Elbein at the intercept on the brutality done to animals by large CAFO operations:
"They walked toward the sound, as one volunteer described it later, of thousands of cattle screaming."
“They pee, poop, eat, sleep in one small space.”
"clinging to the fur of the cattle, the feces caked on the floor, where it was kicked into aerosol by the nervous shuffling of thousands of calves."
" mass cannibalism in cage-free chicken houses that supplied Costco. They found turkeys packed together with open sores, in six inches of feces, in a California farm that Whole Foods had marked as the best of the best."
"1 in 5 calves suffers from diarrhea severe enough to require antibiotics, according to a dairy industry study, and when calves die — as about 7 percent do, on average — diarrhea is the cause of death half the time."
"they brought the calf, who they named Nick, to a veterinarian office, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia — the other major killer of calves — and given little chance of survival ... he had been taken away the day he was born ..."
"if a dairy farm raises a calf in tight confinement, butchers it, and sells the meat as veal — that’s illegal. But raise the same calf in the same conditions, butcher it the same way, and sell it as beef: That’s legal. And if the farm similarly confines that calf’s sister, who will join the dairy herd — that’s legal too."
“It’s very powerful to see these animals run for the first time ... they’ve been in a crate, never had the chance to run ... You see them staring at the sky, stare at something colorful, and you realize they’ve never seen it before. "
Read the whole thing, if you have the stomach.
https://theintercept.com/2018/10/08/california-prop-12-animal-welfare-dairy-calves/Eat less meat and dairy. And make sure the cattle are humanely raised and killed as mercifully and painlessly as possible. There are very few things worse than hearing the cries of an animal whose slaughter is being botched.
sidd
