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 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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