On May 24, 2000, King5.com news service in Seattle, WA, broke a story about undercover footage taken at a nearby slaughterhouse. According to their report, “the video shows fallen cows being trampled and dragged, others are tortured with electric prods. One cow has fallen and workers stick an electric prod on its head, then place the prod down its mouth. Still other cows are hung on chains, fully conscious, blinking and kicking. The worker who shot the tape said one cow was already at a station where its legs were being removed.”
This is only a taste of what goes on in the pork and cow slaughterhouses all around the world. These reports are hard to come along because of how secretive and protected the slaughterhouses are.
This neglect turns around to affect our health because this is the food that we consume in basically everything we eat. There are many meat recalls each year and cases of E-Coli that is intertwined with the meats we consume. It is ignorant of consumers to turn a cheek to the abuse going on in these slaughterhouses. There is no connection between the packaged meats we buy and an actual living, breathing animal. We need to gain that connection once again.
This is the food we put into our mouths and our families’ mouths every single day. Does sanitation even cross your mind? The treatment of the animals we eat is inhumane and downright disgusting. Consumers, like you and I, need to take a stand and fight this or else unnecessary diseases will continue to spread through consumption of bacteria-infected meats and poultry. Let’s fight to open the doors of slaughterhouses to be shown to the world and use public awareness pressure to eliminate the horrific abuses in the slaughterhouses.
To eradicate this horrific way of business, the first step is public awareness of these conditions. Although the abuse of animals in slaughterhouses also includes chicken farms, let’s focus on the treatment of cows and pigs.
The USDA inspected Nebraska slaughterhouses and found them routinely skinning live cattle, immersing squealing pigs in scalding water, and overall abuse of still conscious animals to keep up the production lines. Furthermore, USDA veteran Lester Friedlander, witnessed plant workers cutting the feet, ears, and utters off cattle that were conscious, blinking and moving on the production lines after stun guns failed to work properly.
Need to hear more? In 2007 and 2008, a set of investigations held by The Des Moines Register saw that workers were abusing sick and disabled cattle and dragging the cows to get slaughtered. In the same investigation, hogs were left hanging live from one leg while workers sat on their lunch breaks. Also workers were shocking the pigs three or four times before the live squealing hogs were immersed into the death bath.
Do I even need to say what the point of all this is?
Slaughterhouses have kept their secrets and disturbing tactics undercover for way too long now. It is time us consumers step up and stop this continuous harm to innocent animals and poisoning to our foods. If we do not do something, treatment of cattle and pigs will run out of control. Who knows what other brutal things these big businesses can do just to speed up their assembly line. It will get to the point where we do not know what is even in our meat, if we even do now.
We cannot turn our cheek to this mistreatment any longer, it is inhume and we will end up paying the price. Our children and family members will continue to be poisoned by the disgusting meat we eat every single day. By you eating the meat you do every day you are supporting this treatment and the health risks. Make a change today.