Written by Michelle Kretzer
As it turns out, people are genuinely taken by surprise when they find out where sausage meat comes from, as evidenced by this amusing Portuguese video showing what happens when a fake butcher pretends to make sausage from scratch.
It sounds like the plot of a Disney movie, but this video of a pig and dog who are best buds would warm even Walt's cryogenically frozen heart.
"Don't mind me." After committing the most adorable case of breaking and entering ever, a baby seal curled up on a New Zealand woman's couch for a nap.
Can you do a good "fish face"? These people are spot-on. … Or are the fish doing a spot-on "human face"?
Would you like an awkward conversation about the facts of life with that? A 7-year-old girl and her mother allegedly discovered a condom in the child's McDonald's Happy Meal.
Talk about a return on your investment: Eight years after she went missing, a dog is going home to her family, thanks to a tiny, inexpensive microchip.
And a chicken named Liberty, dubbed Britain's "last battery hen" is headed home too. She will enjoy retirement on a farm with other hens who were formerly confined to battery cages as the U.K.'s ban on the cruel confinement system goes into effect for the new year.
Smithfield Foods, Inc., the world's largest pig supplier, announced yesterday that it will phase out gestation crates for pregnant sows by 2017. Let's hope it keeps its word this time. Smithfield has promised this before.
Female pigs at Smithfield are forced into continuous cycles of pregnancy and birth, only to have their piglets ripped away from them within weeks. The pregnant pigs are confined to metal-barred gestation crates so small that they are nearly immobilized.
In 2007, Smithfield agreed to phase out the crates in 10 years. The decision followed pressure from animal advocates, including PETA's public protests, meetings with Smithfield executives, and a shareholder resolution to ban the crates. But after two years, the company dropped the plan, citing economic woes.
Last month, PETA launched a "hashtag hijack," flooding a Smithfield Twitter event with tweets from supporters demanding the end of gestation crates. Smithfield has now agreed but has given itself another five years to comply and said the ban would apply only to farms owned by the company, not its many contract farms.
A company that earned record profits last year off the misery of pigs could start today to end one of its worst abuses. And it should require its contract farmers to do the same. Hopefully, Smithfield won't renege again and will listen to our calls to ban all gestation crates. Animal advocates can continue to cut into the company's profit margins by refusing to eat Smithfield products—or any pigs.
Written by Heather Faraid Drennan
The turdoggie hybrid we rolled out on billboards just in time for Thanksgiving proved so popular that we decided to return to the laboratory and craft a new creation for Christmas—the puplet:
Dog: © iStockphoto.com/Angelika Schwarz • Pig: © iStockphoto.com/Clint Scholz
Pigs are a lot more like dogs than you might think. Piglets and puppies both love to play and have their ears scratched, and they can easily master skills like sit, fetch, and jump. When in their natural surroundings—not on factory farms—pigs are social, playful, protective animals who bond with each other, make nests, relax in the sun, and cool off in the mud. Pigs are known to dream and recognize their own names, and they are thought to be more intelligent than 3-year-old human children. And just like kids—and dogs—pigs don't want to be eaten.
To celebrate a compassionate Christmas, keep the ham off the table and whip up a pig-friendly feast with the holiday recipes available on our "Living" page.
Written by PETA
Hundreds of pigs were burned alive when an electrical fire destroyed the barn in which they were crammed at a factory farm in Utah operated by Murphy-Brown, LLC, a subsidiary of notorious pig abuser Smithfield Foods, Inc. Gruesome pictures taken by a news crew on the scene show a mass of charred bodies piled on the floor of the building.
An emergency response coordinator for the area reported that he thought some of the pigs had survived, but considering the fact that any survivors face a fate that is hardly less ghastly, it is hard to hope for that. As one former Smithfield employee recounted:
“[P]igs are shocked with a stun gun and thrown onto a conveyor belt, where their legs and feet are tied and their necks are broken in a bizarre machine. Not even a second later, they're hung upside-down on a meat hook and sliced open. Their guts are scooped out and thrown into a trash can, which ends up next door to be processed as ‘other’ pig products. The swinging bodies are still twitching as they continue on to be cut up into smaller pieces. Blood and guts are everywhere.”
Please share this post with your meat-eating friends and tell them that if they are opposed to cruelty to animals, they should put their opposition into action by ordering PETA’s free vegetarian/vegan starter kit today.
Written by Michelle Sherrow
Just how greedy are pork producers? The National Meat Association (NMA) is challenging a California law that requires the euthanasia of pigs who are too weak or sick to stand when they arrive at slaughterhouses. A lawyer representing the NMA noted that this means that many slaughterhouses would have to euthanize up to 300 pigs every single day—a "financial impact" that the pork industry apparently is not willing to take lying down.
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider the case next week in order to decide whether states have the authority to implement laws like this one governing slaughterhouses. If the justices rule in favor of California, the case could set a precedent that would encourage more states to enact broader animal welfare laws for pigs and other animals.
Does the meat industry need to be required by law to do the right thing? You bet it does. Downed animals are often dragged, prodded, or bulldozed into the slaughterhouse. PETA's investigations at pig factory farms have shown that workers beat, kick, and bludgeon sick or injured animals with gate rods and hammers and slam them against concrete floors. A PETA undercover investigator at a Hormel supplier's pig-breeding factory farm in Iowa saw a supervisor kick an injured pig as she dragged herself out of a crate and a worker laugh as the supervisor shot her in the head with a captive-bolt gun.
Don't wait for the courts to do the right thing. Rule in animals' favor today by adopting a healthy vegan diet and encouraging everyone you know to do the same.
About 195 live pigs were hurled to the ground—killing or leaving at least 47 so badly injured that even industry workers knew that they had to be killed—after a slaughterhouse-bound transport truck ran off the road, flipped onto its side, and crashed into a pole in Suffolk, Virginia, early this morning. This crash, which happened on a clear day on a relatively straight road, is at least the ninth accident involving pigs who were being transported to a Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse in southeastern Virginia since 2004.
The pork industry's shameful history of hiring reckless drivers has left the mangled remains of countless pigs on Virginia highways and jeopardized the safety of other motorists. The driver cited for reckless driving in this crash, William Orville Barnett, allegedly violated federal transportation safety laws twice last year. Also last year, a driver hauling 80 pigs for Smithfield Foods subsidiary Murphy-Brown, LLC, crashed in Chesterfield County, Virginia, killing more than 45 of the pigs. The driver—who was charged with reckless driving and failure to maintain control—had three months earlier crashed a truck in North Carolina while hauling 46 cows. Virginia court records indicate that the driver had been previously cited for failure to obey a traffic signal and speeding. In spite of all this, Murphy-Brown put him behind the wheel to drive pigs hundreds of miles across the country.
Despite the pork industry's attempts to hide the aftermath of these horrific crashes by putting up tarps and even asking police officers to make PETA investigators in public areas put away their cameras, PETA has captured extensive video footage of workers as they abuse, cruelly kill, and leave injured pigs to suffer after wrecks. Only three years ago—on the very road on which today's crash occurred—workers pulled terrified 270-pound animals by their sensitive ears and slapped and hit them in the face with tools that even the pork industry says should never be used to hit animals. PETA has also documented that workers at crash sites reloaded debilitated and severely injured pigs—including those whose internal organs were protruding from their anuses—for transport and left immobile pigs to suffer and be trampled for hours before repeatedly driving steel bolts into their skulls in botched attempts to kill them.
The pork industry desperately needs to enact and enforce a zero-tolerance safe-driver policy—for everyone's sake—but the best way to protect pigs and other animals from suffering in accidents as well as on factory farms and in slaughterhouses is by leaving them off our plates.
Friday marked an inspiring victory for pigs, who were routinely being cut apart, surgically mutilated, and killed as part of an elective medical training course at Germany's University of Ulm. Just two hours after PETA Germany asked supporters to contact university officials, the university announced that it would be permanently ending the pig lab!
Medical students and doctors at the university were performing invasive surgeries on live pigs, including cutting out their gallbladders, removing part of their stomachs and livers, and cutting holes in their chests. Using live animals is a crude and archaic method of teaching surgery, and more and more leading institutions have adopted the use of sophisticated human simulators in place of animals. In fact, the use of animals for this purpose appears to violate German law, which requires the use of non-animal teaching methods whenever they are available.
PETA U.S. assisted PETA Germany by drafting a comprehensive brief for University of Ulm officials that described humane, non-animal options for teaching the procedures that students were performing on pigs.
While the University of Ulm is modernizing its curriculum, here at home, the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) still mutilates and kills live pigs in trauma training exercises by cutting holes in their throats and chests, despite the availability of superior, non-animal training methods. Tell MUSC President Raymond Greenberg to end the barbaric training exercises on animals immediately.
No animals were arrested in the making of this protest, but yesterday in Zuccotti Park Liberty Square, a "pig," "cow," and "chicken" joined the Occupy Wall Street protesters to push for more corporate accountability. Our animals were at the center of a whirlwind of police, photographers, protesters, and intrigued passersby who stopped to read the animals' posters and pick up copies of PETA's vegetarian/vegan starter kit.
Bearing delicious vegan pizzas, the animals—representing 100 percent of the animals raised for food in the U.S.—brought attention to the fact that corporate greed is responsible for billions of animals' being treated like cogs in a meat machine rather than the intelligent, sensitive individuals they are.
On factory farms, pigs have their tails and testicles cut off without being given any painkillers; cows are fattened for slaughter on barren, filthy feed lots; and chickens are crammed by the tens of thousands into airless sheds, where their accumulated waste results in ammonia-laden air that burns their eyes and throats.
To opt out of the corporate abuse of animals, order your own free vegetarian/vegan starter kit and get busy breaking down the barricades to protecting animals, your health, and the planet.
The meat industry thrives on the abuse of animals, so it comes as no surprise that former pig factory-farm workers are alleging that the management of Murphy-Brown—a subsidiary of the world's largest pig producer, Smithfield Foods—turned a blind eye to sexual harassment of female employees.
In a case that went before a federal jury this week, one woman claims that female staff were groped by male coworkers, were spied on in the shower via peepholes, and had their underwear stolen from their lockers. The harassment allegedly went on for years despite complaints to supervisors. It is worth noting that the men accused of the harassment—said to include putting what is suspected to be semen on women's underwear—worked at a breeding farm where sows were artificially inseminated, which is typically done by men armed with bags of boar semen and tubes that they shove into pigs' reproductive tracts.
Unfortunately, PETA investigations show that failure to discipline workers for sexual abuse seems to be standard policy at many factory farms, particularly when the victims are animals.
Our investigators have recorded many incidents of sexual abuse of animals, including a Hormel Foods Corp. supplier's farm supervisor who rammed a cane into a pig's vagina; an Aviagen Turkeys, Inc., employee who pinned a female turkey to the ground and mimicked raping her; and a Butterball employee who repeatedly shoved a finger into a turkey's cloaca. After the footage was released, six of the Hormel supplier's workers admitted guilt to charges of livestock abuse and neglect, and three Aviagen employees were convicted after facing the first-ever felony indictments for cruelty to farmed birds by factory-farm workers in the U.S.
You can avoid supporting the sexual abuse of both animals and humans by choosing a vegan diet—and urging everyone you know to do the same.
If you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to an animal, please click here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.
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