Animal Rights
...uffering: Chickens raised for McDonald’s are crammed into crowded, filthy warehouses with less space per bird than a standard sheet of paper. This overcrowding causes disease, suffocation, and heart attacks. Some breeding pigs raised for McDonald’s live their entire lives in cement stalls, unable to turn around, lie in a comfortable position, or nuzzle their babies. U.S. federal standards for slaughter say that all animals should be fully stunned before their throats are slit, but McDonald’s considers it acceptable if slaughterhouses inadequately stun 1 in 20 animals, and refuses to even ask their suppliers to hire extra stunners, an action their own animal welfare experts say would markedly improve stunning efficacy. Leather Fur and Fashion: Main Objective- PROFIT • Buying leather creates a demand for slaughter of animals for their skin. • Animals from fur ranches are kept in wire-mesh cages that are tiny, overcrowded, and filthy. They are malnourished; suffer contagious diseases, and severe stress. • Animals in closed environments often develop self-destructive behavior, and frequently resort to cannibalism. • The end of the suffering of these animals comes only with death, which, in order to preserve the quality of the fur, is inflicted with extreme cruelty and brutality. • Engine exhaust is often pumped into a box of animals. This exhaust is not always lethal, and the animals sometimes writhe in pain as they are skinned alive. • Another common execution practice, often used on larger animals, is anal electrocution. The farmers attach clamps to an animal's lips and insert metal rods into its anus. The animal is then electrocuted. • Other methods are decompression chambers, neck snapping, and poison. Animals for entertainment: Main Objective: Profit • Keeping animals in zoos harms them, for it denies them freedom of movement and association. This frustrates many of their natural behavioral patterns, leaving them bored, and some become seriously neurotic. • Profound constraints are imposed by the lack of space in zoos, their limited financial resources, and the requirement that viable gene pools of each species be preserved. • In rodeos, there is no show unless the animal is frightened or in pain. • Circuses are different because animals suffer most before and after the show. They are severely trained and punished. They are forced to travel thousands of miles each year, often in extreme heat or cold, with tigers living in small cages and elephants chained in filthy railroad cars. • To the entrepreneurs, animals are merely stock in trade, to be replaced when they are used up. Laboratory Animals • Psychologists gave electric shocks to the feet of 1042 mice. They then caused convulsions by giving more intense shocks through cup-shaped electrodes applied to the animals' eyes or through spring clips attached to their ears. • In Japan, starved rats with electrodes in their necks and electrodes in their eyeballs were forced to run in treadmills for four hours at a time. • A group of 64 monkeys was addicted to drugs by automatic injection in their jugular veins. When the supply of drugs was abruptly withdrawn, some of the monkeys were observed to die in convulsions. Before dying, some monkeys plucked out all their hair or bit off their own fingers and toes. • Since 1950 Britain has used over 144 million animals for vivisection resea...