Veganism Prevents Cruelty to Animals

---

Cows and Buffaloes Are Hideously Abused in the Beef and Leather Trades

Despite many Indians' traditional reverence for the cow, today a thriving international trade in beef and leather means starvation, thirst, beatings, broken bones and cruel slaughter for hundreds of thousands of India's cattle.

When cows, buffaloes and bullocks who give milk, pull plows and live side by side with their human families become lame, sick or worn out, they are sent to auctions to be sold for slaughter. At these weekly sales, thousands of bullocks and cows are tethered together in groups of three to seven by ropes run through their painfully pierced noses. Although the temperature may reach over 100 degrees, the animals are not given any shade or water.

Many are old and emaciated, with their ribs and hipbones protruding. Some are bloody from beatings by the men who drove them to auction. Their tails are twisted and broken over and over again by the drivers.

Since slaughtering cows is illegal under most circumstances in all but a few Indian states, the cows are marched over hot, dusty roads for 50 to 100 miles, across state lines, to secret locations where they can be loaded onto lorries and taken to slaughterhouses. To keep them moving, drivers beat the animals across their hipbones, where there is no fat to cushion the blows. The cows are not allowed to rest or even have a sip of water. Hungry, thirsty, weary and often lame or ill, many cows give up and sink to their knees. Drivers mercilessly beat the downed animals and twist their battered tails to force them to rise. If that doesn't work, the men torment the cows into moving by rubbing hot chili peppers, salt and tobacco into their eyes or poking their eyes with screwdrivers and sticks.

After walking without food and water for two to three days, the cows cross the borders crammed into lorries. Because their importation is illegal, it happens in the dead of night with few witnesses. The lorries are meant for only five or six animals, but 15 to 20—sometimes as many as 30—are shoved into each one. Cattle must climb over one another to find any space, inadvertently gouging each other with their horns, trampling and crushing those beneath. Horns are broken off, nose rings ripped out, and bones crushed.

The lorries then careen down twisting dirt roads riddled with potholes, pitching the cattle around and causing even more injuries.

At the slaughterhouse, the cattle are beaten to force them from the lorry, then tied up by all four feet and lined up on their sides. Sick and wounded animals who are too weak to move lie in congealing pools of blood, left to die where they have fallen. Workers, including children, cutting the animals' throats sometimes saw back and forth with dull knives on blood-, urine- and feces-drenched floors. Fully-conscious animals are left to bleed slowly to death in the hot sun.

'At the municipal slaughterhouses in Bangalore and Calcutta, workers, including small children, violently pushed and dragged the animals to the slaughter floor, where they were made to lie in pools of blood and guts removed from their dead brethren. The animals were made to watch their companions die while they waited their turn, their eyes wide with tears and terror, their bodies shaking. The workers used dull knives and cut off the animals' legs, often while the animals were still conscious.'
—PETA Investigator

The Plight of Cows and Buffaloes Used for Milk Production

Cows and buffaloes raised for milk are treated as nothing more than milk machines. They are given painful injections of hormones, even banned substances such as oxytocin, and kept pregnant to keep milk production high. Oxytocin causes painful contractions in the uteruses of the mother cows and buffaloes. Calves are typically taken away from their nurturing mothers and the milk that nature meant for them within days. In Mumbai alone, an estimated 10,000 newborn calves starve to death each year because of a lack of milk. Because male calves cannot give milk, some are killed for veal while others are tied up and left to starve to death. Some are sold to the cheese industry, where they have their stomachs slit while still alive for rennet, the acid that is extracted for making cheese. A few of the male calves are chosen to live out their lives in solitary confinement and used for artificial insemination. Sometimes when these bulls become aged, they are left to wander in the streets, where many die after getting hit by a lorry, while others die slow, painful deaths from infections caused by ingesting plastic bags and garbage.

John Abraham says, 'Now, I'm vegetarian and feel better than ever. I've especially valued the muscle-building and fitness advantages of a veg diet.'

Chickens, Ducks, Turkeys, Goats, and Pigs Live in Despair

The 'factory farming' or intensive rearing system of modern agriculture, becoming more and more common in India, strives to produce the most meat, milk and eggs as quickly and cheaply as possible and in the smallest amount of space possible. Animals are reduced to slaves and often kept in small cages or stalls, unable to turn around. They are deprived of exercise so that all their bodys' energy goes toward producing flesh, eggs or milk for human consumption.

Chickens and turkeys raised for meat and eggs are often kept in crowded, filthy sheds where they can't even spread their wings. Chickens can function well in groups of up to about 90, a number low enough for each bird to find a niche in the pecking order, but in crowded groups of thousands, no such social order is possible. In their frustration, the birds peck at one another so vehemently that they draw blood. To keep them from pecking each other to death, workers often cut their beaks off with hot irons (without anaesthetics). Although the filthy conditions result in widespread disease, hens are given no veterinary care, and many die of stress or disease. Sick birds may be beaten to death with a piece of pipe or may have their heads 'whacked' with a nail driven into a piece of pipe. Others are simply left to suffer and die on their own. Male chicks born in the egg industry are considered merely a wasteful byproduct. Since they cannot produce eggs, newly hatched males are crushed to death and used for fertiliser and as feed. Chickens and ducks are transported to the slaughterhouse stuffed into bags, tied painfully upside down to bicycle handles, crammed into baskets, or overcrowded onto lorries. There, the animals are tied up in bunches upside down and have their throats sawed at with dull blades.

According to Beauty Without Cruelty, the Central Duck Breeding Farm at Hessarghatta, north of Bangalore, is the main promoter in India. The farm sells day-old ducklings. They are shipped by air to far-off places like Sikkhim and Rajasthan. Male ducklings that are not booked or bought are killed by drowning. Those ducks reared for seven to eight weeks are sold or shipped by train to cities for meat.

Sixty percent of goats raised for meat die of untreated diseases (one-third of these animals are babies). Goat farming is becoming increasingly industrialised, and more and more goats are being genetically manipulated and intensively confined. Goats have their throats slit in front of others, often with unsharpened blades.

Pigs often spend their entire lives in cramped, narrow stalls. Crowded to the point where they can barely turn around, they sometimes take out their frustrations by cannibalising each others' tails. But instead of giving them more room, factory farmers simply cut their tails off—a painful mutilation performed without anaesthesia. Before being slaughtered, some pigs have their bristles plucked from their backs while they are fully conscious (the bristles are used in brushes). Pigs are often killed by being beaten with hammers or having hot iron rods pushed up their anuses. Others are stabbed with 20 or more small knives so that the blood runs out slowly, because farmers believe this makes the meat more tender. In Mizoram, pigs are skewered with a poker that is inserted into the anus and pushed out through the mouth; they are then roasted alive.

Turtles Are Tortured

Turtles are protected under wildlife laws, but they are illegally captured, turned over on their backs and transported live to cities for slaughter. They are killed and gutted, while fully conscious, with dulled knives.

Fish Suffer, Too

'The pain system in fish is virtually the same as in birds and mammals.'
—Dr Donald Broom, professor of animal welfare, Cambridge University

India is the sixth-largest producer of fish in the world and the second-largest producer of freshwater fish.

To be profitable, 'aquafarms' must raise large numbers of fish in intensive confinement. This overcrowding causes injuries to the snouts and fins of fish and puts abnormal stress on them, leading to outbreaks of disease. So aquafarmers pump the fish full of antibiotics and chemicals to control parasites, skin and gill infections, and other diseases common to farmed fish. Fish are often deprived of food for days or even weeks prior to slaughter in order to reduce waste contamination of the water during transport.

Fish, whether aquafarmed or stolen directly from the sea, are impaled, thrown, crushed, mutilated while alive or left to die slowly and painfully of suffocation.

In India, although the use of dynamite for fishing is banned, it is still employed in freshwater and sometimes in shallow sea areas. The explosion destroys all creatures in the vicinity and adds to the existing problems of overfishing and pollution. The Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations says, 'Aquaculture's growth is expected to continue ... as the gap between supply and demand for fish products widens.'

Salmonella and ulcerative disease are common in India and are often caused by eating fish.