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.

This is an issue that transcends age, gender, background, anything, because everyone has to eat. Everyone has to make food choices. And our food choices have profound consequences, not only on our own bodies and health, but on the environment that we all live in, the one Earth that we all share, and the lives of animals.

Benevolent viewers, on this week’s edition of Stop Animal Cruelty, we feature Part 2 of our interview with 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.

The footage from our undercover investigations really speak for themselves. And these animals are living oftentimes in their own excrement. And these inherent problems with factory farm systems, when you take hundreds of thousands of animals or millions of animals and confine them intensively in any given area, there is bound to be diseases and infections that run rampant, because these are breeding grounds for disease and filth.

These animals are all creating an enormous amount of excrement and urine and oftentimes they’re living in these conditions and especially with egg farms, these birds can develop eye infections, sinus infections, and other sorts of respiratory problems, because they’re constantly, day in and day out, 365 days a year, having to breathe in the ammonia and other sort of toxic fumes that are being created by their feces.

A study by Penn State University, USA found that pigs were able to learn to play computer games with specially adapted joysticks within minutes. Sadly most of our pig friends are treated as if they are not even living beings and eventually cruelly slaughtered.

Another recent investigation that we conducted was at a pig breeding facility and this was in Pennsylvania, one of the largest pig breeding facilities in the country; thousands of sows or mother pigs locked inside of two feet wide metal stalls called gestation crates. And these stalls are so restrictive that the sows can’t turn around, they can’t even lie down comfortably.

They’re kept in these stalls for almost four months at a time and as a result many of these pigs will literally go insane from a lack of physical and mental stimulation. They will bang their heads up against the sides of their cages constantly. And, these are animals that are just as intelligent as dogs and in fact three year old humans and they’re deprived of any stimulation. They can’t do anything but take one or two steps forward or backwards.

He also documented baby piglets at this facility being thrown across the room like footballs at the other workers and them being grabbed roughly by their ears and being thrown to carts. He documented the standard practice of mutilating piglets without a single drop of painkillers.

The male piglets have their testicles ripped out of their bodies, cutting through their skin and nerves without pain relief. Having their tails cut off without any painkillers. These animals squeal in pain and fight in terror as this happens to them. Our investigator also documented sows with untreated infections, prolapsed uteruses, broken bones, just a host of medical emergencies, and these animals were denied any meaningful veterinary care.

And we are led to believe that these sort of conditions are in fact very common and standard in these industries based on the various investigations that we’ve conducted. Our investigator found that the sick or injured piglets at this facility were not treated by veterinarians but in fact they were killed by being literally thrown into gassing carts, where it would take sometimes up to 10 or 15 minutes for these animals to die. They were killed with carbon dioxide, which is painful. It’s acidic for these animals, essentially suffocation.

And he would find that many of these animals would survive the process and then have to be gassed again; it’s extremely fearful and terrorizing for them. And this is the ugly face of intensive agriculture and this is what we’re supporting when we buy pork products.

Globally, over 56 billion land animals are mutilated and murdered each year for food. The loss of life in the oceans is also of unimaginable proportions.

According to the United Nations, in 2005, commercial fishing operations took 90 million tons of fish from the oceans. However this huge figure does not even begin to give one an idea of the true scale of death caused by the fishing industry.

Fish are just as sentient and just as capable of suffering as any land animal is. They have the same capacity to suffer and deserve protection as well. And we’re at a crucial point right now with dwindling populations of fish and this is largely due to overfishing and huge trawler nets which essentially clearcut the ocean of all of their life, sweeping up everyone and everything in their path, because these nets are indiscriminate.

And factory farming is taking place with fish as well. These animals are being confined in crowding concrete troughs and they’re having infections and all sorts of welfare problems as well.

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.

Our investigator also documented birds with broken wings, with cantaloupe size tumors on their bodies. And these are birds that were sent through the slaughter process and potentially going into the human food supply as well. So this investigation shined a bright spotlight on the cruel realities of what takes place behind the closed doors of our nation’s slaughterhouses.

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. Factory farm and slaughterhouse workers are also casualties of a bloody and destructive system. Studies have found that these employees experience higher than average rates of drug addiction, alcoholism, violence, suicide, mental illness and family disharmony as compared to the general population.

They work day in and day out, shackling animals, sending them to their deaths and slitting their throats. It’s a violent place to work and is not only physically dangerous and demanding but it’s also emotionally damaging for the workers themselves. So we see that slaughterhouses are not only one of the most dangerous jobs in the nation to work at, but many of the people that are working there suffer themselves from having to witness so much cruelty and violence on a regular basis.

In many ways the workers in factory farms and slaughterhouses are victims in their own sense. Many of these individuals are undocumented workers who are taking this job out of desperation. There are poor working conditions and these people are oftentimes victims of this out of control industrial farming as well. They’re doing the dirty work that few people want to do.

And these systems are inherently cruel to the animals because you’re raising thousands of animals in intensive confinement, and it’s just simply impossible to provide these animals with any sort of basic care that fulfills their natural needs. And these people that work in these facilities oftentimes become desensitized to what’s taking place there, because they have to, for the sake of their job, participate in this abuse and as a result oftentimes take out their anger and frustration on these animals.

Part of Mercy For Animal’s mission is to help expand people’s love for farm animals. Mr. Runkle now speaks about societal attitudes toward our fellow sentient beings.

In our society, often when people talk about farm animals, it’s in a derogatory way. Somebody that may be lazy or overweight is called a pig, or somebody that is shy or fearful is called a chicken. And we sort of reduced farmed animals to something that we don’t want to be and is negative. But the reality is the more you get to know farmed animals, the more you see that they are every bit as intelligent and sensitive and caring of others of their own species and other species as dogs and cats, which many of us know and love.

And there have been many animal behaviorists, and ethologists that have actually started to study farm animal cognition or learning. And every year more exciting information comes out. So, for example, what they’re learning is that chickens have a language of their own. We now know of over 30 different calls that chickens have. They have different inflections with their way in which they communicate with chickens that they consider to be friends or that they are more intimate with.

Mercy for Animals has saved many victims of the intensive animal agriculture system during the course of its undercover investigations. We asked Nathan Runkle to tell us about one of the animals the group liberated.

One case that I think is particularly telling is of a hen that I actually rescued from a factory farm in Ohio, and this was a bird that was thrown away in a trash can on an egg farm. She was still alive; she was hanging onto her life, she was left to die on top of dozens of other dead birds. And we were there documenting the conditions and I saw this hen look up from atop this pile and we took her out of this bin and took her to veterinarian who treated her and brought her back to health.

And then we moved her on to a wonderful farm sanctuary in Ohio where she is able to live out the rest of her life. She is able to spread her wings and engage in natural behaviors and she has a happy ending. She serves as an ambassador for over 200 million chicks and hens that we have to leave behind in these facilities.

Here are some final thoughts from Mr. Runkle on the unconscionable practice of factory farming and how we can end it.

We vote every time we sit down to eat. Every time that we pay for our food we are paying for a certain form of production and the consequences of that. So we encourage people to use your pocketbook, use your money to vote in line with your values, and to vote for a kinder world, a more sustainable world and if we all started doing that the accumulative effect would just be incredible. We really owe it to our children and our children’s children and future generations to address this issue now before it’s too late.

We applaud Nathan Runkle and the members and supporters of Mercy For Animals who valiantly advocate 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 following the plant-based diet.

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

Thank you for being with us today on Stop Animal Cruelty. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment, after Noteworthy News. May we all awaken now and adopt the life-affirming organic vegan lifestyle to protect the animals, save humanity, and preserve our one and only planet.

In response to disasters or when someone has gone missing, K-9 Search and Rescue of Texas goes into action!

The dog will track or trail the path or the track that the person walked, in order to locate them.

To meet some of the team’s swift and intelligent dogs, join us on “Devoted Canine Heroes: K-9 Search and Rescue of Texas” Saturday, May 22, on Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants.