A blog about the importance of preventing animal abuse & promoting animal adoption.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

113 Facts About Animal Cruelty

Some shocking and interesting facts from



  • Animals caught in traps can suffer for days before succumbing to exposure, shock, or attacks by predators.

  • Traps often kill "non-target" animals, including dogs and endangered species.

  • To cut costs, fur farmers pack animals into small cages, preventing them from taking more than a few steps back and forth.

  • Crowding and confinement is especially distressing to minks- solitary animals who occupy up to 2,500 acres of wetland in the wild.

  • The frustration of life in a cage leads minks to self-mutilate- biting their skin, tails, feet- or frantically pace and circle endlessly.

  • "PETA investigators witnessed rampant cruelty to animals. Workers beat pigs with metal rods and jabbed pins into pigs' eyes and faces."

  • Snakes and lizards are skinned alive because of the belief that live flaying makes leather more supple.

  • Piglets are separated from their mothers when they are as young as 10 days old.

  • Once her piglets are gone, the sow is impregnated again, and the cycle continues for three or four years before she is slaughtered.

  • Approximately 3 to 4 million cats and dogs- many of them healthy, young, and adoptable- must be euthanized in animal shelters every year.

  • Cows produce milk for the same reason that humans do- to nourish their young - but on dairy farms calves are taken away at 1 day old.

  • 1 day old calves are fed milk replacements (including cattle blood) so that their mothers' milk can be sold to humans.

  • Animals can suffer brain damage or death from heatstroke in just 15 minutes. Beating the heat is extra tough for dogs.

  • Each year, approximately 10,000 bulls die in bullfights.

  • Most cows are intensively confined, unable to fulfill their most basic desires, such as nursing their calves, even for a single day.

  • Cows are fed unnatural, high-protein diets-which include dead chickens, pigs, and other animals.

  • Overall, factory-farmed animals, including those on dairy farms, produce 1.65 billion tons of manure each year.

  • Kid goats are boiled alive to make gloves.

  • The skins of unborn calves and lambs - some aborted, others from slaughtered pregnant cows - are considered "luxurious."

  • About 285 million hens are raised for eggs in the US. In tiny spaces so small they cannot move a wing.

  • The wire mesh of the cages rubs off hens feathers, chafes their skin, and causes their feet to become crippled.

  • Before 1986, only four states had felony animal cruelty laws.

  • Glue traps cause terror and agony to any animals who touch them, leaving them to suffer for days.

  • In one study, 70% of animal abusers also had records for other crimes.

  • Sealers often hook baby seals in the eye, cheek, or mouth to avoid damaging their fur, then drag them across the ice to skin them.

  • Arsenic-laced additives are mixed into the feed of about 70 percent of the chickens raised for food.

  • Every year, nearly a million seals worldwide are subjected to painful and often lingering deaths, largely for the sake of fashion.

  • Scientists estimate that 100 species go extinct every day! That's about one species every 15 minutes.

  • Every year in the US, 50 million male piglets are castrated (usually without being given any painkillers).

  • More than 15 million warm-blooded animals are used in research every year.

  • The methods used in fur factory farms are designed to maximize profits, almost always at the expense of the animals.

  • To test cosmetics, cleaners, and other products, hundreds of thousands of animals are poisoned, blinded, and killed every year.

  • In extremely crowded conditions, piglets are prone to stress-related behavior such as cannibalism and tail-biting.

  • Farmers often chop off piglets' tails and use pliers to break off the ends of their teeth- without giving them any painkillers.

  • For identification purposes, farmers cut out chunks of young pigs ears.

  • Animals on fur farms spend their entire lives confined to cramped, filthy wire cages.

  • For fur, small animals may be crammed into boxes and poisoned with hot, unfiltered engine exhaust from a truck.

  • Engine exhaust is not always lethal, and some animals wake up while they are being skinned.

  • Larger animals have clamps attached to or rods forced into their mouth or anus so they can be painfully electrocuted.

  • Bird poisons attack birds' nervous systems, causing them to suffer seizures, erratic flight, and tremors for hours before dying.

  • If you drink milk, you're subsidizing the veal industry.

  • Male calves are often taken away from their mothers at 1 day old, chained in tiny stalls for 3-18 weeks, and raised for veal.

  • After they are taken from their mothers, piglets are confined to pens until they are separated to be raised for breeding or meat.

  • Although chickens can live for more than a decade, hens raised for their eggs are exhausted and killed by age 2.

  • More than 100 million "spent" hens are killed in slaughterhouses every year.

  • Forty-five states currently have felony provisions for animal cruelty. (Those without are AK, ID, MS, ND and SD.)

  • Dogs used for fighting are chained, taunted, and starved to trigger extreme survival instincts and encourage aggressiveness.

  • Dogs that lose fights (or refuse) are often abandoned, tortured, set on fire, electrocuted, shot, drowned, or beaten to death.

  • Cows on average product 16 lbs of milk per day. With hormones, antibiotics, and genetic manipulation? 54 lbs a day.

  • Humane treatment is not a priority for those who poach and hunt animals to obtain their skin.

  • Alligators on farms may be beaten with hammers and axes, sometimes remaining conscious and in pain for 2 hours after skinning.

  • Investigation of animal abuse is often the first point of social services intervention for a family in trouble.

  • A Canadian Police study found that 70 percent of people arrested for animal cruelty had past records of other violent crimes.

  • Dog fighting and cock-fighting are illegal in all 50 states.

  • Hoarding of animals exists in virtually every community. Well-intentioned people overwhelmed by animal overpopulation crisis.

  • The consequences for hoarders, their human dependents, animals, and the community are extremely serious- and often fatal for animals.

  • Declawing is a painful mutilation that involves 10 amputations - not just the nails - but the ends of toes (bone and all).

  • The long-term effects of declawing include skin and bladder problems and the gradual weakening of cats' legs, shoulders, and back.

  • Declawing is both painful and traumatic, and it has been outlawed in Germany and other parts of Europe as a form of cruelty.

  • Kangaroos are slaughtered by the millions every year; their skins are considered prime material for soccer shoes.

  • Across the US, 6 to 8 million stray and abandoned animals enter animal shelters every year, and about half must be euthanized.

  • In California, America's top milk-producing state, manure from dairy farms has poisoned hundreds of square miles of groundwater.

  • Each of the more than 1 million cows on the state's dairy farms excrete 18 gallons of manure daily.

  • Every year, the global leather industry slaughters more than a billion animals and tans their skins and hides.

  • Elephants who perform in circuses are often kept in chains for as long as 23 hours a day from the time they are babies.

  • Every year, millions of animals are killed for the clothing industry.

  • An immeasurable amount of suffering goes into every fur-trimmed jacket, leather belt, and wool sweater.

  • Neglect and abandonment are the most common forms of companion animal abuse in the United States.

  • On any given day in the U.S., there are more than 65 million pigs on factory farms, and 112 million are killed for food each year.

  • Every year, dogs suffer and die when left in a parked car- even for "just a minute" - parked cars are deathtraps for dogs.

  • Dog owners: On a 78 degree F day, the temperature in a shaded car is 90°F, in the sun it can climb to 160°F in minutes.

  • 98% of Americans consider pets to be companions or members of the family.

  • For medical experimentation animals can be burned, shocked, poisoned, isolated, starved, addicted to drugs, and brain-damaged.

  • Regardless of how trivial or painful animal experiments may be, none are prohibited by law.

  • When valid non-animal research methods are available, no law requires experimenters to use such methods instead of animals.

  • On average it takes 1,000 dogs to maintain a mid-sized racetrack operation. There are over 30 tracks in the United States.

  • Female cows are artificially inseminated shortly after their first birthdays. Happy birthday!

  • Birds don't belong in cages. Bored, lonely, denied the opportunity to fly, deprived of companionship...

  • Many birds become neurotic in cages - pulling out feathers, bobbing their heads incessantly, and repeatedly pecking.

  • According to industry reports, more than 1 million pigs die en route to slaughter each year.

  • More than 100 million animals every year suffer and die in cruel chemical, drug, food and cosmetic tests, biology lessons, etc.

  • Approximately 9 billion chickens are raised and killed for meat each year in the U.S.

  • The industry refers to chickens as "broilers" and raises them in huge, ammonia-filled, windowless sheds with artificial lighting.

  • Some chickens spend their entire lives standing on concrete floors.

  • Some chickens are confined to massive, crowded lots, where they are forced to live amid their own waste.

  • Neglect/Abandonment is the most prevalent form of animal abuse (approximately 36% of all animal abuse cases.)

  • Cows are treated like milk-producing machines and are genetically manipulated and pumped full of antibiotics and hormones.

  • Foie gras is made from the grotesquely enlarged livers of ducks and geese who have been cruelly force-fed.

  • The best way to save cows from the misery of factory farms is to stop buying milk and other dairy products. Discover soy!

  • A typical slaughterhouse kills about 1,000 hogs per hour.

  • The sheer number of animals killed makes it impossible for pigs' deaths to be humane and painless.

  • Because of improper stunning, many hogs are alive when they reach the scalding hot water baths.

  • 13% of intentional animal abuse cases involve domestic violence.

  • Animal cruelty problems are people problems. When animals are abused, people are at risk.

  • Instead of improving conditions for animals, the dairy industry is exploring the use of genetically manipulated cattle.

  • More than half the fur in the US comes from China, where millions of dogs and cats are bludgeoned, hanged, and bled to death.

  • Millions of pounds of antibiotics are fed to chickens, who metabolize only about 20 percent of the drugs fed to them.

  • The 3 trillion pounds of waste produced by factory-farmed animals every year is usually used to fertilize crops.

  • Chaining dogs, while unfortunately legal in most areas, is one of the cruelest punishments imaginable for social animals.

  • Tens of thousands of horses from the United States are slaughtered every year to be used for horsemeat in Europe and Asia.

  • Since the last horse slaughter plants in the US were closed in 2007, thousands of horses have been shipped to Canada/Mexico.

  • Abusers kill, harm, or threaten children's pets to coerce them into sexual abuse or to force them to remain silent about abuse.

  • There are no federal laws to regulate the voltage or use of electric prods on pigs.

  • Forty-one of the 45 state felony animal cruelty laws were enacted in the last two decades.

  • In the United States, 1.13 million animals were used in experiments in 2009, plus an estimated 100 million mice and rats.

  • As a result of disease, pesticides, and climate changes, the honeybee population has been nearly decimated

  • Many studies have found a link between cruelty to animals and other forms of interpersonal violence.

  • Cows have a natural lifespan of about 20 years and can produce milk for eight or nine years.

  • A fur coat is pretty cool- for an animal to wear.

  • Eighteen red foxes are killed to make one fox-fur coat, 55 minks to make a mink coat.

  • Fur farmers use the cheapest and cruelest killing methods available: suffocation, electrocution, gassing, and poisoning.

  • In addition to diarrhea, pneumonia, and lameness, calves raised for veal are terrified and desperate for their mothers.

  • During Canada's annual commercial seal slaughter, as many as 300,000 seals are shot or bludgeoned.

  • Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5418388


    Note: Personally, I believe there is nothing wrong with slaughtering certain animals strictly for food, but this must be done humanely and the animals should be in good living conditions beforehand. I also think that declawing cats is fine as long as they are indoor cats.

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