According to a recent AP
article, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that it had temporarily
shut down a slaughterhouse in rural Oregon for “inhumane slaughtering
practices.
A letter sent to the plant owner by the Food Safety and Inspection
Service, a division of the USDA, states that workers were unsuccessful in
knocking out cows with a single shot from a handheld bolt gun, and were instead
shooting them multiple times.
The Federal Meat Inspection Act is supposed to prevent the “inhumane
slaughtering of farmed animals, excluding birds like chickens and turkeys. The
law gives the food safety agency the authority to shut down slaughterhouses.
This plant has faced penalties from the government before.
In July 2013, the Oregon State Department of Environmental Quality fined the
company more than $15,000 for discharging wastewater into a ditch and polluting
nearby wetlands.
From polluting
the environment to exploiting
workers to committing horrifying acts of animal cruelty, factory farms
routinely break laws and often get away with it.
It’s important to note that this slaughterhouse was shut down
for “inhumane slaughtering practices. The truth is there’s no
way to humanely kill an animal who doesn’t want to die.
Pigs, cows, chickens, and other farmed animals are just as
sensitive and intelligent as the dogs and cats we love at home. Yet the meat
industry is allowed to abuse billions of them in ways that would warrant
felony-level animal cruelty charges if the victim were just one dog or cat.
What does “humane mean to the factory farming industry? See
for yourself.
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