9 Reasons Why Animal-Abusing Jobs Are Worse Than Your Office Gig
Often, the world learns what’s happening to animals behind the scenes only because workers themselves can no longer stomach the life-scarring atrocities that they’re required to commit.
That’s no big shocker considering the following:
1. A job slaughtering chickens could require wearing a diaper.
Workers employed by infamous companies like Tyson have reported that slaughterhouse supervisors deny them basic bathroom breaks, forcing them to urinate and defecate on themselves. A PETA eyewitness has even seen workers blatantly peeing right on the kill floor. In one survey of 266 workers in Alabama conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, nearly 80 percent of respondents said that they’re not allowed to take bathroom breaks when needed.
2. Factory-farm workers may have to wear used tighty-whities.
Most people probably don’t realize that at many factory farms, because of biosecurity concerns, workers actually have to wear clothing—including underwear—provided by the company. They strip, shower, and then put on the used undies or shorts that have also been worn by their coworkers.
3. On an egg factory farm, someone is in charge of grinding up the male chicks.
Living male and other unwanted chicks, along with eggshells and dead birds, are tossed into large grinders. On some farms, the babies are crushed, burned alive, or drowned in giant plastic bins.
4. Employees on dairy farms fear the real possibility of drowning in a pool of cow feces.
As crazy as it might sound, this isn’t an uncommon occurrence. During an investigation into the deaths of two farmhands in Idaho, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration noted that “[d]rowning in manure ponds is widely known in the dairy industry.“
5. Farmhands on dairy farms rape cows.
Like all other mammals, cows produce milk only during and after pregnancy. So roughly every nine months, cows on dairy farms are forcibly impregnated in order to ensure that their milk production continues. They’re restrained while insemination instruments and entire forearms are shoved into their vaginas and rectums.
6. Handlers at the circus beat animals into submission.
No animals perform stupid tricks for humans because they want to. They perform meaningless, confusing stunts out of fear of the consequences of not doing so.
A PETA eyewitness recorded Carson & Barnes Circus’ “animal care” director, Tim Frisco, viciously attacking elephants with an electric prod and a sharp steel-tipped weapon called a bullhook. The infamous handler instructed the trainees to sink and twist the bullhooks into the animals’ flesh until they screamed in pain.
In the video, Frisco swears at the less-experienced handlers, urging them to inflict more severe pain. He goes on to tell them that if the elephants squirm too much, they should strike them right under the jaw with a bullhook.
7. Slaughterhouse workers can look forward to crippling arthritis.
Most slaughterhouses operate nearly 24 hours a day, seven days a week—killing hundreds or thousands of animals each hour. Workers continually cut out tongues, scoop out eyes, and blast out brains by the thousands. The long hours and repetitive motions are known to cause chronic pain in workers’ hands, wrists, arms, shoulders, and backs.
8. Meat industry employees lose limbs and fingers.
Meat industry workers have sustained countless injuries, such as amputations of fingers and hands, broken hips, and chemical burns, and have even died on the job—and these are just the reported incidents. Employees are commonly immigrants or refugees who don’t report injuries because they fear losing their jobs and livelihoods.
9. Working in animal experimentation requires using medieval-style torture methods on animals.
Right now, millions of animals in laboratories are being poisoned, electroshocked, cut open in experimental surgeries, burned, and infected with disease. From rodent guillotines to electroejaculation anal probes, the cruel devices used in experiments rival a person’s worst nightmare. What happens in these facilities isn’t science—it’s animal abuse, plain and simple.
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Help PETA end these dirty, demeaning, and dangerous occupations.
It’s clear by now that any industry that abuses animals will put its bottom line before any living, feeling being—human or otherwise. For the sake of human dignity and that of all other animals, take action to shut these institutions down now:
