Lent is a period of reflection, and a time for Christians to repent for their sins. What better time to become acquainted with the realities of animal agriculture and abstain from inflicting pain and suffering on sentient beings?
By abstaining from animal products, this is what you’ll be giving up…
Harm to Chickens
Hens are imprisoned inside tiny cages, stacked high inside vast sheds with tens of thousands of other birds. To prevent them pecking each other under such great stress and distress, their beaks are cut off with a hot wire guillotine, an extremely painful process, which leaves many struggling to eat for the rest of their short lives.
These hens are forced to lay egg after egg, and after a year or so, with their bodies “spent”, they are taken from the cages, stuffed into crates, trucked to the abattoir, and shackled upside down on a conveyor belt to await slaughter. Many suffer multiple fractures during this process.
And spare a thought for the male chicks – yes, those cute, adorable, fluffy babies you and your kids probably adore. At one day old, they are shredded alive. Horrific, right? They’re put through a grinding machine or gassed to death because they don’t produce any profit for the egg industry.
For chickens, ducks and turkeys – where the number of animals inside one shed is gargantuan – individual care is impossible, and so millions suffer and die without ever seeing a vet or being treated for illness, infection, or injury.
Abuse of Cows
The dairy industry is built on the control of the reproductive systems of female non-humans. Cows are repeatedly impregnated to ensure their milk keeps flowing. Their babies (whom they carry for nine months, just like human mothers) are taken from them to stop them drinking the profitable milk. Cows bellow with grief at the loss of their young.
Suffering is rife within the industry. Female calves’ horns and extra teats are cut off with no anaesthetic and in some countries, the same happens to their tails.
Milking machines attached to the cow’s body can result in painful infections of the teats such as mastitis. The cycle of forced pregnancy, birth, theft, and grief continues until the cow’s body can give no more, and these gentle, curious, smart, playful animals are shipped off, terrified, to be slaughtered.
As for their young, the male calves tend to be seen as “waste” products. In the US, these babies end up in veal crates, confined in darkness before being slaughtered just a few days or weeks after being born. In Australia, these male calves (known as “bobby” calves) are often starved in the hours before they are slaughtered. If money cannot be made from them, they are simply shot at birth.
All this suffering for a product we don’t need, and in fact, does us harm. Dairy milk is perfectly formulated to enable a calf to grow, but in people it is linked to digestive problems, skin complaints, and even some cancers.
Besides, don’t you find it bizarre that we’re the only species that drinks milk past childhood – and it’s not even human milk!
Terror of Pigs
Female pigs are forcibly impregnated and many are kept in “sow stalls” – tiny spaces not big enough for them to turn around, where they may go insane with boredom. After giving birth, they are forced to nurse their babies from the confines of gestation crates where they can barely reach their young to nuzzle and comfort them.
As with chickens raised for their meat on factory farms, these sentient beings live and may die in their own excrement. Because of the sheer numbers, they’re often not treated for the sickness and pain they suffer.
But it doesn’t stop there. Pigs are beaten, kicked, and shoved into trucks, hundreds at a time, and transported, often for 24-72 hours, without food or water, to the slaughterhouse. Investigations show only too clearly the terror and physical suffering they endure there.
What would Jesus say about such suffering?
In Australia, pigs are forced into gas chambers to be “stunned” by carbon dioxide, but this so-called “humane” method induces panic and terror. Stunning is often ineffective, so pigs, as well as other animals, may be fully conscious as their throats are cut. It obvious that slaughterhouses are terrifying for animals, but they make victims of people, too.
Suffering of Marine Creatures
Scientific evidence has found that fish are sentient and can feel both physical and emotional pain, as do crabs, lobsters, and other crustaceans. And yet, billions are dragged from their homes to suffocate to death, bleed out, or be boiled alive.
Industrial fishing is incredibly destructive. Huge nets pull trillions of fish from the oceans, but other species including whales, dolphins, porpoises, sharks, starfish, sponges, turtles, and even diving seabirds such as the albatross, are caught up in them and die slow, painful deaths.
Fish farming is not the answer. As well causing a host of environmental and health problems, it’s also extremely cruel, imprisoning masses of fish in netted cages, where they too are forced to live in their own excrement, just like other factory-farmed animals. Farmed fish are fed wild-caught fish, and so further drives the destruction of the oceans.
Right now is the perfect time to give up cruelty and embrace compassion instead. Download your free Vegan Starter Kit here.
Katrina Fox is a journalist and PR consultant who has written for a broad range of print and online media in the UK, US and Australia. A vegan for more than two decades, she is the founder of VeganBusinessMedia.com, providing resources, consultancy and training for vegan entrepreneurs, authors and creatives. Originally from the UK, Katrina is based in Sydney.
