113 Facts About Animal Cruelty

Some shocking and interesting facts from

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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.

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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.