Animal Aid

Each year in the UK, around 1,000 million animals are killed for food. Modern intensive farming exists to produce meat and dairy products as quickly and cheaply as possible. To keep production costs down the animals are given the bare minimum they need to survive.

You might see happy farmyard scenes painted on egg boxes or in TV ads but the reality is very different. Huge, stinking sheds are crammed full of miserable animals who are deprived of everything that makes life worth living. They can hardly stretch their wings or legs and will never be able to roam. Millions will never even lie down comfortably.

Most farmed animals are slaughtered at just a few weeks or months old. Apologists for the industry pretend that, because the animals are purpose-bred on a farm, it is OK to treat them cruelly and then kill and eat them. Yet these animals are sentient creatures who feel pain and fear just like a cat, dog, or, indeed, a human being.

Which animals?

Pigs

Contrary to popular belief, pigs like to keep themselves clean and are not happy wallowing in excrement. Yet the majority of farmed pigs are often forced to live standing and lying in their own waste. Condemned to a life of misery and squalor, their need for company, to investigate their environment, play, root and mother their young are all thwarted.

Approximately 80 per cent of UK breeding sows are housed permanently indoors and are repeatedly made pregnant and their babies taken away from them. The sows are put into 'farrowing crates' - one of the most barbaric tools of the factory farming industry - about a week before they give birth and are kept there for about a month after.

Farrowing crates are barren, metal and concrete cages designed to restrict the sow's movements so that she cannot accidentally crush her young. They prevent the mothers from stepping forwards or backwards or even turning round: for the duration of their restraint, all they can do is stare at the wall in front of them.

Although the natural weaning process takes two to three months, piglets are usually taken away at three to four weeks so that their mothers can be impregnated again. The growing piglets are raised in concrete pens. Such barren conditions cause boredom and aggression. Piglets are subjected to mutilations such as tail-docking and teeth-clipping to prevent them wounding each other, or - during the suckling period - biting their mothers’ teats. Bred to grow much faster than nature intended, piglets are often unable to support their own weight. Heart and respiratory problems are endemic. A lifetime spent on hard concrete floors causes breeding sows to suffer a high incidence of lameness.

Infections run rife on pig farms due to the filth, the heat and the overcrowded conditions. Their feed is laced with antibiotics, simply to keep them alive.

After four to seven months, pigs not selected for breeding purposes are sent for slaughter. Breeding sows are killed at 3 or 4 years old. Invariably lame and exhausted from continuous pregnancies, they are turned into cheap convenience foods such as sausages and pork pies.

At the slaughterhouse, pigs are first given a powerful electric shock to their head - an attempt to render them ‘insensible to pain’ - before their throats are stabbed with a knife (known as ‘sticking’).

A three-year study of 29 slaughterhouses in the UK revealed that stunning is often ineffective. In one study, 35 per cent of the pigs were found to have been stunned in the wrong position, and an average of 30 seconds elapsed between stunning and sticking - enough time for the animal to regain consciousness.

Chickens

In the wild, chickens spend their days pecking at the ground for food and dustbathing. But in modern poultry farms they are crammed by their thousands into dark sheds and throughout their short lives remain unable to express their natural instincts.

Chickens reared for meat are called 'broilers'. On average, a modern 'broiler' house holds around 45,000 birds but some units have populations exceeding 100,000.

By the end of their six week growing cycle the tiny chicks who were put into the sheds have become unnaturally large birds, and are squashed into a severely cramped space. To get to the food and water points, the birds must push their way through a solid mass of other chickens but many do not make it. Severe over-crowding is one reason for this. Another is the fact that the birds are fattened up so quickly that their legs may not be able to support their own bodies. Millions - around 6 per cent or approximately 52 million birds each year - collapse under the strain and die before they even reach slaughter weight. Their deaths are inconsequential to the poultry farmers who view the loss as an expected, and acceptable, part of their industry.

Broiler chickens are vulnerable to a host of health problems including fatty livers and kidneys, heart attacks, septicaemia, and deformities caused by arthritis together with the stress of carrying so much weight on young bones. Because their growth rate is so rapid, their hearts and lungs struggle to maintain sufficient oxygen levels, resulting in breathlessness. They are given drugs in an attempt to fend off disease but their short lives are filled with pain and suffering.

Turkeys

Turkeys aren't only eaten at Christmas - around 20 million are slaughtered throughout the year in the UK. Many of the same welfare problems associated with chicken production are found in the turkey industry. Modern turkeys have been genetically selected for high meat yields and to fatten in as short a time as possible. They have a natural life span of approximately 10 years, yet factory farmed turkeys are slaughtered at 12-26 weeks. In this short period, they may grow to nearly twice the size of their predecessors of only 25 years ago. As with broiler chickens, their legs are frequently unable to carry the weight of their ballooning bodies and they collapse and die of thirst and starvation.

Disease is widespread on commercial turkey farms, resulting in approximately 1.4 million turkeys (or 7% of the total) dying in their sheds every year. Ulcerated feet and hock burns are common - caused by the birds having to live their lives standing in urine and excreta-soaked litter on the shed floors.

Ducks and Quail

In the wild, ducks would spend much of their time paddling and swimming, yet today they, too, are factory farmed. Each year in the UK, about 18 million ducks are farmed and killed for food. Subjected to the dark, dirty and cramped conditions typical of all poultry farms, they also have to endure the cruelty of being denied one of their most basic needs: access to water. Preventing these largely-aquatic birds from swimming, preening and dipping their heads in water has serious consequences for their physical well-being. Farmed ducks often exhibit poor feathers and eye problems - even blindness - from not being able to submerge their heads in water.

The natural lifespan of a duck is around 15 years, yet factory farmed ducks are slaughtered after just seven weeks.

Even quail - tiny, wild birds - are now crammed into cages and reared in factory farms.

Egg laying hens

Egg laying hens are a different breed from the chickens kept for meat production (known as ‘broilers’). Most of today’s eggs come from battery farms where four or five hens are packed into cages barely bigger than a microwave oven. It is estimated that 66 per cent of the total UK egg-laying population of 30 million hens are currently kept in battery cages. The government has banned battery cages from 2012 but the cages they propose to replace them with, called ‘enriched cages’, are barely any better. Some hens are kept in barns and, although uncaged, the conditions are still filthy and overcrowded. Millions of ‘useless’ day-old male chicks are gassed or shredded alive because they can’t lay eggs and, being the ‘wrong’ type of chicken, they won't grow fat enough to be eaten.

Debeaking is commonplace on factory farms. The living conditions lead to high levels of stress which can encourage feather pecking and pulling. In order to prevent the birds injuring each other they have the tips of their beaks sliced off. However, in spite of this routine mutilation, poultry farms are still full of wounded birds with big bald patches and gaping holes pecked out of them.

Just because you see sheep, lambs, cows and calves out in the fields, doesn’t mean that they don't suffer. They are still mass-produced and subjected to a ruthless production and fattening regime which involves the administration of drugs, close confinement for long periods, the removal of their young at an early age, and painful mutilations such as tail docking, horn ‘debudding’ and castration, which seriously compromises their welfare.

Cows

Cows do not naturally produce an endless supply of milk. A cow will feed her calf for approximately six to eight months but, if she does not become pregnant again, the milk will dry up. To keep the milk flowing and supply the dairy industry with the millions of litres it demands, cows are subjected to an endless cycle of pregnancies. The resulting calves are taken from their mothers at a few days old so that the milk meant for them can be bottled up and sold to humans. Separation of mother and infant causes acute anxiety and suffering to both animals.

The fate of the calves is one of the dairy industry’s dirty secrets. Some females replace worn-out cows in the dairy herd. Males are often regarded as waste by-products because demand is limited for the ‘low quality’ beef for which some are reared. ‘Surplus’ calves are shot or sent on punishing journeys to continental veal farms.

Dairy cows are increasingly overworked. Through selective breeding they are forced to produce as much as 60 litres of milk every day - six times more than is natural. Thirty per cent of the total UK milk yield comes from ‘zero grazed’ cows who are permanently confined in sheds and yards and never graze in fields.

Even the cows not zero grazed spend half of their lives packed into sheds that are often dirty, crowded and damp. The hard, concrete floors, to which their hooves are not suited, are a major cause of lameness. Another cause is their swollen udders, which prevent them from standing and walking properly. Many dairy cows suffer from laminitis, an agonising inflammation of the feet. Around 20 per cent of UK dairy cows are lame at any one time.

Due to relentless milking, every year 30-60 per cent of British cows suffer from mastitis, an acutely painful infection causing swollen, weeping udders. Traces of pus from infected teats seep into the milk.

No wonder many dairy cows - who naturally live up to 25 years - are slaughtered by the age of five for use in cheap meat products. By then, they are often emaciated and infertile.

Sheep and Lambs

People see sheep in the driving rain and snow or in scorching heat and think it’s all perfectly natural. But wild animals do not stand about in fields in fierce weather as sheep are forced to do; they take cover but there is invariably no shelter for sheep. Nor can they rely upon enough feed, or even sufficient drinking water.

In addition, ewes are forced into producing more lambs at the ‘wrong’ time of year. Every year some four million newborn lambs - about one in five of the total - die within a few days of birth, mostly from disease, exposure or malnutrition. Contrary to what some farmers say (in an attempt to justify the barbarity of fox hunting), fox predation is not responsible for the loss of so many lambs. Official figures show that foxes take less than one per cent and those they do take are likely to be already ailing. The high losses are due to neglect by farmers, working in an industry that exploits animals at every stage.

As a result of the burdens put on sheep, they suffer endemic lameness, miscarriage, infestation and infection. Each year, around one in 20 adult sheep die of cold, starvation, sickness, pregnancy complications or injury before they can be slaughtered. Often, they will die before a farmer even realises anything is wrong. Lambs who do survive are usually killed for food at around four months old.

Goats

Given the chance, goats love life – they like to roam, to browse, to run, jump and climb but inside British farms, their instincts are denied them. Goats bred for their milk are typically zero grazed – that is, they are housed all year round as a matter of convenience. It is intensive farming. Some of the larger farms have thousands of goats kept permanently in barns. ‘Disbudding’ is commonplace. This is a painful procedure, acknowledged by one industry authority to be dangerous and life threatening. A hot iron is used to burn the horns off a kid within her first few days of life. The possibility of infection is great. The reasons goats are disbudded are twofold: so that they can fit easily into milking machinery; and to prevent the goats damaging one another in the stressful intensive conditions. As with cows, goats must be first made pregnant in order to produce commercial quantities of milk. Unwanted males are killed at birth.

Fish

It is almost impossible to count the number of fish who are killed each year but it runs into billions. Dragged out of the oceans in huge fishing nets, their eyes often pop out of their heads due to the change in pressure and they suffocate as they are crushed amongst millions of others. Tipped onto the decks of industrial trawlers, they are frequently gutted alive. Nets the size of football pitches are indiscriminate in their catch: turtles, dolphins and other ‘non-target’ species are caught up and killed or tossed - injured and stressed and therefore likely to perish - back into the water. Large fish such as tuna are caught on drag lines and may be pulled for miles being ripped to shreds in the process.

The suffering of fish is now well documented. Scientific reports have proven that they experience pain, fear and the natural instinct to survive, just as other animals do. The fact that fish may have led a ‘free range’ existence does not make their slaughter any more excusable or their deaths any less brutal and unnecessary.

Industrial farms breed fish in huge sunken pens, like battery cages under water. The fish are unable to swim freely and thrash about in filthy water until their time comes to be killed. Disease runs rife in such cramped conditions and they have to be dosed with drugs to kill parasites and keep infection at bay. Fish farms wreak havoc on the environment due to the amount of concentrated effluent that is discharged into the surrounding waters.

Most fish are gutted whilst still alive or are left to suffocate. The whole commerical fishing process, totally ungoverned by humane protocols, let alone laws, could be the greatest animal welfare scandal of our time.

Free range does not mean cruelty free!

‘Free range’ is a very misleading term that suggests animals living a natural lifestyle with minimal restraints on their freedom and behaviour. The conditions free-range animals can be kept in are much more confined than people would imagine. Although given more room than factory farmed animals, those reared under free-range systems can still be kept intensively in small living spaces with restricted access to the outdoors. Thousands of ‘free range’ chickens are still packed into huge windowless sheds where disease is rife and mortality rates are high. In such cramped conditions, not all birds are able to reach the exit, as they would have to fight their way to an opening. As a result, many birds never have access to an outside area. Whether in a windowless shed or out in the field, animals are subjected to painful mutilations, such as de-beaking, de-horning and tail docking.

The label ‘organic’ also implies higher welfare standards but being organic is no guarantee that the animals lived free-range. While organically-farmed and free range animals have a better quality of life than factory farmed animals, they will be subjected to the same trauma of transport to the slaughterhouse and the same terrifying, bloody death.

More, more, more!

Animals are now being genetically selected and manipulated to produce more milk, more meat, more eggs and more offspring. Battery hens lay 20 times more eggs than they would naturally. Dairy cows produce around ten times more milk than their calves could consume. And still research into increased productivity continues. Farmed animals are regarded as mere units of production. Their bodies are pushed to the limits in order to produce the most amount of meat in the shortest possible time. As a result, farmed animals suffer from health problems including crippling deformities of the legs and feet and heart attacks.

Disease

In recent years, a string of diseases have been found in farmed animals that have threatened both animals and people. According to a government-commissioned inquiry, Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE) - which transfers to people in the lethal form of vCJD - was caused by feeding infected cow and sheep remains to cows who are natural herbivores. Modern-day factory-farming methods caused this national disaster.

In 2001, millions of farmed animals were killed and burnt to stop the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, a highly infectious illness that affects pigs, sheep, cattle and goats. Foot-and-mouth was said to have originated in a filthy, ramshackle pig farm and spread as animals were transported between farms, and to markets and slaughterhouses around the country.

The salmonella virus, a potentially fatal type of food poisoning, is rife on poultry farms. The more we stress and exploit animals under modern systems of intensive rearing, the weaker the animals will become and the more they will fall prey to disease. Farmed animals are fed drugs, including antibiotics in an attempt to keep them ‘healthy’. These, in turn, are ingested by people eating their dead bodies or milk and egg products.

Markets

Millions of farmed animals every year spend a punishing day at market before being sent to slaughter or on to another farm for further ‘fattening’. Markets are an additional and totally unnecessary layer of suffering for these already exploited animals.

The market is a place of confusion and physical violence. Animals may arrive at market sick or injured, or sustain injuries during the day. Frequently, no veterinary attention is received. Animals are beaten on and off of lorries, through the network of pens and metal ‘races’ into and out of the sales rings. The casual brutality of many market users and employees makes it more difficult for frightened animals to remain calm.

It is rare for any of the roughly 14 million animals passing through English markets every year to have access to water, even on the hottest days. The same is true of those bartered through the Scottish and Welsh sales.

Further problems are caused by the ramshackle nature of most markets and the fact that there is still no compulsory training requirement for those handling the animals. Even children have been witnessed using sticks and electric goads on animals.

In 1993, following the publication of our first undercover report on livestock markets, Animal Aid established a network of voluntary market monitors to help combat cruelty and suffering at such sales. The initiative became known as MarketWatch. Since then, and with vital help from the monitors, we have produced three further major reports on markets - each of them supported by undercover footage. The impact these dossiers have had on the way bartered animals are treated has been positive and significant. However, despite the improvements of recent years, not least inspired by Animal Aid's own work, major problems persist. Animals continue to be subjected to aggressive and neglectful treatment that often constitutes a breach of the market welfare laws and/or Code of Practice. Enforcement of animal welfare legislation remains seriously deficient, with a lack of resources often blamed. The animals’ main lines of defence - the market operators, vets, local authority trading standards officers and DEFRA itself - are simply not working as they should.

The lives of all farmed animals come to a brutal, early ending at the slaughterhouse. Although they are supposed to be ‘stunned’ first to prevent them feeling any pain, many animals are not stunned correctly, due to unsuitable instruments being used and worker incompetence and lack of care. Many animals are still conscious when they are hung upside down to have their throats cut. There is also concern that, even when properly used, the stunning devices (electrical tongs and captive bolt guns) do not eliminate the animals’ pain. Birds are rendered unconscious by being dragged through an electrified tank of water, yet many raise their heads and miss the water completely. Slaughtermen are often paid for each animal killed. This encourages them to rush the process to make as much money as possible and clearly affects the amount of care they take to ensure each animal is properly stunned.

Go veggie!

If you really care about animals, the best way you can help is to stop eating them! The average meat-eater consumes around 5,000 animals in their lifetime. Think of all those lives YOU can save by going veggie!

Make your body a meat-free zone!

Vegetarians don't eat the flesh of any dead animals. We avoid all forms of meat, fish and slaughterhouse products, such as gelatine and animal fats. Vegans take things one step further and avoid all animal products including dairy, eggs and honey, and also avoid wearing animal skins and fibres (e.g. wool and silk).

By going veggie you'll be doing so much good: for the animals, your health, the planet and for other people, too.

Kick the habit

Meat contains saturated fats, which are a main cause of cancer, heart disease and stroke. Vegetarians are less likely to suffer from these and other diseases. You can get all the nutrients you need from eating a good veggie diet that is naturally low in fat and high in vitamins and fibre.

Environmentally unfriendly

Intensive animal farming causes soil erosion and land degradation. Methane gas from farmed animals contributes to global warming and waste from intensive farms is one of the main causes of water pollution. In Central America, 90 per cent of the rainforest has been cleared, primarily for cattle ranching and growing crops like soya to feed animals.

Save our seas

Commercial fishing fleets are stripping the oceans bare, catching dolphins, whales and turtles as well as billions of fish in nets the size of football pitches. Our oceans are on the point of environmental collapse and even politicians are expressing concern at the plummeting levels of some fish populations. Sea bird survival is being threatened because there is not enough fish for them to eat. Seals are killed to ‘protect’ fish that humans want to eat.

Feed the world

World hunger is at catastrophic levels. Yet in some countries, crops are grown to feed animals while people in the same country die of starvation. Rearing animals for food wastes resources. The same amount of land can feed up to 10 times as many people if crops are grown for human consumption rather than devoting it to the production of meat and dairy products.