PETA’s international affiliates have documented cruelty to sheep at dozens of wool farms around the world, including in Argentina, where an eyewitness saw workers hack apart conscious lambs and start to skin some of them while they were still alive and kicking at a facility in the Ovis 21 network – Patagonia’s wool supplier at the time.

A gut-churning PETA video exposé reveals that life is hell for lambs and other sheep exploited for so-called “responsibly sourced” wool on so-called “sustainable” farms. A witness found workers in Argentina hacking into fully conscious lambs, starting to skin some of them while they were still alive and kicking, and otherwise mutilating, abusing, and neglecting lambs and sheep on farms in the Ovis 21 network—Patagonia’s wool supplier.

 

UPDATE:  Update: On August 17, 2015, after hearing from more than 50,000 people, Patagonia announced that it was dropping Ovis 21 as a supplier, but will continue to sell products made from wool.

 

Workers picked up gentle lambs and—while they were fully conscious—tied their legs together, plunged knives into their throats, and sawed through their necks. Blood poured from the wounds as they kicked with their only free leg. Workers then snapped their heads backwards, apparently trying to break their necks.

Even after all that, some of the lambs still managed to cry out and gasp.

Minutes later, some lambs were still alive and kicking when a worker drove a knife into their legs to start skinning them. Eventually, they were hacked apart. Their organs were carved out of their bodies and their severed heads dumped into a bloody tub.

All this happened in full view of other lambs. They were just feet away and cried out in what must have been terror and severe distress. Older sheep—used for their wool, then no longer wanted—were lined up, tackled, and dragged away to be shipped to slaughter.

 

Source Wikimedia Commons, Bobby Proffer

 

With thanks to Stacey at Our Compass – https://our-compass.org/2020/03/09/dissociation-and-delusion-on-a-dairy-farm-a-former-farm-worker-speaks-out/

Source Sentient Media
By Jessica Scott-Reid

Susana Romatz struggled to mentally cope with the demands of working on a dairy goat farm—like separating mother goats from their babies—until she said enough was enough.

Susana Romatz doesn’t consider herself to have been a farm kid, per se, but her grandfather did raise rabbits for meat. Looking back now, she says that navigating that as a child is likely what gave her the “skill-set for disassociating” early on. “I knew what he was doing with them, and it gave me that toolbox to shut that feeling off,” she says.

It was this ability to turn away from her emotions and instincts that would allow the animal-loving, on-and-off-again vegetarian to take work as a farmhand on a goat farm in western Oregon. It’s an experience, the now-vegan—and vegan cheese-maker—says she is still trying to heal from.

At the time, Romatz was a new teacher seeking additional work for extra cash. She wanted something outdoors and physical. That area of Oregon is considered quite progressive, she says. “Ethical,” “free range,” “organic,” products abound. So when a “humane” goat farm was looking for help, she says that she was on board. “I kind of started to buy into that line of reasoning, that you can keep an animal, do animal husbandry, in a way that is kind to the animals,” she recalls. It didn’t take long though, until “things started to disintegrate that idea.”

What made this particular goat farm—which produced milk and cheese and sold goats for meat—“humane” was that the animals were free-range. “They had a lot of land,” Romatz says, and the farm was “family-owned.” Romatz soon realized, though, that these things meant very little. “Just because it was higher up on the level of kindness to animals, compassion to animals, there were still some things that were really bothersome to me.”

At the top of that list, she says, was the disbudding of baby goats—kids—without anesthesia. Disbudding is a standard farming practice, done to stop the growth of horns, and purportedly to prevent property destruction and horn-related injuries. (Horn-related injuries to other animals commonly occur in confined spaces.) Without anesthesia, most animal welfare and rights groups condemn the practice, though it remains common.

“It was really horrifying,” she recalls. “They actually shrieked. [The farmers] would have to hold them down and basically burn off their horn buds with a hot electric poker.” She says some of the kids would never go near humans again. “It was one of the things I had to work really hard at shutting off. I had to not think about it. I could tell it was very, very painful.”

Romatz says that she tried justifying it to herself at the time by considering animal agriculture a trade-off. “With animal husbandry, there are trade-offs that you have to make when you are commodifying an animal, no matter how much you love them. You can’t capitalize on their bodies without making certain decisions that might be questionable,” she once believed. “When you are using animals in that way, you have to make those kinds of decisions,” to earn a financial profit.

But even as Romatz attempted to take a pragmatic approach—much like that of the farm owners—she always felt, in the back of her mind, that it was all very wrong. “The commodification of animals, milk, and bodies in that way, keeping the goats pregnant pretty much year ‘round, being fed grain [rather than their natural diet] year-round to keep them lactating, I knew it all had to be hard on the goats’ bodies.”

The separation of mothers and newborns also weighed heavily on Romatz. “The baby goats were taken away from their mothers almost immediately,” she says. In the dairy industry, mothers and newborn calves are routinely separated in order to reroute milk for human consumption. With the goats, Romatz says she was told by the farm owners that mothers needed to be separated from calves due to fears of a particular virus, the caprine arthritic encephalitis virus, transmitted through the mothers’ milk. (Administering blood tests to identify infected animals and removing them from the herd is also an effective solution.)

Romatz says that the calls between the moms and babies were indisputable. “This is something I would experience on a daily basis during kidding season,” she says, “when there were lots of babies kept in a pen, and lots of the does [mothers] kept in other pens, and you could hear them calling back and forth to each other.” Only the female kids were isolated, though, as the farm owners needed only them to stay healthy—so they too could become perpetually impregnated and lactating one day. The male kids were free to potentially become infected with the virus, she says, because they would be sent off to slaughter at two or three months old anyhow. “It was definitely sad,” she says, of the days the baby boys were sold, “knowing where they were heading.”

In order to mentally cope with with the work, which Romatz did for three years, she says, “you just keep shifting your bottom line, you keep shifting it, until you get to the point where you’re just like, ‘Wow, how was I even able to walk into that every day?’”

Eventually, Romatz left the farm to focus on teaching. She says that it was a relief to no longer have to mentally block out many aspects of her professional work. “All that work you’ve been doing to hold back those thoughts, you can’t do it anymore, and the flood comes, and then you can’t see it the same way ever again.”

Romatz went vegan two years after leaving the farm. After she and her partner rescued a dog, she says, “My partner just texted me and said ‘I can’t do animal products anymore,’ and it literally was so fast that I was able to switch. It took me maybe half an hour.” She says that it just felt right. “It was like everything just fell into place at that moment. All these little doubts and feelings I had been having all this time, and I had been fighting against them, or trying to convince myself—it’s that cognitive dissonance.” She recalls a “constant battle inside myself, doing things that were totally opposite from what my beliefs are.” When deciding to go vegan, “it was so easy for me to finally let all that go. [I realized] that was all an illusion, that was a lie to get me to spend money, a lie to get me to stop looking further into this.”

Her bottom line, she says, immediately rebounded.

Now, Romatz feels a sense of wanting to make up for her past. In addition to being vegan, Romatz is a vegan cheese advocate, of sorts. Out of necessity, she began making her own vegan cheeses, using locally grown hazelnuts and special vegan cultures that she created herself. The cheese is very labour-intensive and expensive (she notes that nut farms are not subsidized in the way dairy farms are) so, for now, Romatz only makes cheese for family and friends. Romatz has a great desire to educate others; she sells her vegan cultures online and provides information and recipes on her website—“to give other people the tools to make these cheeses themselves.”

As for the owners of the goat farm, which is still in operation today, Romatz says, “they aren’t bad people.” They just see things differently. “It was just the older [farmers’] view that animals are more like property,” she says. “They took care of the animals to the degree they needed to [be profitable].”

Romatz believes that the bombardment of messaging—from media, culture, tradition, and family—enables some of us to “become disassociated from the reality of what you are actually experiencing.” She says that it took her a few years before she could really understand all that she experienced on the farm, “before I could allow all the things that had happened there to start to soak in, to realize how I had tricked myself to be able to work there.”

Today, Romatz says she is moving forward, but will never forget the animals of her past. “I’m really trying to respect the lives of the animals who have come and gone. But in understanding and moving forward, you don’t have to necessarily dive into the trauma of the past; you have to understand it and notice it, but you don’t have to beat yourself over it. Thinking about [my experiences] and also moving forward have been very important to me.”

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Pester pig is on a campaign to stop intensive farming. Now at the laundry throwing red socks in with a white clothes wash.

 

 

 

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/pigsinchains?source=direct_link&

 

Tell high street chains to support high welfare farms!

In the UK, Greggs has made a fortune from their vegan sausage roll, but Pester Pig insists their ethics remain questionable until they source all their pork from high welfare farms.

Vegans and meat eaters alike want to end factory farming, a system that tortures animals, poisons the environment and increases the risk of resistant diseases. Don’t buy from Greggs, or Pester Pig might come for your laundry! Share the video & sign the petition.

 

 

Tell Greggs to stop supporting factory farming!

Sign this letter asking the CEOs of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Greggs and Domino’s to only source high welfare pork.

 

 

Sign the petition to all the main UK supermarket COE’s asking them to STOP supporting factory farming and instead to cruelty free systems; sign the petition via this link:

 

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/pigsinchains/

 

Most High Street Chains Source their Pork from Factory Farms

Three-quarters of the 60 high street supermarkets & food chains surveyed by Farms Not Factories sell pork from factory farms. The vast majority of these don’t offer a single high welfare alternative. Pigs reared in factory farms (an intensive farming system that is permitted under the Red Tractor labelling scheme) have to endure permanent indoor confinement in barren, overcrowded pens for their entire lives. Mother pigs are kept in narrow metal cages so small they cannot even turn around for weeks on end.

The Solution

RSPCA Assured, Free Range and Organic all have significantly better standards than the Red Tractor labelling scheme and minimum UK & EU standards. Some well known high street chains have already made the switch to one of these high welfare labels. For example, McDonald’s only sell RSPCA Assured pork across their entire menu and the Co-op only sells Outdoor Bred RSPCA Assured pork throughout their entire own-brand fresh pork range. Pigs on high welfare farms, either outdoors or indoors with plenty of straw, are healthy and more contented. They have enough room to roam and express natural instinctive behaviours such as rooting, nesting and playing.

 

Farms not Factories !

 

02/02/2020

Joaquin Phoenix joined Animal Equality on Tower Bridge in London this morning, in advance of the 73rd BAFTA ceremony, to draw attention to the link between animal agriculture and the climate emergency.

 

 

Phoenix and other activists dropped a 390 square-foot banner that read ‘Factory farming is destroying our planet. Go vegan’ from the iconic landmark, as a plea to the public to stop eating animal products.

Joaquin said “I think we have a personal responsibility to take action right now and one way that we can mitigate climate change is by adjusting our consumption and by going plant-based. And so I feel sometimes like it’s not being talked about enough. So I’m just encouraging people to learn more about eating plant-based and to make a difference to make whatever personal impact they can on the climate emergency.”

 

 

He added: “When you witness the horror that really happens behind closed doors and slaughterhouses to farm animals all over the world, it’s impossible not to be affected by it and to realise that we have to do something drastic to stop it. So I’m just doing my part and trying to amplify the voice of these activists that out every day, doing something, taking action, and the least I can do is take some time off today and come here to talk about this issue.”

Throughout the action, Joaquin and other Animal Equality activists held placards showing the suffering of animals in factory farms, as well as the devastating impacts of animal agriculture on the environment and climate.

President of Animal Equality, Sharon Núñez, said: “Joaquin’s dedication to animals and the environmental cause is extraordinary, he sees the absolute need for us to have serious conversations around the devastation that factory farming is having on animals, our planet, and our health.”

 

 

Factory farming is a major contributor to water and air pollution as well as deforestation. Animal agriculture accounts for 14.5% of greenhouse emissions, according to The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. As well as being a leading cause of climate change, animal farming is a major contributor to water and air pollution, deforestation, species extinction, and more. A vegan diet is one of the best ways to reduce our impact on the planet – by changing what we eat, we can change the course of our future.

Find out more about the devastating impacts animal agriculture has on animals and our planet here.

Purchase an Animal Equality hoodie, just like the one Joaquin wore when he joined us to protest, here.