This Vegetarian Awareness Month, Consider Shocking Sexual Abuse on Farms

As the movement against sexual violence gains momentum in India – and during Vegetarian Awareness Month in October – we urge the public to take a stand against all forms of sexual violence by eating vegan. The meat, egg, and dairy industries are built on the sexual abuse and exploitation of female animals.

Since cows and buffaloes produce milk in order to feed their own babies, just as humans do, dairy farms keep them almost constantly pregnant. To impregnate a female cow or buffalo, several farmers usually tie her to a rack and hold her down. One jams an arm far into her rectum and then forces an instrument into her vagina as she struggles, helpless.

Calves are torn away from their mothers soon after birth. If they’re male, they’re typically abandoned, left to starve, or sent to slaughter, and if they’re female, they’re generally separated from their mother and put on milk replacer – all so that the milk meant for them can be sold to humans.

Female cows and buffaloes’ bodies are manipulated by being bred or drugged to produce unnaturally high quantities of milk. Even though administering the hormone oxytocin to stimulate the release of more milk is illegal in India, the practice is common, and the drug causes the animals pain similar to that of labour. When their milk production wanes, they’re usually abandoned or sent to slaughter.

In the egg and meat industries, workers force male chickens to produce semen and then drag hens out of packed wire cages to inject it into one after the other using the same unhygienic syringe.

Workers at Diamond Hatcheries roughtly inject semen into terrified hens using the same syringe for all the birds

PETA India also notes that hens’ bodies are manipulated to produce hundreds of eggs per year, even though their wild ancestors laid only about 15 a year. This takes its toll on the birds’ bodies, leaving them susceptible to osteoporosis. They’re forced to spend their lives confined to tiny wire battery cages that are often covered with faeces and so restrictive that they can’t even stretch a single wing, causing their muscles and bones to deteriorate further.

Hens crammed into tiny cages languish with ailments, including swollen body parts, eye and skin infections, feather loss, and wounds

Inspired to do something about this abuse? Take our pledge to eat vegan today.