More news of unfathomable animal abuse from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organization (PETA) and this time it’s abuse of turkeys at ConAgra Foods, Inc., one of North America’s largest packaged foods companies.

Between April and July, 2006, PETA undercover investigators worked as “live hangers”—the people who receive live birds and shackle them for slaughter—at a Butterball turkey plant in Ozark, Arkansas. PETA’s investigators witnessed despicable acts of cruelty to animals that would horrify any kind person. This one plant abuses and kills approximately 50,000 birds each day.

There’s a video available. But I’m not going to watch it. Just yet. It’s late. And I’m scared. The last time I watched a PETA video, I was sick, I cried, I couldn’t sleep. Even reading about this stuff has made me nauseaous. I feel very sick.

Can this really be true?

An odd question.

How can this be true?

This:

extreme abuse of turkeys—deliberate defilement, incidents in which workers gleefully tortured birds for “fun,” and other indecencies almost too horrible to mention:

On April 13, one worker showed how he could paralyze birds by repeatedly punching their necks.

On May 3, another worker swung a live turkey like a baseball bat against a metal bar, smashing the bird’s head and spraying blood everywhere.

On May 8, one worker laughed out loud as he crushed a turkey’s skull with the heel of his boot.

On July 13, two workers attempted to decapitate a live turkey by twisting her neck and pulling her head through a hole in her enclosure.

“The question to ask should not be: Do we have something in common — reason, self-consciousness, a soul — with other animals? (With the corollary that, if we do not, then we are entitled to treat them as we like, imprisoning them, killing them, dishonoring their corpses.) I return to the death camps. The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said, ‘It is they in those cattle-cars rattling past.’ They did not say, ‘How would it be if it were I in that cattle-car?’ They did not say, ‘It is I who am in that cattle car.’ They said, ‘It must be the dead who are being burnt today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my cabbages.’ They did not say, ‘How would it be if I were burning?’ They did not say, ‘I am burning, I am falling in ash.’

“In other words, they closed their hearts. The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy. that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object, the ‘another,’ as we see at once when we think of the object not as a bat (‘Can I share the being of a bat?’) but as another human being. There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

JM Coetzee The Lives of Animals

ConAgra’s slogan is this:

The right kind of food company.

right: in accordance with what is good, proper, or just: right conduct. Wrong. They’re wrong. They: Current members of the board of directors of ConAgra are: David Batchelder, Mogens Bay, Howard Buffett, Stephen Butler, John Chain, Steven Goldstone, Alice Hayes, W.G. Jurgensen, Mark Rauenhorst, Carl Reichardt, Gary Rodkin, Ronald Roskens, and Kenneth Stinson. [From Wikipedia.org]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture refuses to protect birds in its enforcement of the only federal law designed to protect animals at slaughter, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA).