Transport

Crammed together, animals must stand in their own excrement while exposed to extreme weather in open trucks, sometimes freezing to the trailer.¹⁰ These conditions can result in “downers”—animals

too sick or weak to walk, even when shocked with electric prods or beaten. Downers are dragged by chains to slaughter or to “dead piles” where they are left to die.¹³

See this 2008 Washington Post article and video about the treatment of downers.

About 200,000 pigs arrive at the slaughterhouse dead each year.³⁴ Many of these deaths are caused by a lack of ventilation on transport trucks in hot weather.³⁵

Like this bull I had last year—this bull was one of the biggest bulls I’ve ever seen. It was at the very front of the trailer. And the spirit it had, he was just trying his hardest to get off the trailer. He had been prodded to death by three or four drivers…but his back legs, his hips have given out. And so basically they just keep prodding it. So it took about 45 minutes to get it from the front nose of the trailer to the back ramp….

Then from there it was chained with its front legs, and it fell off the ramp, smashed onto the floor, which I don’t know how many feet that would be but quite a racket…I just said, “Why don’t you shoot the damn thing? What’s going on? What about this Code of Ethics?”

This one guy said, “I never shoot. Why would I shoot a cow that can come off and there’s still good meat there?” When I first started, I talked to another trucker about downers. He said, “You may as well not get upset. It’s been going on for many years. It will go on for the rest of my life and your life. So just calm down about it. It happens. You’ll get kind of bitter like I did. You just don’t think about the animals. You just think that they aren’t feeling or whatever.”

interview with a Canadian livestock trucker, from A Cow at My Table, 1998 documentary

What About Fish?

Many fish are long-lived, have complicated nervous systems, and are capable of learning complicated tasks.¹² Guyton & Hall's Textbook of Medical Physiology (1996) states, "The lower regions of the brain [which all vertebrates have] appear to be important in the appreciation of the suffering types of pain because animals with their brains sectioned above the mesencephalon to block any pain signals reaching the cerebrum still evince undeniable evidence of suffering when any part of the body is traumatized."

By far the most common farmed fish in the U.S. are catfish, around 2 billion of whom live in farms at any given time (USDA ERS, 2004). In some catfish cage systems in the United States, one can find stocking densities as high as 17 pounds per cubic foot (Chapman, 2000). As the average catfish weighs 3.4 pounds at slaughter (USDA NASS, 2003), that's 5 fish per cubic foot. As with other farm animals, increasing the stocking density of fish increases profitability but can reduce welfare. High stocking density in fish farms is associated with stress, aggression, injuries, and disease due to poor water quality and collisions with other fish or barriers (Hastein, Scarfe, and Lund, 2006), with mortality rates of up to 35% (Heikes and Killian, 1997).^12a

Each year hundreds of thousands of dolphins and thousands of other marine mammals are snagged in fishing nets worldwide. Most die.¹³ (See also this report.) Industrial fishing depletes marine food webs, seriously damaging ocean ecosystems.¹⁴

See also this NOAA report, and this on Mercury in fish.

Wildlife

USDA APHIS' Wildlife Services and livestock producers kill wildlife to protect farmed animals.

Having eliminated native populations of wolves and grizzly bears,⁴ federal government hunters now kill about 100,000 coyotes, bobcats, feral hogs, bison (on left), and mountain lions each year.¹⁵ They are shot, caught in steel-jaw leghold traps or neck nooses, or poisoned with cyanide.¹⁵

Slaughterhouses