This Is Vegan Propaganda (& Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You)

by Ed Winters

To put it into perspective, it is estimated that globally around 220 million land animals are killed for food every day,1 and when you factor in marine animals that number increases to somewhere between 2.4 and 6.3 billion.2 Every. Single. Day. That means that somewhere between 28,000 and 73,000 animals are killed every second, a completely incomprehensible number.

veganism is an ethical stance against needless animal exploitation

We cut off their tails, we castrate them, we forcibly impregnate them, we take their babies away from them, we lock them in cages where they can’t turn around. We load them into trucks and take them to slaughterhouses where we cut their throats or force them into gas chambers – and these are just the standard, legal practices.

Is it not strange that we call those who kill dogs animal abusers, those who kill pigs normal and those who kill neither extremists?

by placing taste at the heart of our justification for eating animal products, we are essentially saying that our pleasure is more important than any moral consideration.

Throughout history, farmers have killed male calves shortly after their birth, as is still commonplace in many dairy farms today.

A similar practice is known as ‘grafting’, whereby a farmer skins a dead calf and places it over the body of another calf to trick the mother of the dead animal into thinking that the other baby is her own.

The selective breeding of broilers continued to the point that they are today bred to reach slaughter age in only six weeks, a rate of growth 300 per cent faster than in 1960. In that time, they reach a weight four times heavier on average than chickens raised in 1957. Chickens have suffered hugely as a consequence of this selective breeding, with many of them dying from organ failure, suffering from immune system problems and being unable to move due to their excessive weight, meaning they are unable to reach food and water points.

To this day, the US government still buys back dairy products, with the USDA purchasing $50 million of surplus milk in 2018.

This could involve animals’ genes being edited so that they are hornless or, more disturbingly, designing them to be blind or deaf so that they would be less distressed about being in crowded conditions.

The Red Tractor label is the UK’s largest animal welfare certification scheme and, in their own words, is supposed to assure us that the ‘animals have been well cared for’. It is a huge selling point for farmers and a source of reassurance for consumers, with the sticker of approval proudly displayed on just about every animal product that comes from a British farm. However, what many people are not aware of is that the Red Tractor scheme was set up by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and it is owned by the NFU and other industry bodies such as Dairy UK.

In the case of Lambrook pig farm in Somerset, for example, which was the subject of a national press exposé that discovered dead and living pigs covered in excrement and pigs held in tiny concrete pens and tethered with chains hanging from the ceiling, Red Tractor had audited the farm and passed it as acceptable.

farmers have to pay an annual membership to become part of the welfare scheme, meaning that the RSPCA is auditing farmers who financially support them.

This is all part of a systemic problem with animal farming oversight. Even when farms break the law, they are hardly ever punished by the legal system for doing so.

These breaches included chickens being boiled alive, pigs being submerged alive in tanks of scalding-hot water, animals not being stunned properly or even at all before slaughter, and trucks of animals suffocating or freezing to death.

The mother pigs, called sows, are impregnated either by being placed in a pen with a boar or through artificial insemination, where semen is usually obtained by a boar mounting a dummy and a worker acquiring the semen by hand.

After the piglets have been weaned, the sows are usually impregnated again within a couple of weeks and the process repeats. This cycle of impregnation and incarceration continues for around three to five years, at which point the sows are taken to the slaughterhouse to be killed for cheap pork products, like pies and pastries.

‘thumping’. This involves the piglets receiving a sharp blow to the top of their heads, sufficient to break their skulls. The most common way that this is done is by the farmer lifting a piglet by their back legs and slamming their head down, either on the floor or against the wall. This process often needs to be repeated several times to ensure the piglet is dead, otherwise they can be left conscious but with severe haemorrhaging.

Pigs are generally sent to a slaughterhouse to be killed at around five to six months old.

After they have had their throats cut, the pigs are then transported down the kill line to the scalding tank, where they are lowered into very hot water that loosens their bristles and skin. It is not uncommon for pigs to still be alive when they enter the scalding tank, meaning that they drown in extremely hot water.

The other method of pig slaughter, which is regarded as the most humane in places like the UK, Australia and most of the European Union, is the use of a CO2 gas chamber.

The concentration of CO2 is normally 80 per cent or higher, which is recognised as being highly toxic for pigs.

Cows are mammals, which means that, like humans, they only produce milk once they’ve had a baby. So, from around 15 months old, cows begin the process of being impregnated, most commonly through artificial insemination.

A cow’s gestation period is around nine months. The newborn calf will take his or her first drink from their mother, as the first feed contains colostrum, which is full of nutrients and antibodies. However, once the newborn calf has drunk the colostrum, the farmer separates them from their mother, normally within the first 24 hours. This is done so that the farmer can take as much milk as possible to be sold for human consumption.

Due to the strain placed on their bodies, cows become infertile and too weak or too ill after around five to seven years, significantly less than their natural twenty-year lifespan.

sometimes the slaughterers don’t know the cow is pregnant or they don’t have time to wait – the kill line is constantly moving – or they wait the five minutes but the baby inside hasn’t died. In these situations, the baby can fall out alive, conscious and gasping for air as their mother is being butchered. In the event of this happening, the RSPCA states the baby should be killed ‘with an appropriate captive bolt or by a blow to the head with a suitable blunt instrument’.42

There is something profoundly wrong when the leading charity that is meant to protect animals is giving out instructions on how to kill an animal who has just been cut out of their dead mother. And remember, the UK is the best in the world when it comes to animal welfare.

around 60,000 to 95,000 male dairy calves are shot and discarded soon after being born in the UK every single year.45

A ten-day-old baby, whose only experience of life is being taken away from their mother, loaded into a truck and driven to a slaughterhouse, is left in the cold overnight on a concrete floor before their throat is cut, all so we can pour their mother’s milk over our cornflakes.

‘I’ve seen thousands and thousands of cows go through the slaughter process alive. The cows can get seven minutes down the line and still be alive. I’ve been in the side-puller [a machine that peels the cattle’s hides off] where they’re still alive. All the hide is stripped out down the neck there.’

When we consider the sheer volume of chicken body parts we eat, it’s perhaps not surprising that, apart from insects, they are the most abused and exploited terrestrial animal on the planet. Every year, around 66 billion are killed, which means that more than 180 million are killed every single day.53

Chickens have been selectively bred to reach slaughter weight by the time they are between 35 and 42 days old. This frequently leads to organ failure and leg problems as their bodies grow too fast for their joints and organs to keep up.

Put into context, if a newborn human grew at the same rate as a farmed chicken, they would weigh 28 s...

These particular chickens were nearly ready to be ‘harvested’, an industry term meaning the birds were only a few days away from being sent to slaughter. The term ‘harvested’ is a good example of how desperately the industry tries to hide behind euphemisms.

Farmers are supposed to work their way through each barn daily and pick out the dead birds and cull the ones who are close to death. They do this by either stamping on them, bludgeoning them or by swinging them around by their necks to break them.

Alternatively, they are shackled upside down by their feet onto a conveyor belt, which then carries them through an electrified water bath that is supposed to stun them before they then have their necks dragged over a rotating blade that cuts their throats. Due to the speed of the line, some birds do not make contact with the electrified water bath and can be conscious when they have their necks pulled over the blade. Other times, the blade might not cut their necks properly, meaning the animals are still alive when they are submerged into the scalding tank where their feathers are loosened.

They also have daytime access to an outside area for at least half of their lives, but that only has to equal one square metre of space per bird,

when the chicks are born in hatcheries, they are separated based on their sex. The males are put on one conveyor belt and the females are placed on another. The conveyor belt for the males then usually goes to one of two places: a gas chamber where they are gassed to death or an industrial macerator that grinds them up alive. This happens in all systems of egg farming, including free range and organic. In some countries, male chicks are alternatively suffocated in bin bags or crushed to death.

Because egg-laying hens have been selectively bred, they lay around 300 eggs a year, which places an extreme amount of stress on their bodies.

It is often believed that it is ethical to wear wool because sheep need to be sheared. However, this is only true because we have selectively bred them in such a way that they no longer naturally shed their wool for the warmer months like wild sheep do. In essence, we have changed them physically to maximise the amount of money we can make from them, and then we mutilate them to try to reduce the incidence of a condition that is a problem precisely because we have selectively bred them. Then, to top it all off, we claim that the reason we mutilate them and literally carve off chunks of their skin is because we care about their wellbeing.

For example, human rights transgressions are rampant in the seafood industry, with tens of thousands of workers estimated to be victims of forced labour, human trafficking and debt bondage.

A 2021 study revealed that 12,700 deaths occur a year in the USA because of pollution from animal farming.

It’s common for people to question the ethics of someone who works in a slaughterhouse, and yet doing so overlooks the real reason why people work in these places: a lack of choice. Slaughterhouses are found in lower-income areas, where there are fewer job opportunities. It’s one of the lowest-paid industrial jobs with one of the highest turnover rates. It is also an industry filled with worker exploitation.

As a society, we condemn people who kill animals. If someone stabbed a dog, we would presume that they were either mentally unwell or an evil person. However, we expect people who spend upwards of 60 hours a week repetitively stabbing chickens, pigs,

cows and lambs to hang up their bloody aprons at the end of the day and then just integrate back into normal society.

one ex-worker, ‘I had suicidal thoughts from the guilt. I still dream about it now and I can’t look at dead animals packaged up in the supermarket. And think about this as you’re tucking into a roast: you didn’t hear the tortured screams of those animals. You didn’t see them fight with every ounce of their strength to stay alive. You didn’t clean their blood from the factory floor. I did, and the guilt will haunt me forever.’92

That’s why they sell us an ideal of happy animals living wonderful lives and being killed in a compassionate and kind way. But this isn’t what is happening. We’re told not to worry because we have incredibly high standards and a legal system that means if anyone is caught doing anything even remotely wrong, they will be punished. This is all nonsense. It is a lie. Propaganda. There really is no such thing as a happy farm animal. We are capable of so much more.

48 per cent of the entire landmass of the UK is used for animal farming.

the United Nations reports that 26 per cent of the world’s land surface is given to grazing animals.7

The study showed that even though meat and dairy take up 83 per cent of global agricultural land, they only provide 18 per cent of global calories and 37 per cent of global protein consumption.10 In other words, animal products are staggeringly inefficient – there is a massive disparity in the amount of resources we put into animal farming compared to what we get back.