With the Easter and Passover holidays fast approaching, people around the world are looking forward to celebrating religious traditions and reconnecting with loved ones. This time of atonement, renewal and redemption is a wonderful opportunity to show compassion for animals - especially those who are subjected to intensive confinement, painful mutilations, and merciless deaths in factory farms, hatcheries and slaughterhouses.Although many people look forward to brightly colored eggs and baskets filled with sweets, Easter is no treat for egg-laying hens who have the ends of their beaks painfully seared off and are crammed into tiny wire "battery" cages to produce eggs for human consumption. As exposed by MFA's investigation of Hy-Line Hatchery, the largest hatchery for egg-laying breed chickens in the United States, male chicks are considered worthless by the industry since they can't produce eggs and don't grow large or quickly enough to be raised profitably for meat. Consequently, the egg industry routinely kills hundreds of millions of unwanted male chicks each year by tossing them into grinding machines while they are still alive and sensible to pain.
Thankfully, celebrating a humane holiday is as easy as vegan Easter pie. Consider cutting ties with the cruel egg industry this year by adopting kind and creative alternatives to using eggs for your Easter celebration.
- Offer an animal-friendly Easter egg hunt that kids will love by filling colorful plastic eggs with goodies like little toys and non-dairy chocolates.
- Instead of dyeing eggs, try painting wooden or ceramic eggs, making paper-mâché eggs with balloons, or decorating oval-shaped sugar cookies. The possibilities are endless!
We can also help farmed animals simply by leaving them off our plates. Often the centerpiece of Easter meals, pigs are intelligent and sensitive animals who are denied everything that is natural to them on pig factory farms. Pregnant pigs are commonly confined to metal stalls too small for them to lie down comfortably or even turn around. Mercy For Animals' investigation into Country View Family Farms revealed the common industry practice of workers castrating piglets by ripping out their testicles with their bare hands, cutting off piglets' tails with dull pliers, and tattooing pigs by repeatedly hitting them with metal-spiked mallets.
Be sure to sample meat alternatives (like holiday Tofurky roasts) and visit ChooseVeg.com for hundreds of recipes to make your Easter meal meatless and delicious. If your family observes Passover, take a look at these Passover menus and tips on creating a vegan Sedar plate. Thank you for giving farmed animals hope by making mercy for all animals a vital part of your feasts and festivities this year!
