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A filmmaker has shared shocking footage of factory farms captured by a camera attached to a drone.
Mark Devries, who works as Special Projects Coordinator, Investigations for vegan charity Mercy for Animals, directs short-form documentaries about factory farming and animal rights.
He is known for conducting the world’s first drone-based investigation of factory farming.
Deceptive
Writing about what his filming has uncovered, he says: “The animal agriculture industry spends millions on deceptive advertising to persuade consumers that farmed animals roam freely on bucolic pastures.
“But I’ve been piloting drones over animal agriculture facilities for several years, and the video I’ve captured tells a far different story.
“Nearly all animals raised and slaughtered for food in the U.S. live in factory farms – facilities that treat animals as mere production units and show little regard for the natural environment or public health.
“Instead of creating widgets, these factories confine, mutilate, and disassemble animals who feel pain and pleasure just like our dogs and cats.”
Crowded
According to Devries, aerial views of the first factory farms he filmed did not capture ‘grass and rolling hills’, but windowless buildings made of metal.
He said: “Each confined thousands of intelligent, sensitive pigs who spent their lives on concrete floors in crowded pens.
“The footage also reveals what appear to be red lakes but are in fact giant, open-air cesspools. Waste falls through slats in the pigs’ concrete flooring and is flushed into these massive pits, which sometimes have the surface area of multiple football fields.
“To lower the levels of these cesspools, many facilities spray their contents into the air where they turn into mist and drift into neighboring communities.”
Health
Devries writes about the impact these farms have on local people, saying this practice of spraying cesspit contents into the air ‘has been associated with spikes in blood pressure among community members and increased asthma symptoms among nearby schoolchildren’.
He adds: “I spoke with neighbors who described walking outside and falling down in their own front yards because the stench of these factory farms made it so difficult to breathe.”
Responsibility
According to Devries, there is one effective way to stand up against this system.
He says: “Drones have put to bed the myth of Old MacDonald’s farm. Armed with the truth, we must take responsibility.
“The practices exposed only exist because people purchase products of factory farms.
“Each of us has the power to stand up and vote against this industry by simply leaving animals off our plates.”
READ MORE:
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