Toronto Pig Save is releasing footage of activists taking temperatures with a digital thermometer inside pig transport trucks stopping at the long lights at Lakeshore and Strachan (near the Exhibition’s Prince’s Gates) during Thursday’s heat wave.
On Thursday, July 21, 2011, Toronto experienced “record hot temperatures” which hit 38 degrees Celsius and well over 40 with the humidity index. If being in the sun is unbearable, imagine what it is like to be a pig stuck in a transport truck in crowded conditions, dehydrated with no water for the entire trip, and standing or lying on feces, which release ammonia fumes and lacerate the lungs.
Later that same afternoon, activist then held a protest at Toronto’s Quality Meat Packers on 677 Wellington Street West, where pigs are unloaded with rattle paddles and electric prods.
Toronto Pig Save is also releasing graphic footage of the “kill floor” at Quality Meat Packers taken at 6 a.m. on Friday, July 22 — the day after the heat wave. Many of the suffering pigs on the transport trucks are likely in this footage, which shows pigs — in a brutal fashion — being forced into a carbon dioxide gas chamber with hard-wired electric prods. A couple of meters away, they come out stunned from a gondola-like structure and then have one of their legs shackled as they are led upside down up a shaft — later to be bled and “butchered.”
The mission of Toronto Pig Save is to “make slaughterhouses have glass walls,” including QMP, Toronto’s downtown pig slaughterhouse. QMP kills 6,000 pigs a day (30,000 pigs a week). This efficient industrialization of mass killings is grossly unjust for the pigs and the workers alike.
Toronto Pig Save is an animal rights, pro-labour group in support of a just transition towards a food economy that is organic, local, whole-grain, and plant-based — that is, vegan.
Video production, Anita Krajnc (co-founder Toronto Pig Save) with special thanks to Caroline Audet.
For more information, visit Toronto Pig Save‘s website.
