As an occasional meat eater, I sometimes wonder how this tasty steak got on my plate, because society is changing and with it certain sensitive subjects whose behind the scenes we sometimes discover, which is the case with gruesome videos of slaughterhouses in which you can see how animals are treated. So, we decided to tell you about some of the worst practices of intensive farming, in order to make you eat leeks for the next three weeks and who knows, to raise your awareness a little more on the subject.
1. Shrimp stripping
Intensive shrimp farms have a good life because the product is in high demand and consumed, which means that we obviously have to meet this demand. In order to boost the reproduction of these cute little beasts, breeders resort to a particularly horrible method: epedunculation. It consists in tearing out the eyes of females so that they are more fertile, which is all the more atrocious since we know that crustaceans feel pain.
2. The canonization of chickens
In a chicken farm in Mayenne, the living conditions of the animals are absolutely infamous: they are stuffed with products to accelerate their growth, which causes several of them to limp and suffer malformations and some to die, because they cannot not reach the drinking troughs. But in this factory, a “chicken cannon” is also used, a kind of tube that projects live animals into transport boxes that will take them to the slaughterhouse, a particularly inhumane practice.
3. Live castration of pigs
The breeding of pigs in France is the source of a large number of acts of cruelty: they are castrated alive without anesthesia, their tails are cut, their teeth are pulled out or they are filed, they are deprived of their outside and they are piled up in spaces that are too narrow for their number, which means that they mutilate each other when they pass each other. Nearly 20% of farmed pigs die before going to the slaughterhouse because of their living conditions.
4. The last moments of the chickens
After a short life of suffering and confinement, the chickens are taken to the slaughter which can take several forms, their last moments consist of being chained upside down and stunned before having their heads cut off. To stun them, there are several solutions: they are electrocuted by the head, they are gassed with CO2 or their heads are plunged into electrified water basins. Once they are “shocked” they are quickly decapitated.
5. Calf isolation and anemia
Just after their birth, the calves are taken from their mothers and taken to individual pens where they have no room to move. The idea is to keep them on the ground so that their muscles remain tender and they are fed foods that are almost devoid of iron, which causes anemia in many of them. Since they are killed at a very young age, some have not really learned to walk properly, which the lack of energy does not help to improve and most have difficulty moving when taken to the slaughterhouse .
6. Dehorning cows and oxen
In cattle farming, you have to try to limit the injuries that the animals can give themselves, since they are often parked in spaces that are too small, they tend to cut each other with their horns. that’s why we just cut them up. In some farms, their tails are also cut with shears without anesthesia to prevent them from whipping each other. Giving them more space would obviously be too boring.
7. Intensive fish farming, often overlooked by the general public
If the suffering of terrestrial animals is increasingly publicized and sensitized, that of marine animals remains generally less visible. However, some farms involve horrors just as atrocious as those of terrestrial animals, such as those noted in an American salmon farm: violence, throwing fish on the ground to kill them, notches in the fins for identification, agony of the fish not selected in tanks without water where they are crushed by the weight of their congeners, overpopulation of the basins, cannibalism, stress…
8. The fate of chicks deemed “unfit for consumption” from a factory in Brest
In 2016, the trial of a factory in Brest took place after the broadcast of compromising videos. The chicks were asphyxiated just after their birth by piling them up in large bags without oxygen or they were thrown alive into large grinders. These prohibited techniques were favored because they were less expensive than the others and the chicks smothered in bags could be sold to raptor breeders while those reduced to a pulp were mixed with manure. This fate concerned chicks deemed unfit for development, in this factory some estimates ranged up to 50,000 chicks per day killed in these conditions from birth.
9. Force-feeding geese (and the outright killing of female ducklings)
In 2020 alone, there were nearly 41 million births of ducklings used for the production of foie gras. Finally when we say “used” it is quickly said: we kill the females from the first day of their life since they are not exploited in the production of foie gras. For the males, we grind their beaks and send them to breeding where they are stuffed two to three times a day for 14 days. The power of the pumps used for force-feeding causes terrible harm to the animals: their liver quickly reaches ten times the normal size and they suffer from hyperventilation while very often developing liver diseases.
10. Extensive use of drugs
With the infamous living conditions that animals are subjected to, they easily develop many illnesses and stress that we try to correct by administering drugs and medication to them. They spend their lives between suffering and treatment before joining our plates where the meat still contains antibiotics and traces of various drugs.