AO_Undercover

It would not be wise at all, haha. That's why the president of Animal Outlook, Erica Meier, kindly offered to provide proof for me so I can maintain my anonymity. Thanks!

That's a great question. I have looked over some of my investigations and had the memories come flooding back. I mostly remember the reactions the animals had to any cruelty or standard practices like how the calves react to having hot irons pressed against their skulls during disbudding/dehorning. In some cases, they would even grind their teeth to brace themselves against the pain... sometimes I can still hear that sound if I think about it hard enough. I think that hit me the hardest and to this day, I still cry when I think about it.

Thank you for that question, it's one that has been on my mind for a long time. I think the best thing that could be done is letting people see what is actually going on. People who have watched undercover footage from factory farms usually all have a visceral reaction to the content because it is shocking to them. In some cases, people have no idea that animals are being abused on farms because they have been shown this idyllic image of a happy farm where animals are free to roam and have "one bad day" when they're slaughtered, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

I think that if people can see just where their food comes from and how cruel the process can actually be, they'll be empowered to be more conscious of their decision making when going to the grocery store or they might even pursue those changes themselves! We are all more influential than we give ourselves credit for.

That's a really great question. A lot of standard farming practices are pretty cruel in nature. Take disbudding/dehorning. Young calves have their skulls burned with hot irons to remove their horns and on one of the dairies we investigated, they performed this procedure without anesthesia, so the calves felt every ounce of the pain and the role of the farm worker there involved administering that pain, essentially. There was no malicious intent there, the farm worker was doing that job and it is standard practice to disbud or dehorn the calves, but the calves suffer in the process.

When much of standard practice on farms dictate that animals must suffer through the processes, the farm workers can become desensitized to causing animals pain, since it happens pretty often through standard practices, anyway. This could make acts of cruelty seem like not much of a big deal to them. I think this was best summarized by the supervisor at the hatchery owned by Cooke Aquaculture, where we conducted our investigation into fish farming. He can be seen in the investigation video, talking about how the fish there were killed by suffocating them, saying, "It's rough. Over the years, you kinda get desensitized."

Thanks for asking that. Every time I've ever been on a farm, I've actually hoped that I wouldn't find any cruelty. It would be nice to investigate a farm one day and find no abuse, to see no animals in pain. Unfortunately, that's not the reality of factory farming. At every farm site I've been to, some forms of cruelty revealed themselves, whether it was 1 day into it, or a month in. At times I've been surprised when I didn't immediately see it, and I held out hope that there would be workers who treated the animals with kindness or decency. But I've had that hope be proven wrong time and time again. Suffering and factory farming go hand in hand when it comes to what the animals go through.

In grocery stores, there are food products that state that the animals were "humanely raised" or that they adhere to some better standards, but the act of farming involves doing things that are inherently inhumane, such as disbudding calves to stop their horns from growing, throwing fish into empty buckets without water so that they slowly suffocate to death, keeping chickens in dark sheds their entire lives, these are all standard practices. This is the sobering reality that comes with consuming animal products.