A Meat and Dairy Article from All-Creatures.org



The Final Ride: Horrifying Truths about Farmed Animal Transport

From Animal Place Sanctuary
June 2024

The lives of animals on commercial farms are horrendous. But one of the most horrendous parts of animals’ lives on farms occurs just before they are killed. It’s the suffering they face on the transportation trucks that haul them to slaughter. And new numbers are showing that the death tolls on these trucks are higher than we could have ever imagined.

pig transport
A pig finds themself on the truck to slaughter. Pigs are highly stress-prone animals, and the most common cause of pig death in transport is heart failure.

The lives of animals on commercial farms are horrendous. But one of the most horrendous parts of animals’ lives on farms occurs just before they are killed. It’s the suffering they face on the transportation trucks that haul them to slaughter. And new numbers are showing that the death tolls on these trucks are higher than we could have ever imagined.

A new Guardian investigation analyzed publicly available data to find that over 20 million farmed animals die during transportation in the United States every year. And these are only the reported cases.

20 million chickens, 330,000 pigs, and 166,000 cattle were reported as dead on arrival or soon after they arrived at slaughterhouses in the US every year. 800,000 pigs (over 2,000 pigs per day) were listed as “downed” upon arrival to slaughterhouses. This means the animals were too sick, injured or weakened to walk to their own deaths. So how does this happen?

It all starts with numbers. The animal agriculture industry has transportation down to a science. Instead of “how can these animals be transported safely,” the question is, “How many animals can fit on a single truck without undergoing substantial loss of product (animal lives)”?

If as many animals as possible can be crammed into a single transport truck and only a small percentage of lives are lost, farms will still see more profit than if a small handful of animals were transported and all arrived safely. The number of animal deaths while still yielding a profit are known as “acceptable losses”. For chickens, this number typically falls around 0.2%. When you consider that around 9 billion chickens are slaughtered in the U.S. every year, these numbers are astronomical.

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Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE.


Posted on All-Creatures.org: June 22, 2024
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