The images in the following program are very sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals.

Respected viewers, on this week’s edition of Stop Animal Cruelty, we meet Nathan Runkle, the courageous vegan founder and executive director of Mercy For Animals, a non-profit animal advocacy group based in Chicago, USA.

The organization conducts sustained community outreach efforts and effective advertising campaigns to inform people of the exploitation and torture of farm animals and why we must switch to a plant-based diet. Mercy For Animals also performs undercover investigations of factory farms in the US to bring to light the unfathomable barbarism and violence that occurs in the meat, dairy and egg industries on a daily basis.

We focus on protecting farmed animals because this is the area of animal abuse in our society where the largest number of animals are killed and exploited. Over nine billion cows, pigs and chickens in the United States are killed for food every year. If we look at the global level we’re talking about over 50 billion farmed animals!

And each one of these animals are unique individuals with their own personalities and needs and interests. So Mercy For Animals sets out to expose the cruelty that’s taking place in factory farms and in slaughterhouses and inspire consumers to adopt a healthy and compassionate plant based diet.

Why did Nathan Runkle decide to make safeguarding our animal co-inhabitants his life’s work?

I was actually raised on a farm in rural Ohio (USA) and always had a natural affinity for animals. I always cared deeply about their protection and I witnessed a lot of animal abuse growing up and that always felt wrong to me.

When I was 11 years old, I came across information by a local animal protection organization that opened my heart and my eyes to animal cruelty issues on a broader scheme and taught me about factory farming or the industrial animal agriculture systems that are used in this country and across the world where animals are kept in tiny cages and stalls and pens, so small that they oftentimes can’t even turn around, and they can’t extend their own limbs.

I learned about the harsh realities of slaughterhouses and at that young age I felt that this cruelty was not something that I wanted to support. It wasn’t something that I wanted to take place in my name and I became a vegetarian at that young age. And then we formed Mercy For Animals a few years later.

So how old were you when you actually started it?

I was 15 years old when we formed Mercy For Animals. I saw a need for an organization in our local community to work on behalf of farmed animals, these animals being so abused, so intensively confined, having basically no legal protection from some of the harshest abuses. We set out to give these animals a voice and have grown to a national force since then.

There is a reason why factory farms and slaughterhouses keep tight security and do not allow outsiders to view what goes on within their walls. If people were to see the mass murder and obscene torment of innocent beings occurring inside, the consumption of animal products would quickly end.

Really backbone to the advocacy work that we do on behalf of farmed animals is undercover investigations, inside of factory farms, hatcheries, and slaughterhouses. And our investigators go in and they serve as the eyes and the ears for all of us, every consumer.

They go in, they work side by side with people in these factory farms and slaughterhouses for months on end; they risk their personal safety, they give up everything that they know, they go in wired with hidden cameras and they document case after case of routine and systematic animal cruelty and neglect in these facilities.

We have entered seven of the largest egg farms in the United States from coast to coast, and every single time without exception our investigators find just appalling abuse. We’ve been inside of the world’s largest hatchery and inside of poultry slaughterhouses.

Inside of these egg farms our investigators document the standard confinement of these birds, which consist of cages stacked in tiers, lined up in rows, in huge windowless warehouses, where up to 200,000 birds are kept in wire cages that are about the size of a folded newspaper. And anywhere from five to seven birds are crammed into these cages.

They can’t fully spread their wings, they can’t walk, they can’t perch, they can’t dust bathe, they can’t engage in the most natural behaviors. And these birds as a result, they lose their feathers, and they get injuries and infections. Their lives are just filled with the most harsh treatment and exploitation that any of us could imagine.

When they’re about two years old they’re ripped out of their cages and they’re literally thrown into metal kill carts, which are then filled with gas and the birds are killed. This is the reality of modern egg production. This is how 95% of egg laying hens live and die.

On the front end of the egg industry the male chicks which hatch are considered useless. So what happens in the United States every single year is that over 200 million male chicks are disposed of. They’re either thrown away into trash cans while they’re still alive, or as we documented at the world’s largest hatchery, these male chicks are thrown alive into grinding machines.

When Stop Animal Cruelty returns, we will continue our discussion with Nathan Runkle, founder and executive director of Mercy For Animals. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

This is Stop Animal Cruelty on Supreme Master Television, featuring an interview with Nathan Runkle, the vegan founder and executive director of Mercy For Animals, a non-profit animal rights group based in Chicago, USA. The organization was founded in 1999 and has over 35,000 members and supporters.

So what has been the public response to your work?

People are really kept largely in the dark on where their food comes from, and that is intentional. The meat and the dairy and the egg industries spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to convince consumers that farmed animals live happy lives out in open pastures and they come back to the big red barn. But that’s not the case.

The vast majority of farmed animals are intensively confined on factory farms, where they’re unable to move, turn around, and they’re mutilated without painkillers. And when people find out the harsh reality of these systems and the fact that cows, pigs and chickens are being treated as little more than production units and commodities, not as the sentient individuals capable of feeling pain that they are, people feel like they’ve been misled by the meat, dairy and egg industries.

And the more that people learn about these industries the more they see that the treatment that these animals endure is unacceptable and it runs against their most basic needs, and that most people, I believe, are good at heart and they’re compassionate and we’re seeing really a groundswell of people that are starting to reject these industries.

The imprisoned animals are raised under nightmarish conditions, with every aspect of their growth controlled in order to maximize profits, without a thought given to their desperate cries that fill the air asking for mercy.

In many regards these are almost “Frankenstein” animals of what they once were because they’ve been genetically manipulated, they’ve had their feed manipulated, their lighting manipulated, and many of them are injected with growth hormones. So we now see our broiler chickens or meat type birds, going to slaughter when they’re only 45 days old.

And these birds have been bred to grow so large and so fast they are victims of their own bodies. They have crippling leg deformities. They have problems breathing. Many of them have heart attacks. Some studies say that 90% of these birds have problems even walking.

You look at turkeys, they suffer the same sort of problems to the extent that they can’t even reproduce naturally. All of them have to be artificially inseminated. Pigs are artificially inseminated, dairy cows are artificially inseminated and these animals endure those cycles over and over and over again until their bodies can’t take it and they’re slaughtered.

In 2007, Mercy For Animals conducted an undercover investigation of the seventh largest turkey slaughterhouse in the USA. What they found was beyond shocking.

Our investigator gained employment at the facility and worked on the “live hang deck,” which is where trucks come in with the birds in crates. They come from the turkey farms where they live in huge sheds packed wing to wing, living in their own feces in these huge windowless warehouses oftentimes.

And what he documented is they arrive at this facility and the workers take these frightened birds who are flailing and screaming, rip them out by their legs and snap them by their fragile limbs into these moving shackles which take the birds upside down, fully conscious, and still alive through a process. And the first stage after they’ve been slapped into these moving shackles is their heads are taken through a pool of electrified water.

And what this water does is it paralyzes the birds temporarily so that they can’t move and then a rotating blade slits their throat. And the investigation found these birds flailing about, blood all over their feathers, and this form of slaughter is standard.

This is how the eight billion or more chickens in this country and the over 200 million turkeys in this country are killed every single year. So that’s the day to day operations at this facility, subjecting these birds to enormous cruelty.

One of the problems with this slaughter system is that some of these birds will go into the scalding hot feather removal tanks of water while they’re still conscious because their throats either weren’t slit at all or the birds hadn’t bled out or they weren’t dead yet by the time they reached these tanks of water. So some of these birds go into the water while they’re still alive.

We all have the power to end the horrendous scenes we have seen today that are representative of what is occurring all across the world. Please choose to follow a compassionate organic vegan diet as it ensures that animals are spared from being brutalized, exploited and violently killed for food.

Our deep appreciation goes to Nathan Runkle for being a true hero and standing up on behalf of our animal friends. May all animals on Earth soon enjoy free and beautiful lives as a result of the efforts of groups like Mercy For Animals and individuals adopting the plant-based lifestyle.

For more details on Mercy For Animals, please visit www.MercyForAnimals.org or www.ChooseVeg.com

Thank you for being with us on today’s program. Please join us next Tuesday on Stop Animal Cruelty for Part 2 of our interview with Nathan Runkle. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment, after Noteworthy News. May all life always be protected and cherished and receive the blessings of Heaven.

There are several stories of how animals have communicated. Probably one of the first things that I heard, other than my first mare, was some chickens about two days after I started communicating.

Besides being a gifted telepathic animal communicator, Ms. Holly Davis also has expertise in the field of Zoopharmacognosy or the study of animals self-selecting and using specific plants with medicinal properties for treatment of their health conditions.

I've primarily been working with it with my own horses. I've been working with them for about two years now. And we've been making some really good headway with it.

Please watch “Soul to Soul: Telepathic Animal Communicator Holly Davis – Parts 1 and 2,” Friday and Saturday, May 14 and 15 on Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants.