If we add up the mass of all mammals on Earth,
60% of them will be so-called farm animals,
another 36% will be humans and only 4% will be wild animals.
The fact that most animals on our planet
were brought to the world by human hand, may seem frightening.
However, a much more frightening secret is hidden in the place where these animals live and die.
What happens to animals during their lives,
is deliberately hidden from public view.
We don't want anyone filming here.
We eliminate the movement of strangers.
I don't agree to let you into the farm.
All this time I've been traveling around the country
I've never noticed there could be animals somewhere.
Or maybe I didn't want to notice.
Unfortunately, no.
Unfortunately, no no no.
No, we don't want that public, no.
I won't tell you for what reason
But Mr. (name) doesn't want things like that here.
Not even news channels.
I'm just not interested in publishing anything anywhere.
It's nothing attractive.
It's simply a production process
which is and will be
closed to the public.
Period.
We definitely won't let the public inside.
Excuse me, goodbye.
There is no doubt that some animals feel fear, love, joy and pain.
However, when we pass huge buildings, in which hundreds of thousands of animals are imprisoned,
or when we overtake a truck on its way to a slaughterhouse,
we often don't even notice.
Inside, there are beings who express emotions in a similar way to those
we have learned to love.
Protecting some animals and abusing others
is a learned behavior to which we are exposed as children,
before we learn to read and write.
As to whether some animals feel pain, don't feel pain,
or whether they feel some emotions more or less,
science has given us sufficient evidence that [Psychologist, thai boxer]
animals feel in a way very similar to us.
Czech law distinguishes
between pets and livestock [Chair of "Voice of animals" and lawyer Plicka & Partners]
and it gives to each group very different rights, [Chair of "Voice of animals" and lawyer Plicka & Partners]
but it doesn't reflect reality, because if the question was,
whether a dog and a pig feel the same way,
then the answer would be, sure, they do. A pig feels pain
and has other emotions as well.
From a psychological perspective, in our relationship to animals,
our brain uses unconscious defense mechanisms. [Psychologist, thai boxer]
As the term suggests, we are usually not aware of them. [Psychologist, thai boxer]
There is no higher authority in the world or the universe
that says: It is like that.
It is a line that we ourselves draw in our heads.
And then it divides animal species.
It's an artificial division, it's not something based
on science or anything real.
Where is the imaginary dividing line
between the animals we love
and the animals whose suffering we not only deliberately overlook,
but even pay for?
The person you love and who is your everything
and all the people important to you, mom, grandma, grandpa, the whole family,
tell you "Eat meat. Here's your plate,
Don't mind the vegetables, but eat the meat, so that you're…"
Things like that, so you're permanently
led to think that way.
Modern technology,
huge areas carefully protected from the eyes of consumers
together with the current laws have enabled the abuse of animals
to grow to incredible proportions.
Technologies are being automated,
the state and the European Union are providing large sums for the reconstruction of factories
and breeders are trying out ways to make animals grow as quickly as possible
while keeping them alive.
With the advent of strong marketing and with lots of money
flowing into and out of the meat and dairy industries,
you suddenly have enormous capital
and you need people to consume so you make money from it,
you can teach people to do practically anything today.
See what marketing and media can do,
people do literally whatever we tell them. Who to vote for, what to eat.
People are perfectly manipulated
and marketing is so terribly powerful today,
that I believe it's the main reason.
I think I can say with a clear conscience,
that not only as animal advocates but also as lawyers,
we are convinced that
advertisements stating that the cow is happy
that she can give someone milk, or that she is happy,
that she can give someone her meat and so on, or happy eggs and the like,
are misleading advertisements and it's high time
people found out the truth.
TESTIMONY
[REC hidden camera]
The footage you are about to see was shot in the Czech Republic between 2018 and 2021
It shows standard practices of abusing animals in all developed countries around the world.
The whole process of animal husbandry begins with the careful selection of mothers and fathers.
They must meet certain criteria in order to ensure high profits
to their breeders in the future.
For bird reproduction, so-called breeding farms are used.
In the cramped space of long warehouses,
a certain number of males must live together with a much higher number of females.
The animals have nowhere to hide from each other, so they often fight,
peck each other's feathers and combs, and the females tend to be injured
during the act itself.
The first thing that shocked me was when I saw the huge building.
There were 3,000 animals and you could hardly see the ground.
I didn't know where the floor was and where the animals were.
They were all so cramped together.
The animals were in a bad condition, they had missing feathers, [Former feed testing company worker]
there were also injured animals. [Former feed testing company worker]
I saw a hen with a huge tumor on her butt.
If there is one that can't stand on its feet [The voice of a broiler farm worker]
is limping, sitting or injured in some way, [The voice of a broiler farm worker]
then you catch it and usually get rid of it. [The voice of a broiler farm worker]
A female's fragile bones break easily under the weight of a heavier male.
The result can be multiple limb fractures.
The birds are kept in these places for many months,
new bedding is simply added on top in layers
The animals live their entire lives in layers of their own feces,
which release toxic gases, and these cause the animals health problems.
In breeding farms, the food intake of broiler hens and roosters
is intentionally restricted.
They were bred to gain weight quickly, but if they did that in a breeding farm,
they would not be able to reproduce.
Such overbred individuals often cannot even move on their own in adulthood.
The reproduction of large animals usually begins with insemination.
The semen comes from a breeding male,
who is imprisoned all his life in an insemination center.
To achieve ejaculation, the male is stimulated in various ways.
One of them is the insertion of an electroejaculator into the rectum.
During the procedure, the animal is forcibly held by the head.
The workers wait for the ejaculation and catch the sperm into a prepared test tube.
One dose fertilizes 40-50 females.
In cows, insemination is the most commonly used method of fertilization.
The farmer inserts their whole arm into the anus of the female.
He then inserts a catheter into the vagina and injects the sperm.
Sows experience an even more drastic method of insemination.
They are trapped in individual cages for five weeks during each insemination.
The cages are so tight that they barely fit into them.
They can only lie, stand, or sit.
After mating, they are there for another month, or should be, [Former pig farm worker]
then they should spend three months in free pens
and about a week before giving birth, they are moved to the cages again.
But sometimes, for example when there isn't enough space,
the sows spend the whole pregnancy in the cramped cages.
A male walking by the cages serves merely as a tool for recognizing the estrus of the females.
A human then fertilizes the sow by inserting an insemination catheter
with a dose of semen into the genitals.
Fertilization by insemination is also carried out on birds.
The genitals of the males are stimulated by hand.
The collected semen is then used to fertilize the females.
But I don't have glasses, so...
You take the semen...
... you stab it inside.
COMING INTO THE WORLD
Just like a human mother, an animal mother feels a strong bond with her offspring.
Humans intentionally disrupt their natural need to be together
and try to turn animals into mere machines for making more animals.
Sows are kept for a third of their life in tight farrowing crates.
The excuse for the use of these cages is that otherwise the sow could crush her piglets.
Even so, this is one of the most common causes of their death.
The sow cannot turn in the tight farrowing crate
to look at her piglets, who are born one by one onto the hard floor.
The more young the sows give birth to, the higher the profits of the agribusinesses.
Therefore the sows have been bred to give birth to about 14 piglets,
two to three times a year.
Death is a daily occurrence on pig farms.
Piglets born weak or disabled are either
left to die without help or killed in a drastic way
in front of their mother and siblings.
Injured and weak piglets were usually disposed of.
Most often they were struck against the railing or the concrete ground.
We were ordered to kill piglets this way [Former pig farm worker]
because the farm wouldn't feed the weak ones, [Former pig farm worker]
who were useless for further rearing.
So we had the order to dispose of the weak and sick ones.
Births of deformed young are no exception.
In some cases, these are unrecognizable.
The inquisitive piglets who survive birth and culling get bored in their cage.
Due to the lack of other stimuli, they use their frustrated mother for their games.
Or their dead siblings.
After weaning the piglets, the sow goes back for another insemination,
where she is kept in a tight cage again until mating
and then another month after mating and so on.
The animals suffer from serious health problems during their pitiful lives.
But farmers don't find it worth their money to treat them.
Some females suffer from uterine or rectal prolapse due to frequent births.
Painful injuries caused by rubbing against the tight construction of the cage are also common.
When they were sick and maybe older,
it was said that it was not worth it to give them drugs, antibiotics,
so they were left in their condition as long as they had milk
or until they died on their own.
The longer they spend in the cage, the worse their mental state.
Over time, the females give up almost any effort to get out.
Old sows are mostly what we called "destroyed"
by the breeding, so they are rather apathetic, lying down.
Female rabbits are fertilized in some farms
on the very day they gave birth.
Together with the insemination dose, antibiotics are injected into their vaginas.
Mammary gland inflammation is not treated. [a female rescued from a factory farm]
In most farms, female rabbits must conceive at the second attempt at most.
If they fail, death awaits them.
If a rabbit gets pregnant, she is kept in a wire cage with her young.
In some farms, the mother is allowed into her young's cage only once a day
to feed them.
The farmers regularly check the cages
and the young inside them. If they look too small or weak,
they strike them against the edge of the cage.
How do you kill them?
These little ones?
Well. Physically.
Like, you break their neck?
Well, like this. (He shows.)
Against the ground.
Rabbits give birth up to ten times a year.
The cycle of births and fertilizations without any rest is difficult to manage.
The rabbits die of exhaustion or after a year spent in a cage
they are taken to a slaughterhouse.
Birds do not have the opportunity to be with their mother even for a moment.
They are born alone from so-called hatching eggs in hatcheries.
Using modern technologies, over 250 million birds
hatch annually in the Czech Republic.
The frightened chicks call their mother, but she is laying more eggs
in dark barns tens of kilometers away.
The chicks hatch in crates inside automated hatchery chambers.
From these incubators they are transported and dumped on a conveyor belt.
That's where it turns around automatically, the chicks
fall through... unhatched eggs go to waste.
Sitting at the belt, workers roughly rummage through
endless hordes of frightened chicks, checking their health
and physical condition.
Here the women must sort the chicks.
They have to pick out shells, dead chicks,
chicks with a defect.
Birds who have crooked beaks, physical imperfections
or other handicap, are thrown into special crates
and subsequently sold to be fed to other animals.
We have contracts again
Wild animal rescue stations come for them
or the zoo.
So it's used like this.
Healthy chicks are taken to one of the hundreds of growout houses in the Czech Republic
or far beyond the borders of our country.
PAINFUL PROCEDURES
The life of abused animals is cruel in itself.
What's more, their bodies are mutilated at a very young age.
Piglets' teeth are clipped, two upper and two lower canines.
The clipping of teeth in piglets should be done nowadays with a grinder,
but because it's slow and it makes the workers' hands hurt, [Former pig farm worker]
they use normal clippers, which of course get blunt after some time,
so the piglets' teeth splinter, their gums get hurt and so on.
Also their tails are burned off.
Otherwise they would bite each other's tails out of boredom and the lack of stimuli.
Males must undergo castration,
which in most cases takes place without anesthesia.
Piglets are not anesthetized during castration, anesthetics are not used,
because the workers are not willing to use gloves,
and without gloves they would numb their fingers, so just because of workers
who don't want to use gloves piglets are not anesthetized.
Also they said that it would slow down work,
so they did not use anesthetics even though subsidies were received for that.
Within a few hours or days after birth
the young animals' earlobes are pierced using pliers with a blunt tip.
Calves must also undergo painful dehorning.
Most farmers choose the method of burning the horn down to the skull
using a thermal cautery.
When I burn it...
I actually burn
the blood vessels that lead to the - to the horns.
Only when some dumbass fights like this...
... then... sometimes I don't burn it the way I should.
Dehorning is performed in 96% of Czech farms.
According to the Act on the Protection of Animals against Cruelty
dehorning may be performed without anesthesia up to four weeks of age.
Calves have been shown to feel pain for at least
three weeks after the procedure.
As a result of removing the horns, purulent wounds may occur.
In that case, the calves experience severe pain.
HENS ABUSED FOR EGGS
Most people see hens as machines for making eggs.
Businesses that abuse them treat them accordingly.
They treat them as if they were just a tool
for turning cheap feed into eggs.
But few people know what caring mothers hens are,
that they experience a whole range of positive and negative emotions
or that they can think using deduction.
People talk and think about them only in the context of laying eggs.
As with other bird species,
hens lay eggs for reproductive reasons.
An egg is no gift to humans, it's a container for the healthy development of a chick.
It is not natural for hens to lay such huge amounts of unfertilized eggs.
Their wild ancestors laid about 13 eggs a year.
Due to genetic manipulation, today's hens are driven
to produce up to 330 eggs per year.
In hatcheries, 24 million chicks hatch in one year.
About half of them are female and the other half are male.
The workers at the lines sort them by sex and throw the males into separate boxes.
As they do not lay eggs, males are unnecessary for the egg industry.
Only healthy females are important.
These are females, right?
Freshly hatched male birds and unhealthy females
are ground up alive or poisoned by gas in special boxes.
In the Czech Republic, millions are killed this way every year.
The females that survived selection have to undergo beak burning.
From hatcheries, female chicks are moved in crates to so-called rearing sites,
where they live for about four months, which is the age
when they start laying eggs.
They are kept in the same conditions
in which they will be forced to live once transferred to a laying facility.
There are currently five different technologies in the Czech Republic,
in which hens have to spend their lives.
Some hens are transported to furnished battery cages,
others to aviary systems, free-run, free-range or organic farms.
Temporary workers who carry out the transport of the hens
treat them with extreme cruelty.
Furnished battery cage systems are banned in our country from 2027 on.
Until then, however, about 27 million more hens will spend their lives in them.
They are forced to stand on a sloping wire floor
in a crowded cage that houses 8-20 individuals.
The living space of each hen is the size of an A4 sheet of paper.
They cannot stretch their wings or satisfy their basic needs,
such as scratching or dustbathing.
The lack of movement causes their bones to weaken, so they break easily.
The animals are not able to hide from each other.
Weaker individuals are attacked by stronger ones
and their injuries later turn into deep and painful wounds.
Cannibalism is one of the consequences of the frustration caused by the environment
in which the hens are forced to live.
Death is common.
Once the ban on battery cages comes into effect,
the most common type of hen prison will be the aviary system.
The aviary system differs from the battery cage system only in
the possibility to leave the wire cage and step onto solid ground.
Up to 17 hens must share one square meter of it.
Inside the barn, there are two to four floors of open cages.
The hens' life is governed by artificial lighting, which determines their day and night.
It is adapted to encourage the hens to lay as many eggs as possible.
In a huge flock of thousands of animals, it is impossible to form a hierarchy,
which would otherwise be an integral part of the social life of hens.
The unsuitable environment in these barns leads to
feather pecking and cannibalism,
which is the cause of 65% of deaths out of the total number of dead hens.
The almost continuous laying of eggs has a devastating impact on the hens.
They lose their feathers, their combs pale and fold.
Some hens manage to escape through the waste removal system.
However, they often end up in waste shafts, where they die of starvation and thirst
on piles of feces and rotting bodies of animals.
The area of a free-run system is made of concrete ground covered with bedding and grates.
The health and social problems of hens are the same as in an aviary system.
Unstable hierarchy, noise, chaos, cannibalism and rapidly spreading diseases.
Hens in a free-range and organic farm can have an access
to outdoor areas during their life, but they still live in unnaturally large flocks,
suffer from stress and at a very young age they die from diseases associated with frequent laying.
Death rate is highest in these systems.
After about a year, egg production begins to decline, regardless of the husbandry system.
The intensive laying of eggs leaves its mark on the hens' health.
The least show of ill health is an automatic death sentence.
If the hens do not die on their own, the farmers will get rid of them in whatever way possible.
When I see a half-dead one
I do it this way:
I simply take her together with the dead ones
Open the trash can
she goes first
and then the rest on top of her.
And she suffocates.
Yeah.
Some companies offer the so-called spent hens for sale
to small farmers, which is another way for them to make a profit.
Private farmers take the miserable hens to their gardens,
where they let them serve until they fall ill or stop laying eggs.
The hens that are left are collected and sold to slaughterhouses.
The collecting is carried out by temporary workers who often use the miserable animals
as a target for venting their own frustration.
Grasping the hens by their legs so they hang upside down
is considered gentle and is permitted by law.
However, the skeletons of birds are very fragile and serious injuries often occur.
The stressed out and screaming animals are crammed into crates,
which are subsequently treated as if they held worthless things
rather than sensitive and very shy creatures.
In a slaughterhouse, egg-laying hens die in pain just like chickens
who are raised for their muscles.
[The seat of dangerous infection, NO ENTRY] In the case of an infection such as bird flu,
the illness of a single animal means the death of hundreds of thousands of others.
Animals from such farms are caught and thrown into trash cans alive.
The workers then empty the trash cans into huge containers and gas the birds to death.
Those on the bottom die even before that
under the weight of the bodies of others.
COWS ABUSED FOR MOTHER'S MILK
For a cow to start producing mother's milk,
she must first be fertilized and must give birth to a calf.
The maternal bond is a trait common to all mammals.
The two will spend 30 minutes or a maximum of 12 hours together,
depending on when a worker finds out about the birth.
Once they find the calf, they separate the two forever.
After being placed in a cage, the so-called individual pen,
the calf calls its mother.
In some farms, the mother does not hear the call, in others they call each other
and in some farms the mother also gets to see the calf twice a day
- on her way to the milking parlor.
Newborn calves are locked into
endless rows of cages every day.
In summer, the sun blazes down on the small cages.
In winter, the calves have no way to keep warm and nowhere to hide from the frost.
They often do not survive the first days of life.
The mothers often die too due to a difficult birth.
Any disability or illness also means imminent death,
because farmers don't find it worthwhile to treat ill animals.
The calves who survive the harsh conditions spend two months in the sheds.
People then divide them by sex.
Females are shut up in group pens
until they're sexually mature for the first violent insemination.
Males are sent either to a slaughterhouse or to a feedlot in the Czech Republic
or in distant countries.
The calves, separated from their mothers, suffer from an unsatisfied sucking reflex.
They compensate for this basic need by sucking on any objects
or body parts of other calves which resemble the udder of their mother.
Even some adult cows show signs of this unmet need.
This is a problem for farmers because such cows suck the milk of other cows
and thus reduce the farmers' profit.
Farmers forcibly attach a plastic or a metal ring with spikes
to the nasal cartilage of such a cow.
When she tries to suck milk from other cows, the ring causes them pain,
so they automatically drive the involuntarily armed cow away.
While the lonely calves have to drink an artificial milk replacer
from rubber nipples, their mothers are forced to give their milk to people.
They are kept in cowsheds, where they live side by side,
without enough room to move, let alone run.
The cows' mother's milk is sucked from them by milking machines in a milking parlor.
The facility is designed in such a way that the young mothers cannot escape.
Their initial resistance and effort to get rid of the unpleasant machines
turns into a forced habit over their short life.
The milking parlor cannot be kept clean.
The ends of the mammary glands often come into contact with feces in which
the animals lie, so a large percentage of mothers suffer from inflammation.
The European Union therefore allows a certain number of inflammatory cells
in cow mother's milk sold for human consumption.
The cows are forced to deliver to humans an average of 20 liters of milk each day.
If this amount falls to the point that the abuse is not profitable anymore,
the cows lose their right to live.
They are loaded onto a truck and taken to a slaughterhouse,
often before they are even five years old.
She has such an udder she can hardly walk.
Go!
Go on!
Are you stupid?
Go over there.
Go on. Turn!
Move on!
Go over there you bitch!
Go!
Turn!
You want another kick?
She wanted to get paid.
That's good!
Some die even earlier. They collapse, exhausted after difficult births.
These are often left lying next to the cowsheds,
for long hours in the cold or the heat, dying slowly.
Physically killing her isn't a problem, is it? [Factory dairy farm worker]
But she can't go to a normal slaughterhouse [Factory dairy farm worker]
and when an emergency car comes [Factory dairy farm worker]
then he can take her today [Factory dairy farm worker]
because she fell down today.
And like...
It shouldn't be done, but...
he's gonna say she fell down on the car.
No one can prove whether he loaded her up or not.
So it depends on the driver, what he's like.
Whether he loads her up or not.
- And how does he load her up when she can't walk? - He takes the reel...
and that's not a pretty sight at all.
Move!
You bitch!
If there's a bull, right [The voice of a former slaughterhouse worker]
and he just doesn't want to [The voice of a former slaughterhouse worker]
go where they want him to. [The voice of a former slaughterhouse worker]
Well, then there are some experts, [The voice of a former slaughterhouse worker]
who take boiling water and just... [The voice of a former slaughterhouse worker]
Look, once we sprayed a bull here, who didn't want to go.
He was some kind of cripple.
So we sprayed on him.
A doctor came and the bull was steaming and we had a problem. (laughter)
As for organic farms, not much changes for the animals.
Here, too, cows are repeatedly inseminated and forced to give birth to calves.
They can spend seven days with them, but after that time, their bond is
broken by the farmers as well.
The calves are shut up in the cramped spaces of individual pens
and their mothers have to go to give milk to people several times a day.
In the end, they all die prematurely.
Humans are the only mammals on Earth who have chosen
to consume mother's milk of another animal species.
They are also the only mammals to consume mother's milk in adulthood.
ANIMALS ABUSED FOR MUSCLES
The terms we use often don't let us imagine the true meaning of the words.
Under the word meat, we hardly imagine the muscles, tendons,
or fat of miserable animals or the animal itself.
We often believe that eating animals is only our personal choice.
But aren't we forgetting the ones who are affected the most?
Every day we choose between the life and death of beings who cannot
defend themselves against our decision to enslave them.
Every year, slaughterhouse workers in the Czech Republic kill
over 107 million month-old chickens.
Their plucked bodies are then sold to customers,
who don't consider for a moment
that they're eating parts of creatures who were alive only shortly before.
Chickens consumed by humans
are 35-day-old chicks in an unnaturally large body.
They must spend their miserable life in long and dark buildings without windows.
The farmers pursue a single goal - for the chicks to grow as fast as possible.
The chicks are brought from hatcheries to growout houses on the day they were born.
The staff dumps them out of crates on bedding
which won't be changed during their lifetime.
The chicks must learn to eat and drink on their own.
Those who fail die of starvation and thirst.
10 to 70 thousand birds can be crammed in one barn,
so one square meter houses up to 20 individuals.
At first, the chicks have more room,
but with increasing weight, they can hardly move around for the last week of their life.
The overgrown chicks suffer from gait disorders and chronic pain.
Their limbs break and warp under the weight of their own body,
especially under the weight of breast muscle, which is most sought after.
Due to breeding, breast muscle makes up 24% of the total body weight.
The chickens very often need to lie or sit down,
because they can't carry the weight of their own bodies.
Especially in the last stages of life
they spend most of the day lying on the rotting bedding.
Uric acid decomposes in it
and forms an aggressive irritating solution.
This causes skin inflammation, especially in the breast area.
Due to bedding soaked with feces
the chickens also develop deep leg ulcers.
Every day, workers walk through the barn collecting dead bodies.
They move among the animals without any concern for them.
If a worker comes across a bird that is too small or sick,
they get rid of him.
We mostly write "sudden death".
Number eleven or ten, muscular system.
Right? Here it's all written out.
I saw that someone had number fourteen,
"culling". What's that?
That's killing, it gets killed.
Like, it gets killed.
So it's worthless.
It's gonna starve, it has nothing in its crop.
So they wouldn't eat at all.
The big ones won't leave them anything.
And these would have nothing at all.
That's why they bring more of them...
the breeder
and we must reduce it to a certain number.
Yeah? Nice.
What are you doing here? Shh!
What about these two deaths?
This one is dead...
They are both breathing.
Are they both breathing?
They're about to stop breathing... (incomprehensible)
Now they're not breathing anymore.
They are in one circle and the smaller ones get killed.
It is...
the fate of chickens.
You won't change that.
Go and drink, eat.
Or we'll kill you.
Sometimes the animals survive the farmers' attempts to kill them.
He... he's still moving.
Really?
Now you must have had enough.
Without help, they then die a slow and painful death
on a pile of discarded, decomposing bodies of others.
Another common cause of death in chickens
is a phenomenon called sudden death syndrome.
The heart and lungs can't handle the extremely fast muscle growth.
Trash cans next to the growout houses are filled daily with the dead bodies of those
who, for various reasons, couldn't handle life in their own body
or were ruthlessly killed.
The marketing strategies of some companies
are based on the use of the label "farm product".
This label should evoke in people the idea of ​​a better life for the animals.
Farmers use the birds' length of life as the main proof of the quality of their farm.
They kill them after 90 days instead of 35.
However, three times longer life means only a prolongation of the animals' suffering.
Before going to a slaughterhouse, the chickens are collected either mechanically or manually.
The mechanical method is provided by the so-called peer system,
which is presented as a gentle method of catching.
Carts with animals are transported to a ready semi-trailer,
from which a sliding platform sends them to one of the floors of a truck.
As a result of this manipulation, some animals are injured
or lose their lives even before they arrive at the slaughterhouse.
Manual capture takes place like this:
Groups of workers push, kick and throw the chickens to the front of the building,
where they catch them and ruthlessly stuff the resisting animals into crates.
Due to the rough handling, the birds have broken wings or other bones
and bruises form.
Hundreds of thousands of frightened month-old chicks travel daily across the Czech Republic.
From the transports of death, they see daylight for the first time,
they feel fresh air for the first time.
But not for long.
Dozens of slaughterhouses are waiting for their arrival.
The month-old chicks are hung by the legs.
They are afraid and tossing in a futile effort to escape.
Their limbs are often injured from cruel treatment
which makes everything all the more painful for them.
The conveyor moves uncompromisingly to a tank with electrified water,
which should stun the birds.
If the chickens raise their heads, they aren't stunned
and workers cut their carotid artery while the birds are fully conscious.
In industrial slaughterhouses, the chickens' necks are cut by automated machines.
The bodies of thousands of dead animals are hung on hooks.
The ones with visible bruises and other marks of cruel treatment
are thrown away.
The rest of the bodies are packed into plastic containers,
which are subsequently available in stores for customers,
who usually know nothing about the unhappy lives of the animals.
In smaller slaughterhouses, workers do the killing by hand.
Animals killed in this way are sold under the label "farm product".
After about one month of life, piglets are driven away from their mothers
into common pens, for so-called pre-fattening.
Due to genetic manipulation and specially developed feed
they are forced to gain 400 grams of weight per day, later up to 800 grams.
Pigs are cleanly animals,
who have been forced to live in dirt, feces and urine by humans.
Voluntarily, they would never lie down in the place where they defecate.
The oppressive boredom in pens in smelly barns
drives these intelligent animals to stereotypical behavior.
An example of this is the biting of cages.
In this bare environment, they are supposed to be entertained by chains hanging above the cages.
The workers claim that a piece of hanging iron enriches the room
and improves the pigs' lives.
Even minor injuries can be a big problem for the animals.
Carelessness when shortening the umbilical cord can lead to umbilical hernia.
Adverse living conditions
also lead to rectal prolapse
and a variety of other painful diseases.
Seriously ill animals are often left untreated.
Veterinary inspections were announced in advance,
so everything that the authorities might find fault with was hidden,
such as various drugs or records of treatment. [Former pig farm worker]
Or they were altered, rewritten. [Former pig farm worker]
The vets usually just went through it and even when they saw something,
they didn't do much about it.
And that was the end of the inspection, without finding anything wrong.
The vets came twice a month for about two hours,
looked things over and left, without any intervention.
The visit was just a formality.
Untreated infections and injuries can also result in the paralysis of the hind limbs.
There aren't many ways to escape from the distressing environment, at least for a while.
The least cruel one is sleep.
The pigs have less than one square meter to sleep on.
If the pigs were given a chance to live in favorable conditions,
they could live up to fifteen years.
People don't give them a chance to live longer than six months.
Even in this short time, up to 20% of them are expected to die.
Once the surviving piglets reach the required weight,
they get to feel fresh air for the first time in their life
and through the steel holes they can see what it looks like outside.
In the truck, the animals weighing over 100 kg each are cramped
in a space of less than half a square meter per one.
Stress, strong jolts, and adverse temperatures.
These are the reasons why the animals sometimes do not survive the journey.
The destination is the same for all. A slaughterhouse.
The truck drivers and slaughterhouse workers drive the pigs out with shouts,
vulgar insults, kicks, sticks, swatters or electric batons.
Come on, let's go.
Move!
Go!
Go you scum!
Well, that's how that one fell through, man.
Go there.
Look!
You idiot!
Sometimes they just [The voice of a former slaughterhouse worker]
die out of stress [The voice of a former slaughterhouse worker]
when the butchers are herding them [The voice of a former slaughterhouse worker]
I think it's some kind of heart attack. [The voice of a former slaughterhouse worker]
In some slaughterhouses, the workers kill the animals right in front of the others.
Elsewhere, they herd them in groups into gas chambers.
Whatever the method of killing, the pain is always the same.
The intestines are flushed out to remove feces, filled with unused parts of the body
and sold to Czech households.
For example as wine sausages.
Ducks are waterfowl.
Spending time in water is an integral part of their natural life.
Despite this, most ducks in the Czech Republic
are forced to live on dry bedding inside closed buildings.
Three species of ducks are kept in our country.
All three have miserable lives, only the duration of their fattening differs.
The breeders sometimes artificially cross the species.
It's so unnatural that completely infertile individuals are born.
The boring and uninspiring environment, unnatural living conditions,
and the huge concentration of animals lead to nervousness and stress.
The ducks attack each other, peck each other's feathers,
and bite out painful wounds especially in the wing area.
Waterfowl often suffer from diseases of the muscular system.
Their body is adapted to movement in water,
where they can relieve the legs and joints from stress.
On land, however, they must carry their heavy body on their feet.
Without water, they are also not able to keep their feathers clean.
Due to genetic manipulation, the ducks have further problems.
Uncoordinated movements and toppling over are common.
Lying on their back, they often die of thirst and hunger.
Some farms run their own slaughterhouse.
According to the farmers, the killing here is gentle and humane.
The frightened animals can see and smell what is going on.
People are often unable to recognize the obvious signs of panic and fear.
Especially not those who get paid for the animals' cruel death.
To realize they're about to be slaughtered...
No.
They're not intelligent enough for that.
In Czech farms, rabbits are kept almost exclusively in wire cages.
The size of the cages is not regulated by law.
The rabbits produce a large volume of feces and urine each day.
Some farmers do not remove the droppings until the animals are sent to slaughter.
The rabbits' sensitive sense of smell is constantly irritated by ammonia released from the feces.
The caged rabbits cannot satisfy their natural needs.
They can't even stand up
and except for a few steps forward and backward they cannot move.
The futile fight with the bars and the life on wire floor causes them injuries.
The farmers do not treat these injuries.
The rabbits are given only strong reserve antibiotics.
They are commonly used in rabbit farms
due to the high mortality of rabbits, who are susceptible to many diseases.
The rabbits' pitiful life lasts three months.
They reach the desired weight already as children.
After three months, they are loaded into crates.
At the slaughterhouse, the workers handle the crates full of living creatures
as if they were mere commodities in a warehouse without any feelings.
Dozens of crates with thousands of silent animals are brought to the slaughter line.
The rabbits are roughly pulled out of the crates one by one.
The workers cram their heads between two steel points
and release an electric current into them to stun the rabbits.
However, sometimes this fails.
The otherwise almost mute animals scream in fear and pain here.
Some rabbits wake up while or after their throats are slit.
With a severed carotid artery, they are trying to catch their breath.
When the workers notice this, they break the rabbit's neck with their hand.
If they don't notice, the line carries the suffering animal along with other bodies
to further rooms of the slaughterhouse,
where the mutilated bodies are further processed.
Thousands of turkeys are squeezed into barns with artificial lighting.
Except for the feeders and drinkers, they have nothing available to them,
which could amuse them during the long months.
Boredom and a large number of animals in a limited space lead to aggressive pecking.
Due to genetic manipulation, the turkeys are forced to reach the weight of 25 kg
within six months.
If human children grew at this rate, a six-month-old baby would weigh 45 kg.
All turkey bodies in shops are the result of artificial insemination.
The animals are so heavy that they are incapable of natural reproduction.
They cannot move fast or fly.
A barn with a high concentration of animals and poor fans
heats up to high temperatures very quickly in the summer months.
Catching such large animals involves a great deal of human cruelty.
I wanted to find out
how workers treat animals. [Former temp worker carrying out capture]
Because on the Internet you read [Former temp worker carrying out capture]
that it is always done by qualified workers [Former temp worker carrying out capture]
who are properly trained.
I was soon convinced that this was not the case at all.
The brutality of the workers intensifies with the resistance of the frightened birds,
who are trying to hide, escape or defend themselves.
Other workers treat the animals very cruelly.
With great enjoyment they slap and kick them.
Because turkeys defend themselves, of course they're aggressive sometimes.
She scolded you, man.
Do you want more?
You fucking bitch.
I managed to do the job for about two hours,
before I realized it was all about massacring animals.
Many animals die during capture or the journey to the slaughterhouse.
Every year, more than 6 million of these defenseless animals
are killed for the sake of a bloody Christmas tradition.
What I find interesting is studies on fish,
because we, as mammals,
may feel psychologically distant from them. [Psychologist, thai boxer]
That's why all the evidence-based findings are so useful,
the ones we have available from the last ten or fifteen years.
Nowadays, we know very well that fish feel negative emotions,
they also experience worry, fear.
They have complex social behavior.
They use strategies, for example when looking for food.
New findings about fish are fascinating
and their experience of pain is similar to other animals.
Is tolerance for violence against them so high just because they don't scream?
In the fall, pond fishing begins.
The ponds are slowly drained,
so the fish's living space is significantly reduced.
The fishermen catch them with nets,
they handle them roughly and throw them into transport cars.
Individuals who were not caught
die in a layer of mud at the bottom of the pond.
Those who were fished out must live in overcrowded tanks for several months.
Although carp would normally go into winter rest,
the crowded environment does not allow it.
Just before Christmas Eve, they are caught again and transported to street tanks.
They can hardly move in there.
Due to the large number of animals, water becomes very poor in oxygen.
The vendors stress and hurt the fish by constantly tossing them
when looking for a "suitable" individual at the customer's request.
Some are still alive when their scales are torn off.
Some people take their victims home in plastic bags,
to kill them themselves in their homes.
For fish, staying dry is agony.
During the journey, they writhe in pain and gasp for breath.
Christmas is presented as a holiday of peace and quiet.
How is it possible, then, that every year we are able
to cross streams of blood in the streets
and watch public executions without the least regret?
Apart from Christmas carp, the most killed fish in the Czech Republic are trout.
They live in artificial conditions in tanks,
which they leave only when they are to be killed.
In a plastic tub, the fishermen send an electric current into them,
slit their throat and gut them.
Cows and bulls bred for muscle are considered happy animals by many.
As if a temporary stay outside was a luxury that made up for everything that awaits them.
In the so-called semi-intensive farms
the animals are taken away from their mothers when they are several months old
and for several more long months they are imprisoned in barns.
Deep bedding on concrete floor
can also look like this, according to the Regional Veterinary Administration.
"...the animals are kept on so-called deep bedding... ...it is a standard way of husbandry."
In some fattening farms, small calves are kept on chains so short
that they can't lay their heads on the ground while resting.
Even when the animals are out to pasture all year round,
their lives end at the age of two years at most.
If not killed, cows could live for more than twenty years.
At the slaughterhouse, the animals often refuse to leave the truck
as if they knew what awaits them.
Get a move on!
Move on you bastard!
You fucking bitch, get out!
Out!
She's still moving.
Japanese quails
are the smallest bird species abused for eggs and muscle.
Due to their little bodies, they're kept in tiny cages.
Their life is ended by humans at the age of one and a half months.
Transport to slaughterhouses is not profitable, so farmers kill the birds themselves.
The body twitches in a funnel as the heart pumps blood from it.
SHEEP AND GOATS ABUSED FOR MOTHER'S MILK
In the Czech Republic, the demand for sheep and goat mother's milk
and for the products made from it is growing.
Unlike cows, sheep and goats can spend part of the year outdoors.
In autumn and winter, however, they are shut up in barns.
The young are often taken from their mothers on the day after the birth.
They are moved into a different part of the building,
so that they and their mothers wouldn't see or hear each other.
Their separation is painful and stressful.
Large farms use artificial nipples with milk powder to feed the lonely young.
The powder is often made of cows' milk.
No one finds it strange
that in one part of the farm there are mothers with udders full of milk,
which they give up to people,
while in another part there are lambs sucking artificial nutrition from another species from machines.
Goats and sheep are herded to the milking parlor twice a day.
Their heads are firmly held so that they cannot run away from the machines.
The mothers have to hand over milk nutrition even when
they've been pregnant again for several months.
Farmers need the mammary glands to regenerate
before forcing the goat to have more young.
One of the most drastic ways to stop milk production
is a sudden stop of milking.
Pressure builds inside the udder and it swells painfully,
which can lead to inflammation.
Of course, you can dry them from one day to another [The voice of an organic goat farm worker]
using some medicine, [The voice of an organic goat farm worker]
ideally those antibiotics. [The voice of an organic goat farm worker]
The milk may accumulate there and [The voice of an organic goat farm worker]
there may be problems with the udder. [The voice of an organic goat farm worker]
Males do not produce milk,
so they're considered a by-product.
Nevertheless, the farmers try to make a profit from them.
They either sell them to other farms or kill them.
Especially during Easter, there is a high demand for the bodies of lambs.
Some males are kept on the farms
and forced to serve to fertilize females.
Since they have to mate with dozens of them,
they are usually exhausted and on the verge of collapse.
DOMESTIC FARMS
Keeping animals on so-called domestic farms or small farms
is still widespread in the Czech Republic.
People who know the horrible footage from factory farms
sometimes prefer to spend their money on small farmers' goods
or they decide to start exploiting animals themselves.
I wish more space was given
to issues on small farms, [The founder of the Šťastný zvěřinec animal sanctuary]
because that's animal abuse too [The founder of the Šťastný zvěřinec animal sanctuary]
and often the small farms [The founder of the Šťastný zvěřinec animal sanctuary]
or domestic farms
are much, much more disgusting.
On domestic farms, animals occasionally taste grass and breathe fresh air.
On some, their needs are met
or they can move in their natural environment.
At first sight, therefore, abusing animals this way
doesn't seem so drastic.
Animals come to these farms in various ways.
One of them is the purchase at farmers' markets.
In these places, shy animals are exposed to enormous stress
due to a large concentration of people
and the lack of possibility to escape.
In the case of small mammals and birds,
such as rabbits or hens,
farmers do not have to report the keeping of up to several hundred individuals.
Anyone can start raising them without demonstrating even basic knowledge.
It is therefore quite common
that people keep their animals underground their whole life,
in cellars, dark barns,
wooden sheds without windows or even in the attics of their houses.
Even if a customer sees a yard for animals,
they can hardly tell
how many animals are actually let out into it
and how many of them are imprisoned in terrible dwellings all their lives.
Do you let these ones out too?
No.
Later I take them where my hens are.
I raise them here...
If the animals on these farms become ill,
the farmer either doesn't notice it at all,
or they kill them instead of treating them.
Hens are brutally killed just because
they no longer lay enough eggs.
Due to intensive long-term breeding for high egg production
hens often suffer from various diseases of the reproductive organs.
The most common end is, of course, the inflammation of the oviducts.
Most hens succumb to these inflammations
and it's incredibly painful, and the hen basically drowns.
The hen drowns in her own inflammatory shit which,
due to the way in which her internal organs are organized,
flow into her whole body.
Even in domestic farms, animals get out of their pens
only just before their death.
From the legal point of view,
the law makes a great distinction [Chair of "Voice of animals" and lawyer Plicka & Partners]
and when we're figuring out whether something's abuse, [Chair of "Voice of animals" and lawyer Plicka & Partners]
then in the words of the law, what you do to a dog [Chair of "Voice of animals" and lawyer Plicka & Partners]
may be considered abuse,
whereas if you do the same thing to a farm animal,
then, according to the law, it's not abuse.
They live here with us,
we aren't here to take advantage of them,
to keep them somewhere,
to think we are above them
and they are below us,
that we can do whatever we want with them.
Although no laws protect the so-called farm animals
from a miserable life for humans' benefit,
there are places where good people
give them protection and a safe home, spending their own money
and money from donors.
These places are called sanctuaries.
For me, a sanctuary is a place
where the animals are safe, [The founder of the Šťastný zvěřinec sanctuary]
where they live until their natural death. [The founder of the Šťastný zvěřinec sanctuary]
Where we give them all possible care [The founder of the Šťastný zvěřinec sanctuary]
often even impossible,
but we just do all that we can to make them happy
and live as long as possible and in health.
Animals get to our sanctuary in various conditions [The founder of the Farma naděje sanctuary]
sometimes they are on the verge of death. [The founder of the Farma naděje sanctuary]
Then there are a lot of young animals,
so we get one- or two-day-old lambs, goats.
We get animals from various events
like raffles, first prizes at balls.
This hen got here from a small farmer,
because he thought she laid too few eggs [The Život bez krutosti na statku sanctuary]
and she pecked the other hens' eggs. [The Život bez krutosti na statku sanctuary]
so she she was in danger of having her head cut off.
I absolutely don't get it how anyone can doubt
that animals are sensitive creatures.
It's not that they wouldn't have emotions,
it's just that we're not able to read them.
Every animal, from the smallest rat
to the pig, the sheep, they all feel emotions,
they feel exactly the same emotions as we do.
They definitely feel fear, pain, love, affection.
They also feel fear for example when two inseparable friends [Farma naděje sanctuary volunteer]
have to be separated because [Farma naděje sanctuary volunteer]
one of them needs to be medically treated.
Then the other one calls, cries.
So they're not scared just for themselves but for their friends too.
It's not a question of whether they can read, write and count,
but whether they can feel pain.
Maybe you've lived with the conviction that we need
to eat animals and other products of their abuse
to be healthy and to lack no nutrients.
But what if I tell you that
all the suffering and killing of animals is completely unnecessary?
What if we can be healthy, do sports or work hard
without animal products?
What if we can enjoy the taste of great food
without causing death to a single animal?
When someone decides to go vegan today
for whatever reason, [Owners of the international fast food franchise Forky's]
it's actually awfully simple. [Owners of the international fast food franchise Forky's]
How does Czechia stand as to the availability of vegan products?
I dare say we are one of the best in Europe.
Czechia is definitely not behind, especially Prague, I must say.
Prague is a European superpower when it comes to vegan restaurants,
the range of possibilities we have here.
We try to make it possible for people to eat everything they are used to,
plus what they know from global cuisine.
People are often surprised by how tasty vegan food is,
because you can still hear myths
that vegans eat grass or grain. [Owners of the international fast food franchise Forky's]
When I found out that I don't have to eat animals,
I needed to make sure that it works
and that I can do sports with it.
So I got fully involved in my sport,
I started doing it at the highest level posssible
I trained every day and observed my body,
to find out what happens to it.
And the result has been incredible.
Physically, I think I'm at the peak of my strength right now.
I have 49 professional competitions behind me, [Thai boxer]
out of which I won 44 and 30 were knock outs. [Thai boxer]
All this time I've been competing
and not eating meat,
so my own experience convinced me
that meat isn't necessary
not only for everyday life, but also for the most demanding sports performances.
I do MMA, which stands for mix martial arts.
It's a combination of various martial arts.
At the professional level, I have fought 10 matches, [MMA fighter]
eight wins and two losses. [MMA fighter]
I have competed in various countries [MMA fighter]
including Japan or America [MMA fighter]
through the Invicta organization.
Does vegan diet give me an advantage over my opponents?
Definitely. I'm 100% sure of that.
The first and biggest advantage is metabolism.
Your body works faster,
it's not filled with something that rots inside of you for several days.
Definitely faster digestion,
so you're not so tired,
you have much more energy and better regeneration.
My reactions have become faster.
In Thai boxing you often have to react within a second.
The benefits for sport have been obvious and really strong.
I don't meet with any prejudices regarding veganism and sports
and I think you can hardly have any prejudices
when you see a person eating vegan
who's at the same time very strong and in great form.
For me, an important part of male identity is responsibility,
including empathy and protection of the weak.
For me, this is an awfully strong argument for not eating meat.
It's no achievement to go to a supermarket [Thai boxer]
to buy a killed, tortured animal. [Thai boxer]
For me, masculinity means protecting those animals,
so veganism is a manifestation of that masculinity,
of wanting to take care of the weak and to help them.
I draw my strength from plants and the results have been great.
Animals experience a whole range of emotions.
They feel love, joy, sadness.
And just like humans, they can suffer.
Although they are imprisoned, tortured and killed,
they cling to life even in the worst moments
and fight for it to their last breath.
They would never voluntarily choose to die for humans.
People are often full of claims about freedom and personal choice.
But where is the freedom and personal choice of animals,
who were deprived of their life by humans' decision?
Everyone has to make a change themselves.
In how they perceive animals,
and what they spend money on in stores.
As long as people pay for animal suffering, it won't end.
The creatures you saw in this film [Czech film producer, screenwriter, and director]
have eyes, they have a face, [Czech film producer, screenwriter, and director]
they have bones, they have skin, they have their DNA
and we belong among them.
But we ruthlessly take their space,
their right to life
and in peace and quiet of our home or a restaurant,
where we don't see the suffering,
we think that it's all right.
Humanity should be filled with compassion.
The footage you have seen was shot in dozens of farms throughout the Czech Republic.
It shows common and mosty legal practices of abusing animals for human benefit.
The footage comes from these places.
This number has been indicating an approximate number of animals who have been killed for human benefit while you were watching...
...animals, who are being killed in the Czech Republic right now.
How high this number will be in the coming days depends on each of us.