I would not want to see a herd of pigs treated with such absolute disregard.
But they are. Every day. Google "factory farming" and you'll see how our meat is raised and killed in America. The pork you buy in the grocery store didn't come from pigs who were raised playing in the sunshine and rolling in green grass and going to bed in a comfy hay-lined barn every night, only to die at a ripe old age one day and THEN be shipped in nice impersonal packages to the meat department.
Meat animals in america are mass produced factory-style, raised in concrete warehouses knee deep in urine and *** or filthy, rusted, tight wire cages, fed crap, and denied even the most basic mental stimulation resulting in confinement induced insanity. They're torn from their mothers at birth (or in the case of chickens, are born in incubators and never see their mothers at all) and then mutilated in order to keep them from self-mutilating in the future when the cobnfinement drives them insane. Chickens have their beaks cut off with hot blades to keep them from pecking each other while crammed 9 deep in cages too small for one. Pigs have their tails cut off and teeth torn out, without anaesthesia, to keep them from biting themselves and each other out of frustration. Cows are (painfully) dehorned and castrated, again, without anaesthesia. Veal calves are torn screaming from their mother's side and chained into dark shipping crates where they lie, sometimes unable to even stand, and fed an iron deficiant diet to keep their muscles soft and white. They lives this way for 12-14 weeks until they are killed.
Injured animals are beaten to death, crushed with cinderblocks, bashed against walls, or simply left to suffer. Cows in feedlots live in belly-deep swamps of urine and ***.
During trasport to slaughter, animals are crammed onto trucks EXACTLY in the way those dogs are being transported in the video. Smashed together in tiny cages or trailers so that many die from stress, heat exhaustion, dehydration, smothering, and crushing. In cold weather some freeze to the insides of the trailers. They are drug off with chains, often resulting in their skin being torn off in the process.
Once at the slaughterhouse, many animals balk, panic, and try to escape upon hearing the other screaming inside the building and smelling the fear and panic and hot blood. They are beaten, tazered, prodded, and kicked until they give up, fall into line, and wait to die. The entire time they can still hear the screams and smell the blood and fear.
Cattle and pigs are herded into kill boxes, where they are shot in the head with a captive bolt gun. If done properly, this should instantly render them unconcious. Unfortunately, the people doing the stunning get little to no training on how to do it properly and MANY of the animals are improperly stunned. Instead, they now have just been stabbed in the brain and are in horrible pain...and still fully concious.
Then, they are hoisted up on chains by their back legs, and have their throats slashed. There IS a humane way to cut an animal's throat- two cuts right below the ears will sever major arteries and the sudden drop in blood pressure leads to almost immediate unconciousness. I have used this method on my chickens and find it to be humane. But in the slaughterhouse videos I've seen, they use a slash all the way across the throught, severing the trachea and esophagus- resulting in the animals being able to aspirate blood into its lungs and panic before losing conciousness. Sometimes they don't cut deeply enough and the animal bleeds out too slowly. Sincer everything in a slaughterhouse is fast paced, the animal simply goes on to the next station and is skinned and dismembered alive. This is very, very common.
Chickens are thrown by their legs into shackles, often having legs and wings pulled off in the process. Their heads are run through an electrified hot water bath to stun then, and then their throats are cut with automated blades. All a chicken has to do is pull its head up to avoid the electified bath AND the throat slicing blade. They often do, and then they simply have their heads torn off by a worker farther down along the line. Or, they are plucked and disemboweled alive. Both are equally common.
My father was a truck driver for several years and once, when I was about 11 or 12, I went on a trip with him to haul a load of cattle from a feedlot to a major slaughterhouse. I saw them loaded and unloaded, and everything illustrated above happened to them. I didn't see directly inside the slaughterhouse itself, but I certainly did get to hear their screams. Two cows were down when we arrived, suffering from heat exhaustion, and they were drug off of the truck and left to die in the 100 degree parking lot. As we were leaving, they were being drug into dead piles around the side of the building. I saw one lift her head with great effort and then slowly drop it as she was drug into the pile of dead, rotting corpses.
It was incredibly traumatic, and to this day I have nightmares about it.
So, to everyone who is so horrified by the treatment of dogs in the video, please...illustrate to me how our treatment of animals is so different and morally superior here in America? I know of several billion animals stuck in factory farms right now who would probably beg to differ.