Growing up on a small farm taught me a thing or two about meat. The cattle, pigs and chickens on my family’s farm really did enjoy lives close to the ones featured in today’s slick advertising. Right up until my dad’s axe came down on the chicken’s scrawny necks or the butcher drove up and put a bullet between Bessie’s eyes.
I’ve got some good news for all those who care about decent treatment of animals. Farm Sanctuary is hosting its first-ever National Conference to End Factory Farming: For Health, Environment and Farm Animals this year — October 27-29 in the Washington, D.C. area. Attend if you can!
The largest pork company in the world, Smithfield Foods, has broken their commitment to end the use gestation crates for pigs by 2017. Sign the petition for McDonald’s to end using such pork products to increase the pressure on Smithfield.
I love Farm Sanctuary. It’s making the world a livable place for countless farm animals around the United States and Canada, and extending their lifespans as well.
This Animal Aid is one I’ve covered a couple times and have been following closely. It is a campaign to get CCTV cameras in all UK slaughterhouses, to try to help prevent completely insane animal cruelty that has been documented by undercover investigations and fly-on-the-wall cameras. After a few months of work, Animal Aid has …
Win!: Every Major UK Supermarket Says ‘Yes’ to CCTV Cameras in Slaughterhouses! Read More 👉
The so-called Ag Gag bills in Florida and Minnesota failed to go through, but New York and Iowa are still looking at legislation to prevent investigative reporting in factory farming facilities.
It must be the week for maps. I just recently announced that Food & Water Watch won an Interactive Media Award (IMA) for its interactive factory farming map. Now, news is there’s another great interactive factory farming map just out from Animal Visuals, an excellent site with “visual resources for animals” (I’ve shared some of their stuff when writing about livestock production in the U.S. before).
I wrote about a pretty awesome (though, disturbing) interactive factory farming map created by Food & Water Watch and New Signature back in December. The map “illustrates the geographic shift in where and how food is raised in the U.S. and allows anyone to quickly search for the highest concentration of animals by region, state and county.” A non-interactive version of it is above.
While greenwashing is the practice of making false or meaningless green product claims, humanewashing is the practice of misleading consumers through claims made by factory farming meat, dairy and egg producers that their product was made from humanely-raised practices. There is much discussion in the state of Washington these days of “welfare standards” for poultry by …
Factory Farming News: Vet Leaders Side with Egg Industry to Oppose Battery Cage Ban Read More 👉
New research out of Germany shows that not only do fish feel pain but they may experience it a lot like we do.
People don’t like animal cruelty. And they sure don’t want to eat meat that comes from animals that have been subjected to inhumane and abusive treatment.
In Iowa, they’ve found a way to solve that problem: criminalize folks who expose cruel and inhumane animal treatment. Last week the state House of Representatives passed HF 589 (pdf), and it’s poised to pass the State Senate (as SF 431) as well.
The Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board voted 6-5 last week to permit the completely inhumane confinement of veal calves in tiny crates that the calves aren’t even able to turn around in. This is in a “clear violation of an agreement reached last June between humane groups and agribusiness,” Farm Sanctuary reports.
Our food system is serious business and seriously broken, and it’s easy to get pretty doom and gloom about that. This video takes the heavy subjects of meat production, animal cruelty, and meat’s environmental impacts and sums it up with a little bit of a wink. OK, more like a big wink.
