Update: The CW affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, WWHO-TV, has agreed to air PETA's "Turkey Terrorism" TV spot twice a day from August 15 through 19 during Divorce Court and Judge Karen, two shows whose audience consists largely of stay-at-home parents who are often in charge of grocery shopping. 

 

It took months—and people in at least 26 states to fall victim to a super-antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella (with at least one known fatality)—for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to recall 36 million pounds of ground turkey.

While 36 million pounds is a lot of turkey, it's likely that far more than that is infected with sickening salmonella. In the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis, poultry was the most common source of foodborne illness in the United States. As you likely know, bacteria spread like wildfire on filthy factory farms.

Turkeys spend their lives crammed by the thousands into windowless sheds and mired in their own accumulated waste. To keep them alive in these conditions and to make them grow so abnormally large so quickly that they have trouble walking—which results in pressure on their hearts that causes more than a few of them to die before they reach the slaughterhouse floor—farmers feed the birds antibiotics, which leads to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Want to stick with turkey that won't make you sick or cause animal suffering? Look no further than delicious Tofurky products. Your body will thank you.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

You may remember Smithfield Foods' big January announcement that it is phasing out the use of gestation crates, followed shortly by Maple Leaf Foods' decision to follow suit, and Burger King's recent adoption of a new animal welfare plan that includes, among other things, reducing the amount of pig meat it purchases from suppliers that use crates. Well, we just got word from execs at another major pig meat producer (one of the world’s largest, in fact), Cargill Foods—which we had been encouraging to follow Smithfield’s lead—that it's going to come through in a big way: Cargill has stopped using gestation crates in 50 percent of its pig factory farms!

We’re not breaking out the champagne just yet, as the company hasn't agreed to a total phase-out of gestation crates, but this is a firm step in the right direction, and just another positive sign of big changes to come throughout the industry. Of course, PETA doesn't make a secret of the fact that we don’t want any pigs bred or slaughtered for food, but the pigs who are there right now don't have the luxury of hunkering down for a long campaign to win people's hearts and minds about the injustices of industrialized farming. While we keep pushing companies behind the scenes to stop torturing animals, like, at all, millions of animals right now will experience a significant improvement in the quality of their lives. Which is pretty good for a given work day. I'll let you know once they've gotten rid of gestation crates entirely. We're working on it.