What is the most nasty thing you have ever heard about animal products..like meat?

Question

I happen to know a lot of gross things about animal products from the news and books. I was hoping we could all share some little tid-bits with each other.

Please tell me nasty FACTS about meat production, milk, honey, and anything you think vegetarians and non vegetarians would find interesting! Thanks!

Answer 1

Workers cut off piglets' tails and rip out piglets' testicles without using any painkillers. This causes the pigs to scream in agony.

Crowded conditions create aggression and egg-laying hens can peck each other to death. Workers "solve" this problem by cutting off a a large portion of each egg-laying hen’s beak. They use a burning hot blade and no painkillers are administered.

Male chicks are worthless to the egg industry, so every year, millions of them are tossed into trash bags to suffocate or are thrown into high-speed grinders while they are still alive.

Male calves are worthless to the dairy industry, so they're turned into veal. The calves are often prohibited from any movement at all in order to produce the pale-colored flesh that people like to eat.

Foie gras is produced by confining ducks to dark sheds and force-feeding them enormous amounts of food several times a day. A farm worker grabs each duck and, one by one, thrusts a metal pipe down their throats so that a mixture of corn can be forced directly into their gullets. In a few weeks, the ducks become grossly overweight and their livers expand up to 10 times their normal size.

Fish have absolutely no legal protection from cruel treatment. They are impaled, crushed, suffocated, or sliced open and gutted, all while they're fully conscious.

Answer 2

That male baby chicks are killed because they are of no use to the egg industry.  =(

That gelatine is from the connective tissues of an animal- yuck!

Red meats are high in saturated fat & cruelty. A meat based diet requires 7x more land.

The worst fact about meat is that it can be detrimental to human health.

Answer 3

It was about caged chickens that get cemented in their own c**p (because they're in cages and they can't move)

Answer 4

~On farms that care very little about their livestock, they were fed ground up remains of other dead (often diseased) livestock. Due to Mad Cow disease, this is not done as often, but it used to happen A LOT!

~If gutted improperly, the contents of a cow's stomach and its f***s can (and often does) come in contact with the meat that is being processed for human consumption. Because that industry demands speed, it often goes unreported and the contaminated meat continues down the conveyor. (UGH!)

~The idea of pigs being dipped into a scalding chemical bath (in order to remove their hair) while they're still alive makes my stomach wrench.

~If slaughterhouse workers become physically ill, they sometimes lose their lunch in the "waste trough". Apparently, it's a collector of scraps, unused/unusable parts and has a drain in the bottom for the blood to be carried away. I've read former workers state that they saw a coworker get sick in the trough...a few minutes later, a different worker accidentally drops meat into the waste area. He retrieved it and the meat went down the production line anyway.

Answer 5

I heard that meat requires the death of an animal.

I'm not sure if its true, but its pretty gross if it is. And its a pretty sad state of affairs when the death of an animal isn't gross enough, we have to look for more facts. Thats a sad reflection on mankind eh ?

Here are my normal comments on the milk industry:

Artificial incemination every year

Cows would naturally calve every 2-3 years. Dairy farms artificially inceminate them every 11 months. This causes excessive stress on the cows body, increses the chance of prolapse and generally "wears them out" in a few years, rather than a natural 20 years.

Protein enriched feed

The feed they are given is enriched with artificial growth foods. these are generally made with cattle meat protiens.

In the USA and some parts of Australiasia they use a hormone growth agent called recombinant bovine somatotropin. Its brand name is POSILAC® and its made by Monsanto. This increases milk yield and beef growth. This is a synthetic hormone. Its banned in the EU since 1988

The main mechanism these hormones work is by re-directing dietry nutrients from peripheral body tissue to mammary glands. effectively, they are slowly killing the cow.

70% of US cattle are injected with this growth hormone ( 2007 stats ) that the majority of the world will not entertain because they believe its too dangerous.

Bribe/feed caged carousels

These suck. They are large rotating carousels where the cows are caged in a space where they cannot move. They have "black boxes" on thier legs which communicate with the main operating computer. They are fed just the right amount of food depending on how much milk they gave yesterday. They have added growth food if thier production drops

One person can milk about 400 cattle on a carousel so there is no time for checking the animals health - they just milk them dry and kick them out.

killing bulls, excess calves and free martins at 1 week old

All bulls are killed at 1 week old, although some farms iin the UK started ( in 2006 ) shipping them to Continental Europe for veal again. They do not keep any back for breeding as they bring in new blood lines. In the UK we don't use dairy bull calves for veal anymore in country. They are either killed, or shipped out. Bull calves go to make low quality leather products such as cheap sofas.

They kill all free martins as there is a good chance they will be barren.

Strangly, they feed these animals with colostrum at birth to keep them alive, but then kill them a week later.

excess feeding to produce 60 lites of milk per day

The growth food is all designed to produce excess milk. Cows are naturally designed to produce about 15 litres. The european targets for 2009 are set at 90 litres, i don't think it need me to tell you if this is heading the right or wrong direction.

intensive rearing means low husbandry checks

As mentioned above, most automatic dairies have one milkmaid per session, thats it. I know a dairy farm with 1200 cattle and 3 employees. Tell me how they can ever check the cattle....

removing calves from mothers after colostrum feed

This is stressful, cows bawl for weeks for thier young, calling them to be fed. Obviously the calf cannot "run to mom" because its in dog food by now.

killing the cow at 7 years old

Cows can naturally live to 20 years old. Production dairy cows are killed after 4-6 births so are never kept after 7 years old.

Hope that helps.

Answer 6

I Know so much, but I'll share the most recent thing learned:

I knew there was pus in milk, but not exactly how much. Pus cells are called somatic cells and a count of higher than 200 million per liter should not enter the human food supply, according to the dairy industry.

Which means every state In the USA but Hawaii is producing milk with pus levels so high that it shouldn’t enter the human food supply.

I live in MN, where people consume 420 million pus cells per glass of milk. Gross!

Answer 7

I can think of lots but here's two fun stories.

Pork meat smells like human flesh to me.

In England they import animal bones to crush up and feed the dairy cows, which gives them calcium. They found out that some of the bones they were getting from India were human and probably always have been.

Bon appetite.

Answer 8

it made me physically sick when i heard about how meat is injected with carbon monoxide that will keep it from looking spoiled.  first of all, carbon monoxide is a POISON....why the FDA would approve this for use in any food product is beyond me.  i have also seen photos of meats that were injected with carbon monoxide and those that were not after several days, and those that were not injected had already turned green!!  that just makes me ill.  here is a link to an article about this:  http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/...

The other sickening stories to me are the chickens at KFC, and the cries and screams let out by pigs and cows as they die.  i have personally witnessed how dairy cows react when their calves are taken away, and they literally go into mourning.  they cry and cry for days without sleeping or eating.  they react like any parent would when their child is stolen from them.  it is absolutely sickening.  i'm glad i didn't eat much for breakfast this morning now that i'm thinking about all of this stuff =(

Answer 9

The de-beaking of chickens and chicks - I learned about that, and I was completely horrified.

Answer 10

I thought it was disgusting that chickens are routinely fed arsenic (and most commonly roxarsone) to prevent parasitic infections brought on by the fact they are kept caged or in extremely close quarters, often hoarded by the thousands in small confined spaces.

In a wide spread test that measured 150 different grocery store brands of chicken, over half had measurable levels of arsenic, and even organic, kosher and halal chicken contained arsenic (but not as many samples as conventional). Every single fast food sample tested had arsenic.

"Testing of 155 samples from uncooked supermarket chicken products found 55 percent carried detectable arsenic. Arsenic was more than twice as prevalent in conventional brands of supermarket chicken as in certified organic and other "premium" brands. All 90 fast food chicken products tested by IATP also contained detectable arsenic. The full report can be read at: www.iatp.org."

http://www.eidon.com/arsenic.htm

The levels of arsenic consumed by people that eat chicken on a regular basis exceed the legal limit for arsenic in just about any other product. While the government dances around food safety because of the death grip that food industry lobbyists have on them, commercial paint or other substances that have been found to have even a fraction of the arsenic levels in chicken meat have been pulled from shelves. The effects on human health are extraordinary. I saw a question here on answers a few days ago that got me looking into arsenic in deeper detail and I found some shocking stuff.

I read a study recently on one town that was very close to a chicken factory farm, and the amount of arsenic that was excreted in the f***s of the chickens alone was so high that wind-borne arsenic deposits from the heaps of f***s on the factory farm grounds would deposit over the town, and the amount of cancers, tumors, cases of autism, learning disorders, birth defects, skin and lung disorders, etc. increased steadily every year since the factory farm opened business.

Right now the town has a collection of family members filing a class action lawsuit against the factory farm from family members of those that died. Hair and nail tests on people in the town showed nearly every citizen of the town had shocking levels of arsenic in their bodies. The percentages of illnesses in the town were horrifyingly disproportionate to the general population of the USA. And since this is just an isolated case of how dangerous this arsenic is, think of the amount of cases world-wide... there are probably millions of people today that have health problems but would never think of getting tested for arsenic... millions of horrifying illnesses to children and adults.

And of course, it's no secret that cows, chickens and pigs are fed one another's f***s interchangeably as a way to save money. There are loopholes in agriculture laws that permit for this to happen. Since it costs a lot of money and is taxing on the environment to dispose of the humongous amounts of f***s that factory farms produce, chicken farmers often scrape up the mountainous piles of arsenic-laced feathers and f***s and give them to cattle farmers or pig farmers, and vice versa. This "fills out" the feed and saves them money, obviously, and it also assures that cross-contamination and filth make it into everyone's hamburger.

http://www.fecesfarming.com/

Then there's the disgusting nature of factory farms in general. I almost lose my mind every time I see an idiot saying that the videos of factory farm animal abuse are isolated incidents. I have people that are as close as siblings to me that are undercover filmers of numerous factory farms. I have seen with my own two eyes a cattle farm that supplies a HUGE percentage of beef in the USA and the conditions are so horrifying that I can still remember it as vividly as my own mother's face. The smell, filth and moral decay I experienced being there only further motivates me to fight for what I believe in.

I continue to try to investigate and find out things on my own because unlike the general population that sits comfortably with the spoon-fed garbage that the food industry wants them to believe, I won't rest until I see the truth with my *OWN* eyes - not a video someone else shot, not some food industry spokesperson's opinion - but something I saw myself.

I would be more than willing to share company names, locations and specific details of the horrible stuff I saw but for privacy purposes I don't post them here.

Answer 11

The worst in general is that we can bring animals into the world and beat and abuse them, never seeing the outside sun and feed them their own dead. Then they are taken to slaughter and some are not even killed outright before they are rendered to food. You can't need more than that can you?

Answer 12

All I need to know is that I am not eating the flesh of an animal that once had feelings and wanted a chance to live, just like you and me.

Answer 13

potted meat, hot dogs....EEK!!

my cat won't eat that stuff and people do!!!