Ingrid recommends - PETA

Dear Christopher,
I would like to share a terrific article from the June issue of Gourmet magazine with you. The article details the lives and deaths of chickens who are used for food and is a powerful indictment of the practices that take place in American slaughterhouses, which cause tremendous suffering for chickens in their last moments of life. It also examines the viable alternative method of slaughter that PETA has been recommending—and that is already in use in several countries, including Norway and parts of the U.S. I urge you to take a few moments to read the entire article. Please also share it with your friends, family members, coworkers, and neighbors. This is truly the kind of story that can move hearts and minds.Just a few years ago, the thought that a prominent food magazine like Gourmet would publish such a piece would have been preposterous. Our work has made a big difference, and despite the fact that progress isn't being made as quickly as we would like it to be, it is being made. None of this would be possible without your support. Thank you.For all animals,Ingrid E. NewkirkPresident
A View to a Killby Daniel ZwerdlingThe executives who run America's chicken industry might not want you to read this article. Spokesmen at the five biggest companies refused to show me the farms where their suppliers raise the chickens you eat, so that I could see firsthand how they treat them. They refused to show me the slaughterhouses, so I could see how the companies dispatch them. Executives even refused to talk to me about how they raise and kill chickens.Maybe it's because they realize that the entire food industry is being kicked and shoved toward transforming the way it treats animals-and chicken executives are making a last ditch effort to resist.Consider: In the first year of the millennium, McDonald's ordered the huge beef slaughterhouses that supply its Big Macs to revamp their methods, after investigative reports revealed that many cattle become frantic during their final minutes, and that workers were even hacking up some animals that were still alive. Today, the chain's cattle have to be calm as they march to their deaths; if they moo too much, the slaughterhouses could lose McDonald's business.Last November, while the rest of the nation was voting to change the face of Congress, citizens in Arizona were casting their ballots to help pigs. By an overwhelming margin, they passed the Humane Treatment of Farm Animals Act—which prohibits local growers from using the standard industry practice of raising sows in confinement pens so tiny that the animals can't even turn around.In January, executives at America's top hog producer, Smithfield Foods, stunned competitors by vowing to phase out all their confinement pens across the country. Their sows can now amble around. And in March, Burger King promised to buy as many pigs as possible from farms that don't confine them and as many eggs as possible produced by cage-free hens.These are astonishing developments-especially when you consider that only ten years ago, industry leaders shrugged off the animal welfare movement as the province of kooks. Click here to read more.
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