Each Mother’s Day, I think about both my own experience as a mother and the way our society treats the mother-child bond for so many non-human moms. To me, the essence of motherhood is both strength and vulnerability, with the celebration of new life and all of its promise and need for nurturing to realize its potential. Mothers and children …
Animal Outlook, alongside six other animal protection groups, sued Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today for failing to protect pigs who are too sick or injured to walk at slaughterhouses, posing serious risks to animals and food safety. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Rochester, New York, challenges the USDA’s failure to …
Update: The U.S. House of Representatives is taking steps to delay or stop implementation of the high-speed slaughter rule. As is, slaughterhouses are hell on earth for pigs, and they’re about to get worse. Within just a few weeks, the USDA is planning to give slaughterhouses across the country the green light to recklessly speed up slaughter lines–endangering animals, workers, …
Like other animals farmed for food, pigs are highly intelligent, have individual personalities, and are able to feel pain and fear. These loving and kind animals enjoy playing, and exercising! Though they love to laze around in the mud to cool off, pigs are very clean, meticulously choosing other places for their waste. But on factory farms, pigs aren’t given …
As ghosts and goblins descend on us this month, Compassion Over Killing is flooding the USDA’s offices with new ads to ensure all eyes are on another, real-life horror for millions of animals, workers, and consumers: the federal agency’s cruel and dangerous high-speed slaughter program. Making matters even worse for the billions of chickens who are violently slaughtered for food …
Animals at risk As Hurricane Florence threatens east coast communities, people and their companion animals are evacuating. But in North Carolina, millions of lives remain at risk. Pigs, birds, and cows will be subject to flooding, winds, and overall extremely dangerous conditions. In the state of North Carolina alone, farmed pigs nearly outnumber people. There are currently upwards of 9 …
Late last month, consumers filed a suit against multiple pork producers (including Smithfield, Hormel, and Tyson Foods) accusing them of colluding to drive up the cost of pork products. The class-action case alleges that these producers have been working together to artificially inflate the prices for years by “coordinating their output and limiting production.” A day after the case was …
As the USDA debates rolling out their high-speed pig slaughter program nationwide, the slaughter and meatpacking industries remain some of the most dangerous working environments in the US. In a new story, The Guardian reports that in US meat plants there are two amputations a week and 17 “severe” incidents a month, which includes hospitalizations or “loss of an eye.” …
Compassion Over Killing and ASPCA have hand-delivered a joint comment to the US Dept. of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service in Washington, DC, asking the federal agency to end, not expand, its high-speed pig slaughter program. In February, the USDA proposed a “Modernization of Swine Slaughter Inspection” rule, which would revoke maximum line speeds and allow slaughterhouses to …