Target: Thomas Vilsack, Secretary for U.S. Department of Agriculture
Goal: Ban cruel euthanasia methods that subject farm animals to agonizing deaths.
While agriculturalists call the methods used to cull and kill animals “euthanasia,” veterinary professionals have other names for them: “suffocation,” “drowning in fluids,” “death by heatstroke,” and “cooked alive,” to name a few. The United States is currently experiencing an avian flu outbreak, which has led to the deliberate killing of thousands of farm animals like chickens. Two of the most common culling techniques have already been banned in the European Union due to their inhumanity.
One of the methods, called ventilation shutdown, is a sanitized term for the horrors that actually take place. The condemned animals are packed into an enclosed space and exposed to viciously high levels of steam and heat. In essence, they are broiled alive. When this torture was used on millions of pigs during a different flu outbreak, secretly recorded footage picked up the screams of the animals as they died in a literal living hell. The second form of so-called euthanasia involves blanketing the livestock in firefighting foam. What is the effect of this seemingly harmless action? The targeted animals essentially suffocate and choke to death.
Sign the petition below to demand U.S. leadership follow Europe’s lead in ending this unsanctioned torture and legalized animal cruelty for good.
PETITION LETTER:
Dear Secretary Vilsack,
What kind of “medical remedy” could be so horrific that it compels ten percent of the professionals who perform it to consider suicide? What form of “euthanasia” has been deemed so inhumane that the European Union and the World Organisation for Animal Health condemn it? If you wonder about the answer to these questions, look no further than America’s farms, where not one but two of these lambasted practices occur routinely.
Firefighting foam and ventilation shutdown have been used—and are currently being used—to end the lives of millions of livestock afflicted with illness. The terms may sound harmless, and perhaps even humane. They are anything but–the former method results in the slow, painful suffocation of the victims as they drown in their own fluids. As to the latter…some of the physical effects of ventilation shutdown include heatstroke, severe burns, vomiting blood, and bloody mucus emitting from body openings. Or, if you want a clearer concept of what fate befalls the animals “euthanized” by extreme heat and stream, listen to the recording of a barnful of dying pigs screaming in pain.
This inhumanity, this barbarity, and this cruelty have no place in a nation that claims it values life. Please advocate for a ban on these modern-day forms of torture at once.
Sincerely,
[Your Name Here]
Photo Credit: Artem Beliaikin
Another reason I abstain from eating meat.
Please pass the word: everyone here call your congressman, flood their phones with your objections, at voting time everyone needs to vote DEMOCRAT because voting Republican on any level makes it possible for the kind of cruelty going on here. Democrats actually try to create and pass laws that help people and animals, Republicans by contrast repeatedly do the opposite and then lie about it on FOX news and America One News and get their base voters to consistently vote against their own interests. A portion of Republican federal legislators have bought the Russian/Putin propaganda about a fake presidential election and some even support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Republicans have no business representing United States Citizens when they behave in suxh devisive ways. Please vote ALL Republicans out of office at the municipal, state and federal levels. When are the rest of us going to get tired enough of Republicans trying to hold back progress for all of us? Republicans need to be voted out of office, they are damaging the country with backward ideas concerning climate change, women’s rights, minority rights, slave-capitalism attitudes towards worker income, voting rights and lastly animal rights.
This is sickening…
I totally agree with Rosranne.
The reason this is done is due to animal farmers realizing if their chickens die they will get a replacement from the government. This is why no barns are fire alarmed. Why? Substitutes. No plans are made for floods as … they will receive substitutes, Where else in the business world are you rewarded for not taking precautions for your products which you sell for a living? There should be no substitutes given. You don’t care for your product, then you lose your product! Money only continues the problem. When there is a flu outbreak then, and only then, should a way be made to make dying an easier process for animals who have kept food on your table and money in your pocket. No less that that. Anything else should be punished by prison. Can it be done? EVENTUALLY, YES!