Dan Noyes and San Francisco's ABC I-team aired a superb report last night, Monday May 5, on an egg farm investigation.
You can watch it on line at:
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/iteam&id=6123922
and please post a comment on that page.

I urge anybody who doesn't quite understand why animal advocates don't eat eggs to take a look. It is stomach turning, but as Gretchen Wyler used to say, "We must not refuse to see with our eyes, what they must endure with their bodies."

Here are some of the quotes from the activist in the report:

"In six weeks, I saw so many instances of cruelty to the birds and neglect ....
It is impossible to have any degree of decent animal welfare at all in a battery cage operation."

" It was very common for the birds' necks or wings to get caught in the wire of the cages and a lot of the workers would just keep shoving or hitting the bird to try and push them in as fast as possible."

"When you have birds that have been there for two years, they look like absolute hell, they're missing most of their feathers, their covered in wounds. You see a lot fewer birds per cage because so many of them had died off."

Dan Noyes tells us:
"The activist also caught a manager on video not doing an effective job of wringing one hen's neck. The bird was still alive minutes later.
"He saw a worker stomping another hen.
"'As he's stomping on her, she's reacting to him stomping by trying to struggle and keeps flapping her wings and there were manure pits below those individual cages that were filled up with water, so he kicks her underneath an egg belt and she drowns in the manure water,' said the activist."

The report includes video footage of all of the above.

The coverage comes as California gears up for a ballot initiative that would ban cruel confinement systems including battery cages. It is so important that news teams hear how much their viewers, or their web viewers appreciate this kind of coverage of animal issues. Please, please, thank Dan Noyes and the I-team. Go to
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/feature?section=resources&id=5792275

Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts if you do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line. If somebody forwards DawnWatch alerts to you, which you enjoy, please help the list grow by signing up. It is free.)

Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com to read advance reviews of Karen Dawn's new book, "Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals" and watch the fun celebrity studded promo video.