Spit out that Thanksgiving leftover ham and pick up a barf bag. Because even the hardy Pilgrims would take a pass on some of those leftovers if they knew just how gross our contemporary system of raising animals for food truly is...
1. It's like 80's porn, but for female pigs
Before pig factory employees stuff pregnant mamma pigs in cramped crates, the animal "scientists" at the factory put the, um, robotic moves on the soon-to-be mothers with their super saddle machine. Note to the guys: Please don't buy this machine for your date tonight.
2. Chocolate milk?
A large percentage of dairy cows are infected with Mycobacterium paratuberculosis, an illness that causes relentless streams of diarrhea to shoot out of their butts. And since the cow's butt is conveniently located next to her milk-producing utters, all of us can have a little chocolate in our milk without even adding the syrup. Dairy industry: God bless you.
3. Buying bacon pays the guy that pleasures the pig
Dr. Temple Grandin, an esteemed animal behaviorist, tells the story of one pig farmer who, in discussing his masturbating of his pigs, says, "I have to stick my finger in his butt -- he just really loves that."
4. There's crap in your meat
99 percent of chickens take a long, cold bath in massive tanks of water and communal feces before their meat leaves the slaughter plant. The chicken industry literally calls it, "fecal soup." And the USDA legally requires companies to indicate what percentage of their chicken meat "retains" the shit water. The next time you buy chicken, just look closely at the small print on the bottom-right of the package.
5. The male chicks
If we're only eating eggs from female chickens, it's worth asking: What happens to all the male chicks? All of them, over 250 million a year, are destroyed. Some are suffocated in plastic containers; others, like those in this video, are tossed into a wood-chipping-like machine. Skip to 2:22 and, ah, enjoy your egg salad sandwich.
6. Hogging our antibiotics
We give 8 times the amount of antibiotics (read: medicine) to the animals we eat as we do to sick people. Drug resistant infections have soared in recent years, killing an estimated 70,000 Americans in 2010. It's a growing crisis that scientists say is partially caused by gorging animals on all this medicine.
7. You
No jokes on this one. Let's call this what it is: When we eat food from these violent animal factories we're supporting (and eating) all this absurdity. There are so many reasons (shit in the meat, pig porn, diarrhea in the milk) to turn our backs on this system, but here's one to remember: We are better than this.
