Celebrate a Cruelty-Free Easter

As Christians remember Christ's crucifixion as the final sacrifice and celebrate His victory over death in the resurrection, let us resolve to emulate His compassion in their own lives by showing mercy to animals. There's no better place to begin than the dinner table. As we break bread, let's break ties with some of the most violent and ungodly places on Earth—slaughterhouses and factory farms.

Before they become Sunday's centerpiece, animals on factory farms are denied everything that God designed them to want and do. They never breathe fresh air, nurture their young, play with other animals, or do anything to live out the biblical concept that “God's mercy is over all His creatures.”

For example, pigs spend their entire lives in filthy concrete pens, and cruelty is rampant, as witnessed by PETA investigators. PETA's investigation of Belcross Farm, a pig-breeding facility in North Carolina, resulted in the first-ever felony indictments for cruelty to animals by farm workers in the U.S. PETA's recent undercover investigation at Seaboard Farms, Inc. has resulted in the filing of felony cruelty-to-animals charges against a former manager at the facility.

Easter is also no celebration for hens on egg farms, who suffer constant confinement to tiny, filthy wire cages. Male chicks are killed—often through suffocation—since they don't produce eggs, and female chicks have their beaks painfully seared off to keep them from pecking one another. Cows on dairy farms are kept continually impregnated, and their calves are snatched away just after birth so that their mothers' milk can be consumed by humans.

At the end of their short, miserable lives, these animals are crammed into trucks, with little protection from the elements, to suffer the ultimate terror of the slaughterhouse, where workers hang them upside-down and slit their throats.