VivirLatino

The latest horrifying video of animal cruelty in the factory farm system has just been released by the animal rights group, Mercy for Animals. The video is below–but for those of you who can’t watch–a description is as follows:

An undercover video shot by an animal rights group at an Iowa egg hatchery shows workers discarding unwanted chicks by sending them alive into a grinder, and other chicks falling through a sorting machine to die on the factory floor.

Chicago-based Mercy for Animals said it shot the video at Hy-Line North America’s hatchery in Spencer, Iowa, over a two-week period in May and June. The video was obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

I support this groups recommended action against this practice: 1. Go vegan, and 2. Require the egg industry to include labels on their eggs that say, “Warning: Male chicks are ground-up alive by the egg industry,” even though I don’t see either action inspiring mass action in the “average” citizen. I just know too many people who look at animal rights groups and see them as a group of people that are not connected to reality. In other words, animal rights groups are not meeting communities where they are at. So I support their call for action, but wish that they would start with something less radical (in the minds of “average citizen”), like leading investigations then protests against the system of factory farming in the U.S.

Or…they could do something even simpler, like talking to the workers. As somebody who has several family and community members who have or do work in the chicken industry–I would listen immediately if one (or all!!!) of them came to me and said, listen, it’s time to boycott this place.

Workers and animals are connected together in some really violent and complicated ways. Workers are literally killing animals. And speaking from experience with friends and family–the conditions animals live under often literally make workers physically and mentally ill. Workers may need to kill animals so that they can bring a paycheck home–but almost every worker I ever came across hates their jobs, hates killing animals, and can’t be anywhere around the animals that they’re working to kill once they’re off the clock. The stories I’ve heard about egg collecting in particular–Chicana academic Gloria Anzaldua has written about how the sight of eggs made her physically ill after she worked at an egg factory.

There is violence for animals at these factories–and trauma for the workers. And it seems to me that rather than ignoring workers and heading straight to the consumer in these campaigns to protect animals, animal rights advocates would do better and get more productive results by going to the workers first and working with workers to be leaders in a movement away from factory farming violence and toward a more just and sustainable food structure.

So the question becomes, why haven’t they?
Is it because they would have to learn Spanish first?