An exposé reveals the brutal reality for baby farm animals in Australia and urges readers to choose compassionate, plant-based alternatives.
When kids’ TV shows depict baby animals on farms, they’re always happy. Pigs snuggling with their mums, calves drinking from their mothers’ teats, and baby chickens nestling under their mother hen’s wing.
But the reality for young animals in the food industry is far more grim: whirring blades, mechanised sorting systems, and cold steel machines where warm mothers should be.
No matter what welfare labels are slapped on the products of cruelty, all paths from living being to packaged product are littered with cruel abuse, cold automation, and acts so heartless, we’d never accept them if dogs were the victims.
Baby chicks being sorted like mail
To satisfy Australia’s immense appetite for animal flesh, female animals are exploited en masse. The resultant babies are quickly fed into the same machine as their mothers, repeatedly forcibly bred, locked in windowless barns, and slaughtered at a fraction of their natural lives.
During this investigation, a conveyor belt broke, crushing and killing many chicks.
Newly hatched chickens ground up alive
Similar sorting procedures are routine in the egg industry, where male chickens, who can’t lay eggs, are considered waste and disposed of shortly after hatching.
Peeping for their mothers, chickens as young as one day old are sent down a lonely conveyor belt toward sharp, rotating blades, where they are blended, alive.
This happens in all egg systems, even those that claim to be “free range”.
Cows sucked dry while their babies die
Just like humans, mother cows carry their babies for nine months before giving birth, and then, if given the chance, nurse their babies for up to a year.
In the dairy industry, though, they’re denied this chance because their babies are taken from them within a week of birth so that humans can take the milk designed for the newborns instead.
Metal troughs, not fields of grass
If you believe labels like ‘grass-fed’ mean that the animals who die for beef spend their whole lives romping in green fields, you need to, well, touch grass.
Over 80% of cattle killed for their flesh in Australia are “finished” on feedlots, giant intensive outdoor factory farms where cattle are left without any enrichment and fattened up for slaughter.
There, cows are confined to pens of up to 300 individuals for up to 600 days and fed a grain mix that is wholly unnatural to them. This grain is delivered via truck and poured into troughs via a chute. The animals can only stick their heads through the bars that hold them to eat.
In early 2025, World Animal Protection released a report outlining how Australian feedlots breach every one of the ‘Five Domains’ established for animal welfare .
You can be the change you want to see
From forced inseminations to manipulate motherhood, to the gas chambers before animals’ throats are slit, there’s nothing natural about eating meat, eggs or dairy, and resisting this cruelty is an act of compassionate rebellion.
You can do more than just rage against the machines that confine, abuse and kill clever, gentle and sensitive animals – you can help shut down the system of oppression, just by going vegan!
Original source: https://www.peta.org.au
https://www.animalagricultureclimatechange.org/motherhood-inside-a-factory-farm/
