Some Disturbing News about Organic, Free Range, & SWAP Meat Products

The following was taken from the GoVeg.com website:

Labels

Animal products with labels designed to make us feel good about eating animals are typically not much better for the animals themselves than the regular animal products are, but they are also nearly as harmful to our health. The only advantage that organic products have is that they are not laced with arsenic, antibiotics, or hormones.

Labels such as organic, free-range, and SWAP hide the truth – animal products with these labels almost always come from animals who were confined to filthy sheds, deprived of almost everything that is natural and important to them, and sent to a violent death, often at the same slaughterhouses used by factory farms.

As people become more aware of the horrors of factory farming, companies are responding by adding labels to their products with comforting words such as “organic,” “free-range,” “cage-free,” and “natural.” These labels may conjure up images of animals who roam freely in green pastures, but the reality of life and death for animals on organic and free-range farms is very different.

Chickens (turkeys and fish) are exempt from the Humane Slaughter Act, so they have no federal protection from the most egregious cruelty in slaughterhouses.

Why the Humane Slaughter Act and the USDA Fail to Prevent Cruelty to Animals:
http://www.goveg.com/government_hsa.asp

Birds who are to be labeled free-range must only have access to the outdoors, and many chickens and turkeys who are sold under the free-range label never leave their filthy sheds because they’ve been bred and drugged to grow so obese that they can no longer walk.

Washington State University farm expert Terry Swagerty confirms that most free-range chickens never go outside because, he says, “They’re not bred for mobility. They’re bred for hogging down food.”

Transport and Slaughter of Organic and Free-Range Animals

There are no standards regulating the treatment of organic, free-range, or cage-free animals during transport and slaughter, and many of these animals are shipped on trucks through all weather extremes to the same slaughterhouses used by factory farms. At the slaughterhouse, the animals are hung upside-down and their throats are cut, often while they are still conscious and struggling to escape. Some are still conscious when they are forced into the scalding-hot water of the defeathering tanks or when their bodies are hacked apart.

If you’re buying organic or free-range animal products because you think that the animals were given kind deaths, you are sadly mistaken. Read more about what happens to animals during transport and at slaughterhouses.

    

“Consumers can really be fooled. Some farms can qualify for free range, but they raise [turkeys] in the same conditions as industrial farms.” – Turkey farmer Mary Pitman

Pork

 

The Swine Welfare Assurance Program allows its factory farmers to cram mother pigs into filthy crates so small that they can’t even turn around, pump the animals so full of drugs that many become crippled, and kill sick pigs by swinging them head first into concrete floors, in a cruel practice known as “thumping.”

Farmed Fish

The meat industry has also been promoting farm-raised fish as a sustainable alternative to wild-caught fish. What the industry doesn’t want you to know is that farm-raised fish must be fed 5 pounds of wild-caught fish in order to produce just 1 pound of meat, making aquafarming worse — by a factor of five — than commercial fishing, which is destroying our aquatic eco-systems. Fish farms cause fish to suffer too — conditions on some aquafarms are so horrendous that as many as 40 percent of the fish die before farmers can kill and package them for food. Farmed-fish flesh contains contaminants such as mercury, dioxins, PCBs, and other toxins.

Beef

Cows are gentle giants, large in size but sweet in nature. They are curious, clever animals who have been known to go to amazing lengths to escape from slaughterhouses. These very social animals prefer to spend their time together, and they form complex relationships, very much like dogs form packs.

Like all animals, cows form strong maternal bonds with their children, and on dairy farms and cattle ranches, mother cows can be heard crying out for their calves for days after they are separated.

In the U.S., more than 41 million of these sensitive animals suffer and die for the meat and dairy industries every year. When they are still very young, cows are burned with hot irons (branding), their testicles are ripped out of their scrotums (castration), and their horns are cut or burned off — all without painkillers. Once they have grown big enough, they are sent to massive, muddy feedlots to be fattened for slaughter or to dairy farms, where they will be repeatedly impregnated and separated from their calves until their bodies give out and they are sent to die.

Many cows die on the way to slaughter, and those who survive are shot in the head, hung up by their legs, and taken onto the killing floor, where their throats are cut and they are skinned. Some cows remain fully conscious throughout the entire process—according to one slaughterhouse worker, in an interview with the Washington Post, “they die piece by piece.”

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Some Insight on Halal Chicken Slaughter Practices: 
(provided by texastexas.com)

THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS SHOW THE KILLING OF CHICKENS IN ACCORDANCE WITH HALAL  RELIGIOUS LAWS

Halal for Moslems is like Kosher for Jews.  Animals are killed in strict accordance with the Koran (Islamic “Bible”). 

   

Rae Sikora on “Humanely” Raised and Slaughtered Birds
(www.chai.org.il)

Most people assume that if a bird is called “organic,” it is not specially bred for the purpose of meat consumption. On the contrary, organic turkeys, on this farm and others, are specifically bred to gain weight quickly. In about 18 weeks they go from being young chicks to fat adults. The problem with this breeding is that the bird’s legs cannot handle the weight of their bodies, and many of the birds are completely lame and cannot even make it to their food or water. We saw the last 60 of the 1000 turkeys to be slaughtered. We saw them on their last day. Some were stuck in the straw, struggling to make it to food and water, but unable to get up and walk. Their vulnerable position made them the target for eye pecking and harassment by the other stronger birds. The dead ones had been removed earlier that day. The birds receive no veterinary care during their lives.

I stood there struck by the words “only two minutes.” … A minute is a long time. Two minutes hanging upside down with your major arteries cut is a long time…

… I asked the young harvester if doing his job was difficult. He looked suddenly very thoughtful and replied, “It was hard at first, but then it gets easier. But everyday this is hard for me to do.” They described the procedure. The birds are “gently” pushed into wall mounted funnels head first and upside down. Their heads hang below the large opening at the base of the funnel. The young harvester then slices the large arteries on the sides of the bird’s neck. A bucket catches the blood below. In the words of the harvester: “I slice with a clean 100 dollar surgical knife. I am careful not to cut the airway. We need them alive and breathing and bleeding to drain all the blood out or it gets too messy in the next step. It is very fast. It only takes two minutes for the blood to all drain out. They are breathing the whole time and their legs are kicking, but it is mostly just nerves.”

We toured the entire facility from the pasture to the freezer filled with hundreds of tidy packaged birds. After the tour, my friend and I walked slowly toward my car, obviously a little shocked by our experience. I knew at that moment that I would like everyone who chooses to eat a bird or other animal labeled “humanely raised” or “organic” or “free range” to be required to visit the facility that supplies their meat. I doubt most would choose to support these industries. I am also quite sure that most people could not actively take part in the violent processes required to produce their meat. Nothing should be hidden behind the seemingly guilt-free labels of “humanely raised,” “free-range,” or “organic.”

I have met many “used-to-be vegetarians” who have returned to a meat-based diet because of the availability of animal products labeled “humane” or “organic.” These misleading labels give people permission to turn their backs on the violent reality of eating living beings.

Other sources of info:
http://www.ethicurean.com/2006/09/24/killing-chickens/
http://www.vegforlife.org/animals_how.htm

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