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Never before have human beings caused so much suffering to so many animals as in our days:

- In the barns of factory farming, the victims of the modern meat industry lead a wretched life without the light of day and in the narrowest of spaces. Out of fear and aggression, they muti- late each other. Pigs bite each others ears and tails off, chickens pluck out each other’s feathers and peck each other bloody; laying hens vegetate their lives away in cages whose flooring is smaller than an 8½ x 11 inch sheet of paper. To get a grip on the aggression of the animals, one burns the beak off the chickens, breaks the teeth of the pigs and cuts off the feet of the cockerels. One expects of the animals that they live under conditions that literally drive them crazy and require constant use of psycho-pharmaceuticals and antibiotics. Nevertheless, one-third of the victims become sick and die while still in the barns.

- After the torture in the barns of factory farming, the agonizing trip to the slaughter- houses follows. We all know the terrible pic- tures: closely packed cattle, sheep, horses, pigs, poultry animals, thirsty, exhausted to death, badly hurt, dying or already dead on the trucks and ships. The living commodities are mercilessly ill-treated, through heat and thirst, cold and hunger, through fear of unaccustomed surroundings, through beatings and electrical shocks. The animal that doesn’t manage to get onto its feet will, if need be, be thrown on board the ship with a forklift or a cable winch. Many animals reach their destinations bruised, with broken bones and eye injuries.

- The final torture awaits them then, in the slaughterhouses. Live poultry are hung by their legs, head down, on a conveyor belt and drawn through an electrically charged water bath to anaesthetize the animals before their slaughter. With cows and pigs, the anaesthetization should be done with electric prongs or carbon dioxide. It is not seldom that this is unsuccessful; the animals become conscious again and are then slaughtered and bled while still fully conscious. Indescribable fear gets a hold of the victim as it is driven through the narrow passageways to be anaesthetized and slaughtered. Over and over again they falter and scream, but the ones being driven forward from behind them, press forward. New screams are heard just before the anaesthetizing station. The slaughterers wear earmuffs.

- The animals that we don’t eat, we put under very special tortures in the laboratories of science. There, they are made sick to test certain medications; they are operated, amputated and transplants are carried out, poisons are injected directly into their stomachs or lungs, or metal rods are bored into their skulls and brains. Through such tortures they want to test, for example, the effects of poisons and reactions to pain. This is the reason why the animals have to writhe in pain and convulsions for hours or days at a time, in part fully conscious. Worldwide, per year, 300 million animals are killed through experiments: mice, rats, birds, fish, rabbits, monkeys, dogs, cats and sheep, not to forget cows and horses as well.

- And, not to leave out any area in the life of the animals, 300,000 hunters in Germany alone kill 5 million wild animals – in traps, from comfortable, high-standing blinds, using a shotgun that painfully shoots the hare’s skin and nerves full of holes like a sieve, by using deformation bullets that tear apart the entrails of wild pigs, deer and elk, subjecting them to hours of the worst kind of agony.

Human beings are wading in the blood of their fellow creatures to satisfy their craving for meat and, in the case of  hunting, their craving to kill. Most people don’t think anything about it, because, after all, animals are there to be killed and eaten by us. This is what tradition expects, thus effectively keeping us from recognizing what a vile, monstrous terror regime the upstart human is practicing on the planet Earth – toward its close relatives in the history of the evolution of life, relatives that have eyes with which they look at us, who feel joy and pain, and yet are hunted and killed under indescribable fear. If we hadn’t deadened our conscience, we would still be able to feel that it is a collective crime of gigantic, cosmic proportions that will not remain without consequences for the development of mankind, if the latter doesn’t free itself of these crimes.