City-dwellers who think they’re ingesting polluted air will never complain again after reading this powerful story of what happens to a rural community when a factory farm moves in: “Surry County, NC – with its beautiful rolling farmland and vineyards – is under siege.”  Children can no longer play outdoors; residents can no longer use fans in their homes; property values have plummeted; everyone is breathing in ammonia; and the community has no recourse because factory farms are exempt from the North Carolina’s odor laws.

Photo: Jere Cunningham

Every community needs a superhero like Erin Brockovich to protect it, but most have regular people who are just trying to get by. Small towns are  simply no match for powerful agribusiness. As more rural areas are destroyed (literally) by factory farms, perhaps the residents will join the chorus of environmental and animal rights activists fighting to end factory farming — the industry most responsible for destroying their communities, the environment, our health and, of course, the animals.

The NY Times reports that Nestlé will no longer buy products derived from pigs and chickens held in the most intensive forms of confinement (gestation crates & battery cages) and from cattle who have been dehorned or had their tails docked without anesthesia. The new policy, which will affect at least 7,300 of its suppliers and will likely trigger other companies to follow suit, represents “one of the broadest-reaching commitments to improving the quality of life for animals in the food system.”

Intensive confinement and body mutilation are among the cruelest aspects of factory farming. So, for the billions of pigs, chickens and cows who are born into this system, a slightly less awful existence is better than nothing. But these reforms should not give caring consumers the impression that they are eating happy animals. On the contrary, pigs, chickens and cows raised on factory farms will still live wretched lives in windowless sheds, unable to do anything that comes naturally to them. And then they are slaughtered. Please, go veg.

In the United States alone, how many eggs do you think are consumed each day — in omelets, baked goods, packaged foods, restaurant kitchens, etc? About 220 million. It’s a staggering number and begs the questions: Where do these eggs come from? And where are the hundreds of millions of hens who are laying them?

Animals Australia has just released 2 minutes of high definition footage from the inside of the biggest egg supplier in the Australia, but this video could have been taken at any factory farm with hens. You won’t see any people in this video. Just hens. Watch and listen:

The farm featured in this video is “Egg Corp Assured (ECA)” in Australia, which means it has the “mark of a quality product produced under strict guidelines.” These certifications are almost always meaningless because they are created by the trade associations who represent their industry, not the public. Please share this video. People who eat eggs deserve to know the truth about what (or who) they are consuming.

According to the makers of the new documentary film Cowspiracy, one industry is destroying the planet more than any other. It is the leading cause of global warming, water depletion, deforestation, species extinction and ocean dead zones. If you haven’t figured it out already, it is factory farming. So why do the world’s leading environmental groups — the very organizations who should be fighting factory farming — refuse to acknowledge it? I don’t know the answer, and I won’t find out on Thursday at the NYC premiere of Cowspiracy because it is sold out. Those bastards!  At least we have the trailer and the Cowspiracy website to keep us apprised of screenings.

Even though I haven’t seen Cowspiracy, I am already praying to the plant-based gods that it is nominated for best documentary film, a virtual assurance that it will hit mainstream theaters and knock some sense into the American public. Share the trailer on social media. Let’s help make this ground-breaking film blow the lid off of factory farming and the organizations who should be using our donations to fight it.

Owners of a California slaughterhouse that distributed beef from cows with cancer were charged in federal court on August 18th. In court filings, the USDA said that owners of Rancho Feeding Corp. “schemed with employees to slaughter about 79 cows with skin cancer of the eye while federal inspectors took lunch breaks” and that “plant workers swapped the heads of diseased cattle with heads of healthy cows to hide them from inspectors.” The discovery of the diseased carcasses triggered several recalls, including 8.7 million pounds of beef sold at Walmart and other national chains. The slaughterhouse owners and two employees were charged with distribution of “adulterated, misbranded and uninspected meat.”

Photo: REUTERS/Alex Gallardo

If the abuse inherent in modern-day factory farming doesn’t stop people from eating animals, then perhaps the health risks will. Here’s our challenge: People have been eating animals for centuries and surviving, so why would they stop now — at a time when they assume that the government is keeping our food supply safe? When talking to omnivores, I point out that mad cow, bird flu and swine flu originated in the factory farms that produce 99% of the animal products we eat. Now I can say that cows with cancer are in the food supply. And then there are the antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, cholesterol and saturated fat that fill the meat, fish and dairy products we consume. So, if humane issues don’t resonate, then talk about the many reasons why animal products are simply unsafe and unhealthy to eat.