Eggs.

• Chickens are sorted at birth to collect the females. Male chicks are considered useless since they cannot produce eggs themselves, but were also bred to be a part of the egg-laying strain of chickens which are not suitable for meat. Just hours after hatching they are either thrown alive into plastic bags, dumpsters, or into a chute which leads to a grinder. The female chickens are debeaked to prevent pecking one another from the stress of being locked in confined spaces with so many others. The majority of egg-laying hens are put into “battery cages” which usually contain up to five hens that have to share an 18 by 20 inch cage for their entire laying cycle, which under the stressful living conditions usually lasts only 1-2 years, compared to their natural 15-20 years of life. When they stop producing eggs they are either killed or “force molted”, which is a process where they are locked in a dark room without food or water for several days to shock their bodies into another egg laying cycle.

Dairy.

• Cows are forcibly impregnated once every year so that they continually produce milk. Sometimes this procedure is done on a device known to the dairy industry as a “rape-rack.” The artificial insemination process involves a farmer inserting the entire length of his arm into the cow’s rectum to position its uterus, while they force an instrument into its vagina to inject the semen.

  Their male newborns are usually taken away at birth and hastily castrated. They spend the remainder of their lives locked in a space barely bigger than their body while remaining tied down to prevent any new muscle growth. They are never allowed to walk or move freely and are fed an artificial liquid diet to produce the pale colored flesh sold as veal. The newborn females are taken and raised with surrogate mothers to become dairy cattle themselves when they are of age. When the adult cows stop producing milk or become “spent” they are usually sold to slaughterhouses. Less than fifty percent of dairy cows live past seven years of age, with twenty-five percent being slaughtered before the age of three. The natural lifespan of a cow is twenty to twenty-five years.

Meat.

• Cows raised for beef are usually kept in unsafe and unsanitary living conditions where injury and disease are prevalent. To combat this, they are given a long list of antibiotics. To ensure they produce a large quantity of meat they are given artificial growth hormones and fed a diet of mostly corn and soy, which makes them fattier but also very unhealthy as their normal diet is mostly grass and other ground covering plants. They are branded for identification purposes, either with a combination of ear tag and tattoo, or with a branding iron. When they are slaughtered they are knocked unconscious with a device which drives a steel bolt into their skull. It is designed to make them black out but also keep their heart pumping, so they drain more blood when their throats are slit. It has a high failure rate and they are sometimes still conscious while they are painfully bleeding to death.