Nov 17 2007
Extreme Torture of Animals–and Humans: A Thanksgiving Prayer for Mercy
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By Suki Falconberg
11/17/07
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, and 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.
In a mock gesture of affection, a worker embraces the body of the dead pig hanging in the air. All the men laugh.
There is also footage of the torture of piglets. One man picks up a piglet and pretends to stroke her with affection. He then hands the animal to another man who slams her against a metal wall by one leg and then tosses her into a metal bucket.
In the background, we hear the rough language of men at play—lots of joking around, lots of ‘fucks’ uttered in fun and a “Bullshit, you did it in one hit.” The torturer looks in the bucket where the piglet is lying in blood, paralyzed, except for one rear leg twitching wildly. The man says, “Kinda, almost did it in one hit.” It is a game and contest, seemingly, of virility, to almost kill her with one slam.
There is footage of piglets grabbed by one ear and flung into shoots and metal crates and trucks. The men handle the animals as if they were insensate sacks of flour. All the while they are laughing and joking—business as usual. Meanwhile the piglets are screaming in fear.
Out of Iraq comes recent of a group of American soldiers shooting a dog for fun. The dog drags her injured hindquarters on the ground as the men look on indifferently. The dog collapses, still alive and suffering. An Iraqi man, in despair, tries to help the animal. He cries as he gestures at her and at the soldiers. They are still indifferent. Finally, the Iraqi man simply leaves the animal to die, with a shrug. That shrug was perhaps the most painful item in the video. What can I do? I give up. The torture is too great.
Tolstoy said that as long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
I feel compassion for animals that we treat without mercy. It breaks not just my heart but the soul and spirit inside me to see pigs and dogs so helpless before us. A Christian nation? So America says it is. A nation of Christians without mercy for animals. Of the pig torturers in Ohio, one received a $200 fine and a year’s probation. And an admonition to not torture pigs anymore. Who is going to oversee this farm, to stop the suffering? Will there be vast numbers of judges and lawyers and policemen, maybe even the National Guard out there, tomorrow, taking these pigs out of captivity? Will there be thousands of ‘concerned citizens’ at this farm tomorrow, all of them having given up their morning bacon, now that they know where it comes from? And will all these good people find these worthy pigs a sanctuary, where they can live out there days peacefully on green grass?
The other cause that touches my heart—one that I have written on extensively—is the sexual enslavement of women. What happens to these tortured women bears a terrible resemblance to what we do to animals. Brothels in the immigrant district of Paris, where women are raped 80 times a day (and perhaps up to 160 times a day on weekends), are called abattoirs—slaughterhouses. Allied soldiers during the last world war called Pigalle, an area of Paris where prostitutes congregated, Pig Alley. Prostitutes are referred to as ‘fuck meat.’
After her ordeal under 80 men a day (160 on weekends) this prostitute will be ‘dead meat.’ And she’ll be worth a lot less than the dead pig since, typically, women ‘dishonored’ to this extent are marginalized and disposable.
I have written a long article on how brothels are identical to factory farms. I will share it with you at another time since my focus here is the misery of the animals who will be adorning your holiday table. I want to end this piece with another undercover video, this one shot by Mercy for Animals in a North Carolina turkey slaughterhouse. On the way to the killing blade, the animals are shackled upside down by their feet. We see workers using them as punching bags. One worker is ‘raping’ a line of turkeys by reaching into them, deeply, with his hands, and extracting eggs, which he throws playfully at his co-workers. He never seems to tire of this game as he rapes turkey after turkey after turkey—the birds writhe in pain as his hand ‘plays’ around inside them.
From the unbearable conditions under which they were raised, we see turkeys arriving at the slaughterhouse with bloody open wounds and huge infected tumors. Most don’t even look like turkeys, but like grotesque monsters since they have been genetically engineered to grow too fast. There is no resemblance to the beautiful bird with her golden brown plumage and impressive carriage that is the wild cousin of this pathetic Frankenstein bird we have created.
Some of the birds have broken feet and wings and they desperately try to crawl along the floor as they thrash around in the slippery blood. The workers ignore them, except when they step on them, and even stand on them, for long periods of time, for fun. Injured birds are the norm–since they are pulled so roughly from their cages, the workers break their bones. We see one worker ripping off a turkey’s head with a metal pole–for fun, I guess. The turkeys make sounds like screams; and when they are upside down, heading toward the blade that will slice off their heads, they struggle and struggle, for one last breath of life.
No where in the slaughterhouse is there a moment of kindness, or a gentle touch, for these birds who feel so much as they die.
Suki Falconberg, © 2007
What you can do to answer my prayer for mercy: First, become aware. Numerous groups on the internet carry information, videos, and activist suggestions for those who want to end the torture of animals: PETA, Humane Farming Association, Mercy for Animals, Compassion Over Killing, Farm Sanctuary, United Poultry Concerns, and Viva! are just among a few that are out there.
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Brutality like this, whether is is directed towards people, animals, fish, dolphins, birds and so on and on, makes me wonder what has happened to mankind. I cannot even boil a crab for supper. I have done considerable research on the perils of being an omnivore, eating both plants and animals, and I can tell you that eating meat is a huge risk to your health. This is partly because of what the animals are fed, and what medications they are given for nefarious purposes. The
China Study is a good place to start. You will find that eating vegetables, fruits, nuts and cutting out all processed food, including animal flesh, does wondrous things for your health. We have been taught from the cradle to eat meat, and it is bad for us. How do you feel eating the flesh with a vibrational imprint of FEAR? Those who have pets, know that animals are living, feeling and wonderful beings. Wuld you eat your dog? Your cat? Your bird or your fish? Think about it and consider becoming a vegetarian. I myself, have made the move over. Do it gradually, and help stop these kinds of horrific acts against animals. If there is no demand, there will be no more factory style slaughterhouses.
I have just read through article; saw the photo’s. My heart pains deeply for the creatures of planet earth,and human’s inability to be compassionate and not enough voices for these poor inocent animals. How can we hope to create a peaceful environ for all life forms, if we are not considerate, compassionate and loving to the animal kingdom’s. They too share our planet and have a right to a life of free roaming, respect, kindness, compassion. The spilt blood of these animals fill the grounds of the earth with their pain and suffering. We must take care of the ones with no human voice, we must fight for their liberation from cruelty and mistreatment and the horrors they experience. Every minute/hour is pain and suffering. What is done to them all consiousness feels……………………even planet earth. please continue to work for liberation and to stop the torture and cruelty bestowed upon these animals. Namaste’
Thank you for bringing this information to our attention. The definition of ignorance has to be not changing one’s actions when one has been shown the truth. Now that we have all seen it, we must do the right thing, even if it means changing our habits.
I am going to steal your story, and place it where thousands of viewers from scores of countries can read it every week because such truth must be known
The sheer ugliness of our actions toward helpless creatures is compounded by the triviality and moral indifference we have grown accustomed to attaching to such behavior. Maybe all these wars that keep killing and making people miserable are some form of cosmic karma returning misery to our species for all this hell we gratuitously produce for others.
J.B. Suconik–Please, by all means, ’steal’ this story and post it around the world. I would be very grateful if it could touch hearts everywhere. We owe it to that poor piglet who was slammed against the wall and then died in that metal bucket. I think how we treat the helpless is the true measure of our worth as a species.
Ah, god, we are the filthiest animals.
i worked in the animal rights movement for many years and am still a radical animal rights activist and sadly, what you describe is not at all uncommon. I have seen similar footage of men in laboratories (that are supposed to be sanitized), smoking cigarettes, playing loud music, which they tortured the test monkeys who were wide awake - in one video, separating a mother monkey from her infant and torturing her before the infant who was screaming as was the mother while they electrified her, and eventually chopped off her hands and it only got worse from there on in.
You may not remember, but i remember vividly because i protested this, that General Motors was crash-testing live pigs in their cars for “safety”. The pigs were not anesthetized in any way, they were fully conscious, strapped into cars, and them slammed into a wall at sixty miles an hour or so. Of course, this didn’t kill all of the pigs - because some of the safety mechanisms worked (airbags etc), but as with any animals, the pigs were wounded. After that, the testers wanted to see what would happen if the car were to catch on fire - in one part of the video, a tester is holding down a live pig (again, LIVE) and holding a blowtorch to its skin while the pig is SCREAMING to “see what will happen.”
All of this is TRUE and all of this was in the name of SCIENCE (there are many atrocities of which i can and will write…).
I protested this practice at General Motors by having a GM car donated to the organization we worked for, driving it to one of the more prominent dealerships and informing the media beforehand that there would be “some protest they would want to not miss” and we did something spectacular to get their attention. With the car parked, as my fellow workers handed out pamphlets with pictures and the practice of what G.M. was doing (some people who were going to go IN the dealership changed their minds….) while myself and one man stood on top of the G.M. car weiling axes and crushign the car to bits to show our absolute disdain for GMs practices. It was a spectacular scene because it was so dramatic and in a way, like their crash testing of pigs, “over the top” and yes, violent and angry.
ALL of the media showed up and wrote about this and the photo of me weilding the ax made the UPI newswire - all of this STOPPED G.M. from crash testing pigs and even caused them to apologize for the practice (although they gave their excuses) they still apologized publicly and stopped the practice.
None of this would have happened without organization by the animal rights people and our absolute outrage. Sometimes, it takes radical acts to stop other, cruel acts. I am not, and others are not, above doing this. We’ll do what it takes - and i do mean, WHATEVER IT TAKES.
Your article, while extremely difficult to read - esp. the part about the american soldiers and the dog (you would think, or i would think i would give them the benefit of the doubt - clearly i was wrong…. and then they wonder why they are hated throughout the world or seen as a nation of cruelty…. gee…. do the math.) It’s apalling. I believe in treating like with like - so that leaves you with what i feel should happen to those soldiers and myself and other animal rights activists who have done some very radical things, would not be “above’ doing it…. sad to think one must be so extreme to be heard.
AS my grandmother used to say to me, “The things you see when you don’t have your gun….”
Thank you,
Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti
can’t read whole article. can’t look. too horrible. will have flashbacks forever. Animals should be treated right. if you know they are not then do something. Yeah, you can write a letter to some people who are not going to do anything about it so that the next day it stops. I say you blow a hole through a dozen or so of them and leave a message that says the next dozen will also get a hole blown through them if they don’t cease and desist in the improper handling of the lower animals. Then, start blowing holes from far away or close up, if you got the where withall to do it. These people aren’t going to stop because you’re ’sad’ about the animals but they will if they are slaughtered, butchered, hacked, hung, beaten, stomped on and bashed ’til dead, dead, dead. Yeah, probably too extream. But, if I was living near that barbaric hell hole of a slaughterhouse, I just might, and I would be glad, too. PS did you know that the site of the U.N. building in NYC was the site of a slaughterhouse, in the olden days? I bet it was not much nicer than the one described?
Horrible stuff, of course. But we have to remember that most of these animals, if they were not being raised for food, would not exist in the first place! People usually do not keep herds of cattle to give their farm a scenic look or as pets for the kids! They may keep a few sheep or cattle to “mow” the grass. Otherwise… a pig or two as a pet, some geese perhaps, but mostly…
“…for these birds who feel so much as they die.” Do we know this - that they feel to this extent?
Most business owners/employers would not allow their employees to “play around” to that extent at work.
Some people believe at a karmic or psychic level that animals choose to used as food for humans or as work animals. They may not choose the horrible living conditions or abuse, however!
Do they treat farm animals so horribly in socialist countries too, or just the people?
Do animal rights activists really care about animals or do they just use the issue as an excuse to defame capitalism?
Endangered animals are being wantonly slaughtered by the “progressive” government in Zimbabwe. Where are the activists? Where is the outcry? Is this not animal abuse? Are these government goons not laughing and whooping it up as they mindlessly cull these herds?
THAT DOES IT. Hate to tell you, but, Rico, you’re an idiot. Certifiable. You had to pop up to argue precisely to drop some poop on what this lady is trying to do, to sensitize people about the simple fact that there is no such thing as “animals for food,” or “food animals” or whatever way you want to put it. Just animals. And we’re animals, too, only far luckier in having evolved in ways that enable us to do as we please with otehrs, a capability we squander in tyranny and exploitation.
Such differentiations are self-serving, self-justifying human constructs. Your argument is like a Nazi saying, “well, we grew us some Jews for fun…and for slave duty, so we’re entitled to killing them, eating them, shooting them for sport, or whatever, because they were brought up for that!” Some justification!
Your speciesist (look it up!) blindness is so thick that I doubt you’ll ever get rid of it; it’s a disease that corrodes your little pathetic soul. You and your contemptible tribe of mindless exploiters of everything standing—from animals to the air, to mountains to oceans, depleting and fouling everything—hide behind such pathetic arguments. And let me tell you something: socialists in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and other places copied a lot of the models of production of the West—misguidedly— because they industrialized in a hurry, under forced march, under war conditions practically. Environmentalism was not in the forefront of discussion then and when it was, it was a bit too late. All of which you know little about, except for propaganda, and care even less. (Although as a displaced Brit with some colonial antecedents you keep harping about Zimbabwe as if this topic was only about that…of course we censure the Zimbabwe idiots who kill and torment animals. Black, white, zebra, whatever the color…We don’t make distinctions of that sort, and you probably know it, but are too dishonest to admit it.)
Meantime, the planet and the animals and everyone else had to be raped for another 70 years so we’d begin to see the handiwork of our cute species. The only species on the face of the planet that is actually killing its host due to unbridled growth and selfishness. Let’s see, what do we call that in medicine? Oh: Cancer! A raging cancer. And you and your ilk are like cancer cells. Care to dispute the diagnosis?
rico, your complacent allegiance to capitalism and libertarian bullshit are worthy of the little stupid guy that you are. Your snide comparisons and questions are transparently loaded and irritating. What the fuck are you doing on this site? Get the fuck out and go with your misguided kind, to continue the killing of the planet, the inegalitarianism, all the ills that Mammon, your God (although you’d deny it), and selfishness can bestow on you and your kind. I bet you also claim to be a Christian in good standing or something along those lines What a laugh. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit.
# rico on 21 Nov 2007 at 12:12 am
Horrible stuff, of course. But we have to remember that most of these animals, if they were not being raised for food, would not exist in the first place!
Lol Rico…. Now what if reincarnation exists? You cant know that.
And even if you dont believe in that, then the animals would be better off not being born at all.
Its shelfish to think that you are the master of it all and can decide whats best for the animals, decide that : oh its better that they live, better then no life at all!
Oh yippee…because their life is full of joy and freedom. Right?
They are being tortured there. If it was me and I would know what would happen to me, on what kind of planet they would put me I would say: no thanks, erase me please.
What about breeding some humans and clone them, do some tests on em, or just have our ways
Its better for them then never have lived at all right 