Welfare

Introduction

On this page we will cover welfare issues among different species, groups of animals (such as animals raised in aquaculture, plus the aquatic species outside of farms), and even humans.

Human Wellfare

Child Labor & Human Trafficking

At Least 50 Children Found Cleaning Midwest Slaughterhouses 4:11 minute video 

Community Impacts

15 Reasons to Say "No" to Farmed Animals as "Gifts" lists reasons including

Farmers' Mental Health

Mental health has always been an issue for farmer's who's livelihoods hinge on good weather, good prices, and good luck. With climate change depression and suicides have skyrocketed in countries like India and the USA.

Dealing with livestock deaths, injuries, and sometimes mass cullings due to sickness can hit farmers particularly hard. 

Dairy

Meddling from the dairy industry has made the industry unprofitable for most, pushing farmers into financial problems, and even losing homes that their ancestors have often farmed for generations.

73 Cows a 15 minute documentary about a dairy farmer and his cows.

Indigenous Genocide

Indigenous communities throughout South America have been harassed, threatened, kidnapped for slave trade, had their villages burned, and been killed buy outsiders for their land. 

Cattle ranching accounts for 80% of Amazon Rainforest destruction, though this type of violence has happened for oil drilling, mining, and other types of business too. 

Slaughter House Workers

Slaughterhouses often hire immigrants and uneducated people or people who can't find work elsewhere due to criminal histories. This makes it easier for companies to take advantage of their employees, subjecting them to fast, dangerous work for low wages. All over the world there have been reports of unethical work conditions, but during covid major corporations endangered their workers by lying and covering up which employees had tested positive for covid. This lead to many unnecessary deaths.

"In America alone, over seventy thousand individuals work on slaughter lines2 and face the daily burden of killing several hundred animals every hour.3 These workers perform a job that, by its very nature, puts them at risk of psychological disorder and pathological sadism."

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One study showed that  "Though the industries they used for comparison were nearly identical in other predictors of changes in crime (namely worker demographics, potential to create social disorganization, and effect on unemployment in the surrounding areas), slaughterhouses outstripped all others in the effect they had on crime. They led not only to a larger increase in overall crime, but, disturbingly, disproportionate increases in violent crime and sexual crime.5"

Slavery

Cattle Ranching

"Debt bondage is common in Brazil’s lawless cattle country, according to the coordinator of this latest operation, Andre Wagner, also from the Labor Ministry.

“You’ll see someone working in degrading conditions, with an exhausting work schedule, eating one meal a day, while they don’t receive any form of salary or a very small one, because their food and tools are discounted." 

"In fact, more than 50,000 workers have been rescued from what Brazil defines as slave-like conditions since the mobile units were created in 1995. A third of them came from ranches."

Fur & Leather Farms

Animals

Various Species

Aquaculture

Farmed Fish

Wildlife

Camels

Cattle


Beef

Pigs

Factory Farmed "Game" Birds

Chickens

Forced Molting "The practice of starving hens for profit is known as forced-molting. Molting literally refers to the replacement of old feathers by new ones. In nature, birds replace all their feathers in the course of a year to maintain good plumage at all times. A natural molt often happens at the onset of winter, when nature discourages the hatching of chicks. The hen stops laying eggs and concentrates her energies on staying warm and growing new feathers.

The egg industry exploits this natural process by forcing an entire flock to molt simultaneously. This is done to manipulate the marketplace and to pump a few hundred more eggs out of exhausted hens when it is deemed cheaper to "recycle" them rather than immediately slaughter them after a year of relentless egg- laying on a calcium-deficient diet.

To trigger the physiological shock of the forced molt, a University of California poultry researcher (Donald Bell) recommends the removal of all food for no less than five days and as long as fourteen days. Survivors may be force-molted two or three times, based on economics. At any given time over 6 million hens in the U.S. are being systematically starved in their cages, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dr. Peter Dun, an animal scientist from Scotland, said hens are force molted in the United States “until their combs turn blue.”"

Wild vs Farmed Chickens How we've created birds who now lay up to 290 more eggs per year than their wild counterparts, putting them at greater risk of health complications and death.

Ducks

Rabbits

Sheep

Lambs

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Silk Worms

Fur, Skins, & Leather

Fur Industry

Skins

Grants

International

North America

USA