This [video footage from the movie Babe] is the way Americans want to think of pigs. Real-life "Babes" see no sun in their limited lives, with no hay to lie on, no mud to roll in. The sows live in tiny cages, so narrow they can’t even turn around. They live over metal grates, and their waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits.
--Morley Safer, Pork Power, 60 Minutes, 9/19/97

Can one regard a fellow creature as a property item, an investment, a piece of meat, an "it," without degenerating into cruelty towards that creature?
--Karen Davis, PhD (Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs; 1996)

A veteran USDA meat inspector from Texas describes what he has seen: "Cattle dragged and choked...Knocking ‘em four, five, ten times. Every now and then when they’re stunned they come back to life, and they’re up there agonizing. They’re supposed to be restunned but sometimes they aren’t and they’ll go through the skinning process alive. I’ve worked in four large [slaughterhouses] and a bunch of small ones. They’re all the same. If people were to see this, they’d probably feel really bad about it. But in a packing house everybody gets so used to it that it doesn’t mean anything."
--"Slaughterhouse", 1997

"Before they reach their end, the pigs get a shower, a real one. Water sprays from every angle to wash the farm off them. Then they begin to feel crowded. The pen narrows like a funnel' the drivers behind urge the pigs forward, until one at a time they climb onto the moving ramp... Now they scream, never having been on such a ramp, smelling the smells they smell ahead. I do not want to overdramatize because you've read all this before. But it was a frightening experience, seeing their fear, seeing so many of them go by, it had to remind me of things no one wants to be reminded of anymore, all mobs, all death marches, all mass murders and executions ... "
--Richard Rhodes



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