Animal treatment...

We copied this report from goveg.com/feat/hellonwheels/ on 6 September 2007.
We are horrified by such cruelty and by the knowledge that this is part and parcel of our economical systems. This story comes from the USA. In the media one could see stories of EU animal health officers checking trucks because of the heat stress that animals suffer during transports through Germany.

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A Trucker's Story

As one pig truck driver told PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), truckers use electric prods to load the hog trailers to bursting, and they avoid weighing stations at all costs. Many pigs suffer rectal prolapse as they struggle tosqueeze between others. “They’re packed in so tight,” the driver told us, “their guts actually pop out their butts—a little softball of guts actually comes out.”

He also told how one pig who got loose and had never been in the hot sun crawled under the truck for shade. The other driver took a crowbar and beat her teeth out of her head. Then he ran the truck over her. He also told of another driver who “killed six hogs with a ‘hot shot’ electric prod—three down the throat and three up the rectum.” Some truckers also use gaff-type metal hooks to load the pigs—they insert the hooks into every orifice of the animals, including their eyes, mouths, and rectums.

One-Way Ticket to Torture

In winter, some pigs die frozen to the sides of the trucks. In summer, some die from heat exhaustion. Some fall and suffocate when additional animals are forced to pile in on top of them. All are in a panic—you can see it in their eyes—and some die of heart attacks.

The unloading at the slaughterhouses is as ugly as the loading. After being confined in an immobile state all their lives, the pigs’ legs and lungs are so weak that they can barely walk. But when they see space ahead of them, some of them begin running for the first time in their lives. Like fillies, they jump and buck, overjoyed with their first feel of freedom. Then, suddenly, they collapse and cannot get up.They can only lie there, trying to breathe.Then drivers hook their legs up to winches to pull them and often pull their legs and shoulders right off them.

At the slaughterhouse, some pigs are dismembered and skinned alive when the stun gun misses its mark.