Honoring Animal Sentience - France’s L214 Co-Founder, Brigitte Gothiere (vegan), Part 2 of 4

In today’s program, Brigitte tells us about one of the recent videos that the Association recorded. “Each video shows the violence done to animals, and we sometimes discover practices that make us say to ourselves, ‘That is just not possible.’ In August of this year, we showed images from a duck farm, of the breeding ducks for the production of ‘foie gras’ in the foie gras area of the south west, ‘IGP Foie Gras du Sud-Ouest’. I think these were the worst images we've seen in about 15 years on a farm.”

“And it is not personal mistreatment, it's not a person who decides that he hates animals. No, in fact, it's just that we've accepted an absolutely disgusting situation for the animals. We can no longer see how far we have sunk in the standards today, creating a lot of suffering for the animals. That's what we want to demonstrate.” “We have shown the harvesters, which are big machines that bring back the chickens, which they throw in some crates behind. This is the very terrible job of a hand picker. So then, they will be taken to the slaughterhouse. And for the chickens, slaughterhouse means being hooked by the feet, taken out of the crates, hung up by their feet, stunned afterwards in an electrified water bath.”

“Cows also will be artificially inseminated; in order for them to produce milk, they must have babies. Babies will be separated from their mothers within 24 hours. The little ones will be raised in individual boxes for several weeks before being brought together in a group. So then the heifers, the females, they will keep, in order to renew the livestock; so, they take the place of their mother, one by one, to once more produce milk. And the male babies will be fattened and then taken to the slaughterhouse.”

Brigitte explains that, according to their undercover investigations, the amount of killing in the egg-laying industry is also immense, and starts when the baby chicks are only one day old. She explains why this is so. “Only females are wanted, even in organic farming, as males do not lay eggs. And so, they are sorting the chicks, on one side the males, on the other side the females. The males are to be eliminated, either by crushing or by gassing. Therefore we showed the images of this crushing of chicks, which provoked even a response from the government and a priori they would be looking for alternatives to the crushing of chicks. But it is not yet done.”