Vegetarian Starter Kit : Everything you need to eat right for your health, the animals, and the Earth.

Meet Your Meat: What happens to chickens, pigs, and fish?

Ask the Experts:

"I never eat anyone I know personally. I wouldn’t eat a grouper any more than I’d eat a cocker spaniel. They’re so good-natured, so curious. You know, fish really are sensitive, they have personalities, they hurt when they’re wounded.”
—Sylvia Earle, former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

What happens to chickens?

The majority of “broiler chickens” and “laying hens” live in vast warehouses where lighting and ventilation are controlled by machines and where a system failure means mass death. To increase profits, farmers drug and genetically manipulate broiler chickens; as a result, many birds suffer from painful, crippling bone disorders and spinal defects. Laying hens are confined seven or eight to a cage; their wings atrophy from disuse, and their legs and feet grow twisted and deformed from standing on slanted wire cage bottoms.

Up to 40,000 birds live in a typical broiler warehouse, 400 times more birds than can possibly establish a pecking order. In such large numbers, chickens vent their stress and frustration by pecking at each other. To reduce losses, egg farmers use hot blades to slice off chicks’ beaks just hours after the birds hatch. The procedure, which requires cutting through tender tissue similar to the flesh under human fingernails, is so painful that many chicks die of shock. Some die of starvation, when eating becomes too painful.

Every year in the laying industry, millions of newly hatched male chicks—who can’t produce eggs themselves—are thrown into garbage bags or grinders, to suffocate or be crushed or hacked to death.

What they don’t tell you
Chickens are inquisitive and interesting animals who are thought to be as intelligent as cats, dogs, and even primates. When in their natural surroundings—away from factory farms—they form friendships and social hierarchies, recognize one another and develop pecking orders, love and care for their young, and enjoy a full life that includes dust-bathing, making nests, roosting in trees, and more.

What happens to pigs?

More than 100 million pigs are killed for food in the U.S. every year. Pigs on factory farms are castrated and have hunks of flesh ripped from their ears, bits of their teeth torn out with wire cutters, and their tails chopped off—all without painkillers. Sometimes stalls are stacked, and excrement from pigs in the upper tiers falls on those below. The accumulation of filth, feces, and urine in the sheds causes more than one-quarter of pigs to suffer from agonizing mange, and three-fourths of pigs have pneumonia by the time that they reach the slaughterhouse. Drugs and genetic breeding cause pigs to become so weak that they can barely walk, and 400,000 a year are crippled when they arrive at the slaughterhouse. Once there, workers jab metal hooks into pigs’ eyes, mouths, or rectums to force them to move faster.

Breeding pigs on factory farms are impregnated several times during their short lives and are confined to stalls that are barely larger than their own bodies. These stalls are so cruel to these intelligent and sociable animals that they have been outlawed in some countries.

What they don’t tell you
Pigs are very clean animals who take to the mud primarily to cool off and evade flies. Pigs are more intelligent than dogs and like dogs, are friendly and gregarious.

How about fish?

Like other animals, fish feel pain and experience fear. Dr. Donald Broom, animal welfare advisor to the British government, says, “Anatomically, physiologically, and biologically, the pain system in fish is virtually the same as in birds and mammals.”

When dragged from the ocean depths, fish undergo excruciating decompression—often the intense internal pressure ruptures their swimbladders, pops out their eyes, and pushes their stomachs through their mouths. Then they’re tossed onboard, where many slowly suffocate or are crushed to death. Others are still alive when their throats and bellies are cut open.