Letters to the Editor

"Hog farms are about more than just ham and bacon," in the March 22 edition of the Daily Journal is very aptly titled. These "farms" are in fact about cruelty to animals on a massive scale.

Breeding pigs are imprisoned in stalls so narrow that the intelligent, sensitive animals are not even able to turn around. The only time they are removed from these gestation crates is when they give birth. Mothers are soon separated from their babies who are fattened up for a few months before being slaughtered, while the mothers are impregnated once again and shoved back into their barbaric pens.

These social animals are forced to live solitary lives, and their stress and frustration leads to continual neurotic behavior such as biting of cage bars. Bruising, joint problems and injuries are common, and after they are worn out from the brutal cycle of producing litter after litter after litter, they are shipped off to meet a violent death at a slaughterhouse.

Yes, hog farms ARE about more than just ham and bacon. They are shameful examples of inhumanity and lack of compassion toward defenseless animals.

Barb Lomow

Eugene, OR

Please do chicken right

Editor,

The time has come for Kentucky Fried Chicken to take the initiative in the poultry industry and demand that the chickens being raised for their fast food chains are treated in a more humane manner.

Chickens are very gentle birds and are probably the most abused animals on the face of the planet. Today in factory farms and slaughterhouses across the country they suffer any number of cruelties, having their sensitive beaks seared off with hot blades, being crammed in a tiny cage along with the decomposing corpses of other chickens (each bird lives in the amount of space equivalent to a standard sheet of paper). They routinely suffer broken bones from being bred to be top heavy, from callous handling (workers roughly grab birds by their legs and stuff them into crates) and from being shackled upside down at slaughterhouses.

They also die in huge numbers because of long journeys in extreme weather. Chickens are often still fully conscious as their throats are cut or when they are dumped into tanks of scalding hot water to remove their feathers. When they're killed, chickens are still babies - not yet two months old - out of a natural life span of 10 to 15 years.

It is just not acceptable that the more than 700 million chickens raised each year for KFC are being routinely abused in this manner just because they are used for food. Please write KFC and ask it to improve its standards for the treatment of chickens.

Karen R. Hansten

Burlingame

Embarrassed? Try brown armbands

Editor,

It's not just that I disagree with the current administration. I'm outraged. And I'm downright embarrassed to talk to anyone from another country. I'm embarrassed to have a president so arrogant, so dishonest, so hawkish, that in three years, he has nearly destroyed any good relations we had before he took office, and worsened those that were already bad.

I find myself apologizing to my foreign friends both in this country and abroad while trying vainly to explain the sheer idiocy and illogic of the current administration's policies.

So this April 1, April Fools Day, I am joining tens of thousands of others who are wearing brown armbands or ribbons to signify the bull- flowing down from Washington.

Tracy McCullough

San Jose