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Read, Debate: Engage.
| topic: | Animal Cruelty |
|---|---|
| located: | USA |
| editor: | Yair Oded |
The coronavirus pandemic has led to the shutdown of slaughterhouses across the United States, as a growing number of factory workers tested positive for COVID-19. New reports reveal that as a result of the shutdowns – millions of farm animals, including pigs and chickens, are in the process of being inhumanely slaughtered by suffocation, drowning, boiling, and shooting.
According to The Guardian, the spread of coronavirus in meat plants (which resulted to a great extent from poor working conditions) has led to the abrupt closing of 30 to 40 meat plants. Seeing as in the U.S. the meat industry is heavily monopolised, and meat production is consolidated among several prominent factories, the shutdowns have so far cut the beef slaughtering capacity in the country by 25 per cent and the pork slaughtering capacity by 40 per cent, The Guardian reports.
In order to deal with the ‘backlog’ of animals, meat plants have been instructed to ‘depopulate’ their livestock. As a result, more than 10 million hens have been slaughtered so far due to plant shutdowns. Among the methods of their killing are filling their sheds with CO2 gas and smothering them with water-based foam.
As for hogs, it is estimated by the pork industry that about 10 million of them could be slaughtered by September due to plant shutdowns; roughly 2 million have already been killed. Pig culling methods vary depending on the circumstances but include anaesthetic overdose, gassing, shooting, sodium nitrite ingestion, blunt force trauma (in some cases by slamming piglets against the ground), and boiling them alive.
Thus far, the slaughter has continued despite the outcries of animal rights activists and in spite of the fact that demands at food banks and hunger rates are soaring in the U.S. during the pandemic.
One of the many issues the coronavirus crisis has placed under the limelight is the inhumanity and environmentally-destructive nature of the meat industry.
In addition to the unfathomable cruelty with which animals in both the meat and dairy industries are handled, animal agriculture is also among the primary causes of global warming. Countless scientific sources have concluded that beef and pork production release enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. “If cows were their own country, they would be the third-biggest greenhouse gas emitter in the world,” writes reporter Sarah Kaplan in the Washington Post.
The meat industry also perpetuates racial injustice against ethnic minorities. In an opinion piece for The New York Times, author Jonathan Safran Foer mentions that the majority of the thousands of workers who contracted COVID-19 at U.S. meat plants due to refusals to shut the factories down as the virus spread were black and Hispanic.
The coronavirus pandemic has only accelerated and brought greater attention to the long-standing problems and devastating injustices in the meat production industry. Americans must urgently reconsider their meat consumption habits and press for immediate reforms to take place in the meat industry.
Image by Aline Dassel
