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Eventually, milking cows, like this one, collapse from exhaustion.
Normally, cows can live as long as twenty years,
but milking cows generally die within four.
At which point, their meat is used for fast food restaurants.
At this slaughterhouse,
the branded and dehorned cattle are brought into a stall.
The captive bolt gun, which was designed
to reduce animals unconscious without causing pain,
fires a steel bolt, that is powered by compressed air or a blank cartridge,
right into the animal's brain.
Though various methods of slaughter are used, in this Massachusetts facility,
the cattle is hoisted up and his or her throat is slit.
Along with the meat, their blood will be used as well.
Though the animal has received a captive bolt to the head,
which is supposed to have rendered him
or her senseless ... as you can see the animal is still conscious.
This is not uncommon.
Sometimes they are still alive even after they have been bled,
and are well on their way down the assembly line to be butchered.
This is the largest glatt kosher meat plant in the United States.
Glatt, the Yiddish word for "smooth", means the highest standard of cleanliness ...
... and rules for kosher butchering require minimal suffering.
The use of electric prods on immobilized animals is a violation.
Inverting frightened animals for the slaughterer's convenience
is also a violation.
The inversion process causes cattle to aspirate blood, or breath it in, after incision.
Ripping the trachea and esophagi from their throats is another
egregious violation, since kosher animals are not to be touched ...
... until bleeding stops.
And by dumping struggling and dying steers through metal chutes
onto blood soaked floors,
with their breathing tubes and gullets dangling out,
this "sacred task" is neither clean or compassionate.
Shackling and hoisting is ruled yet another violation,
nor does it correspond to the kosher way of treating animals.
If this was kosher, death was neither quick nor merciful.
Veal, taken from their mothers within two days of birth, are tied
at the neck and kept restricted to keep muscles from developing.
Fed an iron-deficient liquid diet,
denied bedding, water, and light,
after four months of this miserable existence they are slaughtered.
Sows in factory farms are breeding machines, kept
continually pregnant by means of artificial insemination.
Large pig market factories will "manufacture",
as they like to call it, between 50,000 and 600,000 pigs a year... each.
FACTORY CONDITIONS
GESTATION CRATES
RUPTURES & ABSCESSES
CANIBALISM
WASTE PITS
Tail docking is a practice derived from the lack of space and stressful
living conditions so as to keep pigs from biting each other's tails off.
This is done without anesthetic.
Ear clipping is a similar procedure, also administered without anesthetic.
As well as teeth-cutting.
Castration is also done without painkillers or anesthetic, and will
supposedly produce a more fatty grade of meat.
The electric prods are used for obvious reasons: handling.
Electrocution is another method of slaughter, as seen here.
Throat slitting, however,
is still the least expensive way to kill an animal.
BOILING AND HAIR REMOVAL
After knife sticking, pigs are shackled,
suspended on a bleed-rail and immersed in scalding tanks to remove their bristle.
Many are still struggling as they are dunked upside down in tanks of steaming water,
where they are submerged and drowned.