sad Reality

Wed November 11th, 2009 by Nicole Maas For The Retort

The following is a true representation of a very real phenomenon: imagine a cage full of puppies. Their snouts have been seared off with a hot iron without so much as a single drop of painkillers, and they are so cramped in their feces-encrusted cage that they are unable to turn around or stand up in. The wire mesh of the cage rubs and digs into their paws, causing deformity and great pain. Neurotic with terror and frustration, they attempt to bite each other and themselves, but without teeth they are unable to damage the valuable flesh of their cellmates.

Their captors kick and punch them, often to death. For fun, a group of workers twist a puppy’s head until she is decapitated. They laugh. One puppy is found with a missing leg, a worker having pulled her through the bars of the cage even though her foot was caught.

Many of the puppies suffer from infection, open wounds, blindness due to the ammonia wafting from the urine-soaked concrete, arthritis, cuts, scrapes, bruising and illness. They are forcibly impregnated and often starved for up to fourteen days to speed up the birthing process. Their offspring are immediately taken from them.

After about seventy weeks, the survivors will be shipped many miles away in the blistering heat or freezing cold to a slaughterhouse. They will be hung upside down, their throats will be slit and then, often still conscious, dunked into a scalding tank to remove their fur. They will then be chopped, processed, packaged into neat little Glad-wrapped cartons and shipped to grocery stores where blissfully ignorant consumers will purchase their rotting remains, choosing never to associate these remains with anything that was once alive and as acutely able to feel pain and grief and terror as any of us.

Pretty gruesome, right? I imagine many of you are stunned and angry and hopefully wondering what you can do to put a stop to what you have just read. The answer is to stop buying chickens and their eggs. The above description is that of the life of a typical laying hen. Please ask yourself why you would feel horror and outrage at the thought of a dog enduring such cruelty but would turn your eyes away and refuse to consider or acknowledge the same treatment when committed against a hen or other non-human animal that via torture on a factory farm ends up as dinner on our plates. Please visit meetyourmeat for further information.