More than 273 million turkeys are raised for food every year in the U.S.; about 79 million of them are slaughtered and eaten for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter.(8,9) Before ending up as holiday centerpieces, these gentle birds spend five to six months on factory farms, where thousands of turkeys are packed into dark sheds with no more than 3.5 square feet of space per bird.(10) To keep the extremely crowded birds from scratching and pecking each other to death, workers cut off portions of the birds’ toes and upper beaks with hot blades and desnood the males (the snood is the flap of skin that runs from the beak to the chest).(11) No painkillers are used during these procedures.

Genetic manipulation and antibiotics enable farmers to produce heavily muscled birds who can weigh 35 pounds in as little as five months, and “their internal organs are noticeably crammed together in the little bit of space remaining for the body cavity,

a stress-induced condition that causes young birds to simply stop eating.

This report estimates that 10,378 million land animals will be killed for food in 2007, including 39 million cows, 121 million pigs, 4 million sheep and goats, 10 million rabbits, 317 million turkeys, 28 million ducks, 9 billion "broilers" chickens and 450 million "layer" hens

The capacity for suffering is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be met before we can speak of rights.

In both the historic and modern views of animal rights, the key point is "sentience," or the capacity to experience pain or pleasur

In the animal rights view, if a being is capable of suffering, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.