Male piglets also have their testicles removed, a procedure performed without anesthetic. Shortly after birth, piglets have their tails chopped off this discourages the bored and frustrated animals from gnawing one another’s rumps. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.”įor pigs, conditions are little better. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know-or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know-barbaric. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows.

(Fish enthusiasts may bring home fewer gifts, but they spend more on each one, with the average fish gift coming to thirty-seven dollars.) A majority of owners report that one of the reasons they enjoy keeping pets is that they consider them part of the family.Īmericans also love to eat animals. In a survey released this past August, more than half of all dog, cat, and bird owners reported having bought presents for their animals during the previous twelve months, often for no special occasion, just out of love. “We have so many customers who say they’d eat macaroni and cheese before they’d cut back on their dogs,” a Colorado pet-store owner recently told the Denver Post. (Seventeen billion goes to food and another twelve billion to veterinary bills.) Despite the recession, pet-related expenditures this year are expected to increase five per cent over 2008, in part owing to outlays on luxury items like avian manicures and canine bath spritz. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Illustration by Sue CoeĪmericans love animals. This year, Americans will consume some thirty-five million cows, a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and nine billion birds.

Safran foer eating animals