Animal Concentration Camps

"Imagine a huge hangar with wooden compartments, chopped straw on the floor and no windows anywhere. When a day old baby chicks arrive, it looks like there is a lot of space there for those little fluffy balls to run around while they eat out of an automatic feeding pan. Bright lights stay on 24 hours a day only turning off for half an hour. But the lights are not turned off so that baby chicks could have a good nap. It's because if they never see the dark and the lights suddenly turn off because of a short circuit or a power failure, the baby chicks would panic and some of them could squeeze so hard they would die."

"Seven weeks after, just before they are killed for meat, tricks are used to make the chicks grow two times faster than in natural environment. Continous lighting is a part of the trick because that way the chicks eat much more than normal and for much longer. The biggest trick is the food which is full with proteins helping them to gain weight - and that food often contains dryed parts of other chicks.

"Now imagine that same hangar with those baby chicks completely grown up. Every bird weights 1,8 kilos and has a space not bigger than computer monitor available. You can barely see the straw and dry twigs as they are not changed since the very first day and now they are covered with feces from seven weeks ago untill today. Chickens have grown up so fast that they still have blue eyes and peep as baby chicks, but they have reached the size of an adult bird.

"If you look closely, you can see that some of the birds are dead. The rest of them don't care but continue to eat and drink. It's because their hearts are not able to pump enough blood to feed their large bodies. Dead and dying birds are collected and removed every day."

Baby chicks literary change their behaviour because of the conditions they live in: hundreds of chicks placed inside one building not being able to move. Due to a serious stress caused by these conditions, animals often become very agressive and start to attack each other. Some of them start to attack other chicks out of despair and anger. Chicks peck each other to the death, pigs bite off each others' tails. In an attempt to prevent those "vices", farmers often cut off chickens' beaks using hot knives, rather than giving them more space or making their environment more comfortable. The pain they are experiencing at that moment is the same as the pain that humans would experience if a nail was pulled out of their fingers. Being filled with hormones, antibiotics and drugs to accelerate their growth unnaturally in order to gain more meat, chicks' bones crack and break massively. Therefore almost every other chick has its legs broken, not to mention the horrible pain they feel as a result. It's done purely for the profit, every hour repeatedly killing hundreds of thousands of animals.

90% of the chicks suffer from various injuries before they are killed and more than 30% have broken bones - especially legs. It is terrible to see them walking around with broken legs, cut off beaks and beaten by farmer workers. We cannot even imagine the pain they are experiencing. If they could talk, we would hear excruciatingly painful bloodcurdling screams.

"In farrowing pens there is a metal tool similar to wide teeth comb which is used to separate sows (mother pigs) from piglets. The mother lies on her side and the metal barrier makes it impossible for her to cuddle with her piglets, to lick them or do anything that she would want to do. Piglets can come to mother's teats to suckle milk, but any other contact is impossible.

"After 3-4 weeks of feeding, piglets are separated from the mother and placed into stalls which are pilled on top of one another. They would be suckling mother's milk at least two more months in the natural environment. I observed some piglets which had more humane life, jumping around in the fresh air, chasing one another, knocking each other over, playing pranks on each other, and they actually looked like puppets. Piglets living on modern farms are stuffed together and they can't even run from each other if they want to play. They usually start to bite each other' tails out of boredom and frustration, often causing horrible injuries.

"How do farmers stop such a behavior? It's simple- they cut off piglets' tails or take out their teeth. It's cheaper than giving them more space." *

"If young people ever realized what was involved in factory pig farming, they would never touch meat again". - James Cromwell, farmer Hagget in the movie "Babe"

*Sections of the book "The livewire Guide to Going, Being and Staying Veggie!" written by a British author Juliet Gellatley