Vegetarian Star

Emily Barclay would like you to know a few things about the animals that you eat the next time you sit down at the dinner table.

“I’m not against people who eat meat but I’d like them to know what happens in a factory farm where highly intelligent animals like pigs live horrific lives,” Barclay told Confidential.

Rolling Stone featured an article several years ago describing the conditions pigs lived at a Smithfield Foods farm, a leading producing of pork.

“Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth.”

“Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered.”

Is this a place where you would send your 3-year old to day care?

According to GoVeg,  pigs have the intelligence level beyond a child of the same age and are the smartest animals outside of primates.

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