Sexual Abuse of Animals: A Recurring Theme on Factory Farms
During our investigations, undercover workers document some seriously sick and disturbing events—including the sexual abuse of animals, from pigs to turkeys. Unfortunately, sexual violence against farmed animals is not an unusual occurrence.
I have to warn you—what you’re about to see and read is not for the faint of heart.
Our undercover investigation at an Iowa pig factory farm revealed that a supervisor rammed a cane into a pig’s vagina. That same supervisor said that he thrust gate rods into the anuses of pigs who frustrated him.
At a Butterball slaughterhouse, a PETA investigator saw—in addition to other horrific cruelty—a worker insert his finger into a turkey’s cloaca (vagina). Another worker mimed raping a bird whose legs and head he’d shackled.
At Aviagen Turkeys, Inc., in West Virginia, the “world’s leading poultry breeding company,” a worker was indicted for cruelty to animals after being caught on video pinning a female turkey to the ground and mimicking raping her. When interviewed by police, he reportedly admitted to having done this to dozens of other turkeys.
When writer Jim Mason worked for a day as a turkey breeder, he discovered that since turkeys have been genetically manipulated to grow so large that they can no longer breed naturally, workers must manually extract semen from males and manually inseminate females. On dairy farms, a female cow will often be forcibly restrained so that she can’t get away when an insemination instrument is shoved into her vagina. Pig factory farm workers confine boars to tiny “carts” and parade them in front of sows so that other workers can look at and touch sows’ genitals in order to determine the best time to insert a tube of pig semen into them.
Cruel, twisted, perverted, and sadistic—and this kind of sexual violence happens every day on factory farms. Some of it is even considered “standard practice.” But factory farms or not, in any industry that’s founded upon killing and theft, is it any wonder that these horrible things are done to the most defenseless beings? If you oppose cruelty to animals, the only logical conclusion is to go vegan.
