MFA explains:

Upon reviewing the undercover footage, world-renowned animal behaviorist Dr. Jonathan Balcombe denounced the facility, stating that “this video depicts scenes of unbearable suffering and inexcusable neglect. … This farm should be closed down at once.”

Share the information by going here http://www.mercyforanimals.org/pigabuse/ and choosing “share on facebook.”

Just as how Smokey the Bear reminds us that “Only you can prevent forest fires” MFA reminds consumers that they can “prevent needless suffering of farmed animals by adopting a healthy and humane vegan diet.” Learn more about transitioning to a plant-based diet at http://chooseveg.com/

Farm to Fridge – The Truth Behind Meat Production from Mercy For Animals on Vimeo.

Then they took the video on the road in a national tour. A special truck equipped with video screens played the film for passersby from Los Angeles to New York.

Here are some of the videos of press coverage that the tour received:

Here’s what the HSUS says:

The investigator—who spent a month working inside a Smithfield-owned facility in Waverly, Va.— documented numerous abuses including the following:

Female breeding pigs were crammed inside “gestation crates” so small the animals could barely move for virtually their entire lives. The animals engaged in stereotypic behaviors such as biting the bars of crates, indicating poor well-being in the extreme confinement conditions. Some had bitten their bars so incessantly that blood from their mouths coated the fronts of their crates. The breeding pigs also suffered injuries from sharp crate protrusions and open pressure sores that developed from their unyielding confinement.

The investigator never saw a veterinarian at the operation. A barn manager told the investigator to ignore a pig with a basketball-sized abscess on her neck, and then cut the abscess open with an unsterilized razor.

Employees jabbed a lame pig’s neck and back with gate rods to force her to move.
Three times, the investigator informed employees that a pig was thrown into a dumpster alive. The animal had been shot in the forehead with a captive bolt gun, which is designed to render an animal unconscious, and was thrown in the dumpster still alive and breathing.

Employees mishandled piglets and tossed them into carts.

Some piglets prematurely born in gestation crates fell through the slats into the manure pits.
Watch the video and learn more here >>

“This new video exposes the truth behind commercial turkey production,  explores why these sensitive, social animals are worthy of our protection and encourages viewers to adopt a new Thanksgiving tradition.”

Learn more here: http://www.adoptaturkey.org/aat/media_center/thanksgiving_toll.html

In addition to illustrating the plight of modern turkeys, the video also explores why these sensitive, social animals are worthy of protection. With clips of rescued turkeys at Farm Sanctuary’s bicoastal shelters engaging in their daily routines and being honored with feasts of their own at the organization’s popular Celebration FOR the Turkeys, it gives viewers a glimpse into the emotional lives of these birds and shows that, just like cats and dogs, they too have feelings and desires all their own. As this section of the video puts a face on the suffering endured by the millions of turkeys slaughtered in the U.S. every year, it also tells viewers how they can help bring an end to cruelty and start a new holiday tradition by participating in Farm Sanctuary’s Adopt-A-Turkey Project.

“If you’re planning to put a turkey on your Thanksgiving table this year, please take seven minutes to watch this important video and understand what it took for that bird to get there,” says Farm Sanctuary President and Co-Founder Gene Baur. “And then ask yourself, ‘am I okay with that?’ We believe this new video has a lot of potential to open hearts and minds, and save countless lives.”

The video is also available for order as a DVD to use for tabling purposes, to showcase at viewing parties around Thanksgiving, or to keep in your video library. The DVD also includes bonus features including three PSAs with actress Ginnifer Goodwin promoting a compassionate Thanksgiving!

Between 250 to 300 million turkeys are raised for slaughter every year in the U.S. — more than 46 million alone for Thanksgiving.

You can learn more about Thanksgiving’s toll on turkeys here.

Animal Aid’s autumn investigation took a different approach to gaining footage. Volunteers sneaked into seven UK slaughterhouses and planted hidden remote video cameras. They allowed the cameras to run for days or weeks, and then compiled this footage and released it to the public. The video made headlines across Britain, and the public uproar paid off immediately:  within a week Britain’s Food Standards Agency recommended that all slaughterhouses in the country be outfitted with video cameras.

Well, now an Israeli animal rights group has added a brilliant new twist to the approach taken by Animal Aid: they’ve installed a spy cam in a factory egg farm, and are broadcasting the images in real time directly to the web.

Here’s a screenshot of the webpage:

When I was a kid, they said the videos were staged.
Many years later, they said the videos were just a few bad apples.
Then, they said the undercover investigators should have stepped in themselves and stopped the cruelty.
What will they say now?

FACT: animal abuse is rampant throughout ALL animal enterprise.

If you care about animals, the path to take is clear: VEGAN.

MFA’s Undercover Investigations: Exposing Animal Cruelty from Mercy For Animals on Vimeo.

A North Carolina laboratory has stopped doing research and is surrendering all of its animals a week after an undercover video showed what activists allege were workers cruelly treating dogs, cats and rabbits [...] The developments came after People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals released a video of conditions at the laboratory.

Link to the whole story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/us/16animals.html
The video was published here last week. Check it out for an example of why animal experimentation is wrong >>
Hat tip: Mimi

Regardless of intent – whether malicious or institutionalized – the cruelty and suffering continues.

It will not stop until YOU stop it.

Evidence:

Above: A Mercy For Animals investigator investigated the largest dairy factory farm in New York State – Willet Dairy in Locke in early 2009. The undercover investigator documented egregious acts of animal cruelty, including neglect:
* Cows with bloody open wounds, prolapsed uteruses, pus-filled infections, and swollen joints, apparently left to suffer without veterinary care
* “Downed” cows – those too sick or injured to even stand – left to suffer for weeks before dying or being killed
* Workers hitting, kicking, punching, and electric-shocking cows and calves
* Calves having their horns burned off without painkillers, as a worker shoved his fingers into the calves’ eyes to restrain them
* Calves having their tails cut off – a painful practice opposed by the American Veterinary Medical Association
* Newborn calves forcibly dragged away from their mothers by their legs, causing emotional distress to both mother and calf
* Cows living in overcrowded sheds on manure-coated concrete flooring
* Workers injecting cows with a controversial bovine growth hormone, used to increase milk production

Above: Another MFA investigation uncovered:
* Workers grabbing piglets by their fragile ears or legs and throwing them across the room and slamming them into transport carts.
* Workers tattooing sows by repeatedly driving sharp metal spikes into their flesh.
* Sows with untreated rectal prolapses and deep, infected sores and scrapes from constant rubbing against the bars of their stalls.
* Workers cutting off piglets’ tails with dull pliers and castrating them by ripping out their testes with their bare hands – all without anesthesia.
* Thousands of pregnant pigs confined in two-feet wide metal stalls so small that they could only take one step forward or backward and could not turn around or lie down comfortably.
* Injured, sick and runt piglets being tossed into overcrowded gassing kill carts, slowly suffocating from CO2.
* Workers firing steel rods into sows’ heads, sometimes as many as four separate times, before the sows fell and died.

Above: This investigation found:
* Rotting carcasses in cages with live hens still laying eggs for human consumption.
* Workers and managers killing birds by grabbing their necks and swinging them around in circles – an attempt to break their necks which often resulted in prolonged, torturous deaths for the hens.
* Supervisors and workers throwing live birds into trash cans, leaving them to be slowly crushed under the weight of other birds’ corpses and unable to access food or water.
* Birds suffering from broken bones, bloody open wounds, and untreated infections.
* Hens confined four to six in tiny wire cages so small they were unable to stretch their wings, move freely or engage in other basic behaviors.
* Birds trapped in the wire of their cages or under the feeding trays without access to food or water, some with body parts, including their faces, pressed against moving conveyor belts.
* Management and workers callously kicking live hens into manure pits where they either drowned in liquid feces or likely died slow and painful deaths from illness, injury or starvation.

Above: Thrown, dropped, mutilated, and ground-up alive. This is the shocking reality faced by hundreds of thousands of chicks each day at the world’s largest egg-laying breed hatchery. More info here: http://www.mercyforanimals.org/hatchery/

Above: In January and February of 2007 an MFA investigator worked on a turkey slaughter line, secretly filming egregious acts of animal cruelty with a hidden camera. Shocking abuses he witnessed include:
* Turkeys with broken wings and legs, bloody open wounds, tumors and other untreated injuries being slaughtered for human consumption
* A worker violently punching live, shackled turkeys for “fun”
* Employees forcefully shoving their hands into the cloacae (vaginal cavities) of live chickens
* Turkeys and chickens being thrown across the facility and up into the air
* Workers ripping the heads off live turkeys
* Birds being crushed to death under the wheels of trucks
* Conscious turkeys having their throats slit

Above: During a four-week investigation between April and May 2010, MFA’s investigator documented farm workers:
* Violently punching young calves in the face, body slamming them to the ground, and pulling and throwing them by their ears
* Routinely using pitchforks to stab cows in the face, legs and stomach
* Kicking “downed” cows (those too injured to stand) in the face and neck – abuse carried out and encouraged by the farm’s owner
* Maliciously beating restrained cows in the face with crowbars – some attacks involving over 40 blows to the head
* Twisting cows’ tails until the bones snapped
* Punching cows’ udders
* Bragging about stabbing, dragging, shooting, breaking bones, and beating cows and calves to death

Conclusion: The deplorable conditions uncovered in the meat, eggs, and dairy industries highlight the reality that animal agriculture is incapable of self-regulation. In order to prevent egregious cruelty to farmed animals, meaningful federal and state laws must be implemented, strengthened, and enforced.

But even without changing the law, there’s ONE thing everyone can do RIGHT NOW to make a HUGE difference for animals: GO VEGAN!

The deplorable conditions uncovered at Conklin Dairy Farms highlight the reality that animal agriculture is incapable of self-regulation and that meaningful federal and state laws must be implemented and strengthened to prevent egregious cruelty to farmed animals.

Although many of the abuses documented at Conklin Dairy Farms are sadistic in nature, numerous MFA undercover investigations at dairy farms, pig farms, egg farms, hatcheries and slaughterhouses have revealed that violence and abuse to farmed animals – whether malicious or institutionalized – runs rampant nationwide.

Compassionate consumers can end their direct financial support of farmed animal abuse by rejecting dairy, and other animal products, and adopting a vegan diet.

Please visit chooseveg.com for information about going vegetarian or vegan.

You can also find vegan recipes here at: http://www.vegansoapbox.com/recipes/

During a four-week investigation between April and May 2010, a Mercy For Animals’ investigator documented farm workers:

* Violently punching young calves in the face, body slamming them to the ground, and pulling and throwing them by their ears
* Routinely using pitchforks to stab cows in the face, legs and stomach
* Kicking “downed” cows (those too injured to stand) in the face and neck – abuse carried out and encouraged by the farm’s owner
* Maliciously beating restrained cows in the face with crowbars – some attacks involving over 40 blows to the head
* Twisting cows’ tails until the bones snapped
* Punching cows’ udders
* Bragging about stabbing, dragging, shooting, breaking bones, and beating cows and calves to death

Learn more here >>