Forks Over Knives by Gene Stone Read Free Book Online

that they cannot move or even flap their wings. The harsh wire cages are lined up in rows and stacked in tiers in huge factory warehouses. When just chicks, they are subjected to a process known as debeaking, a procedure that involves severing bone, cartilage, and tissue to remove part of the beak—a necessary precaution in many factory farms where severely overcrowded cages provoke pecking and fighting.
    Calves raised for veal are typically separated from their mothers immediately after birth and confined thereafter in crates measuring just two feet wide, their movements restrained with neck chains. Males are castrated without painkillers.
    Because the cost of every square inch of space is carefully calculated for optimal profits, pigs, too, are packed together tightly, constantly breathing the noxious gases from their own excrement.
    At the slaughterhouse, fully conscious chickens are hung by their feet from shackles—because poultry is excluded from the rules of the Humane Methods of Livestock Slaughter Act, stunning them prior to slaughter is not required. If the automated cutter fails to cut their throats, they are killed by other means, or submerged alive in the scalding tank that is used to loosen their feathers so they can be removed later.
    All in all, in 2008 the number of animals killed to satisfy American palates was 8.56 billion, or 29 animals per average American meat eater. The total number of animals killed on land and sea was approximately 80 billion, or 270 per American meat and fish eater—making the average number of animals consumed in one American lifetime 21,000. While the total number of animals killed to feed Americans has decreased slightly over recent years, the number
slaughtered
in the United States has actually increased because of a rise in U.S. meat exports. (The United States, which has 5 percent of the world’s population, accounts for about 20 percent of the animals killed worldwide for food.)

Gene Baur
    GENE BAUR, A native Angeleno, graduated from California State University, Northridge, in 1985 and later received a master’s degree in agricultural economics from Cornell. The cofounder and president of Farm Sanctuary, America’s leading farm-animal protection organization, he is the author of the best-selling book
Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food
. Gene has photographed and video recorded hundreds of farms, stockyards, and slaughterhouses to expose countless examples of factory-farming cruelty; his work has been featured throughout the major news media.
    Gene has also helped initiate legislation to prevent farm-animal abuse by testifying in court and before local, state, and federal legislative bodies; he played an important role in passing the first U.S. laws to prohibit cruel farming methods, including the Florida ban on gestation crates, the Arizona ban on veal calf and gestation crates, and the California ban on foie gras.
    From a young age, Gene knew he wanted to help others. “My parents are very conservative Catholics and I grew up with a strong dose of Catholic morality,” he recalls. “Not all of it stuck, but some of the basics, like ‘Thou shalt not kill’ remained important—and these values, enhanced by the folk music I discovered during high school, stuck with me.”
    So during high school, Gene volunteered with terminally ill kids at children’s hospitals; in college, he worked with troubled adolescents and, later, with environmental and public interest groups. Eventually Gene became involved in the nascent movement promoting the ethical treatment of animals and, with his wife at the time, founded Farm Sanctuary. “By the mid-1980s, this was the issue that meant the most to me—and one that was not getting a lot of attention.
    “Over the years I have seen terrible things—people being extraordinarily cruel to animals, becoming monsters. I remember once watching some guys at a stockyard using electric prods to move the cows