Horror: Rabbits Cruelly Farmed For Pet Food

This is the truth behind bloody pet food. Do you still want to buy it? Do we have a choice? These white rabbits are born in one meter square cages which they share with 16 others and they die there 80 days later. In terms of space, each rabbit has one A4 sheet of paper to live on all their lives. This is hell. Yet there are lot of people who don’t care and even support this cruelty. That is why it happens.

Many have painful injuries such as ears chewed off, sores on faces, ulcerated paws (due to behavioral problems rabbits chew off the ears of others).

Fungal infections are so bad that the white fur falls off the rabbits through the raised cages as if snow was falling.

Baby bunnies are killed by knocking their heads against the edge of the cage. Some survive this and die in the garbage.

This is intensive rabbit farming in the European Union and the UK imports 300,000 rabbits mostly farmed in cages as described on this page. UK pet food suppliers are part of this horrific cruelty.

These grotesque rabbit farms are in countries such as Greece (shouldn’t be in the EU), Italy, Poland, Cyprus and Czech Republic. In France 99% of rabbit meat (the French like rabbit meat) are farmed intensively without access to the outdoors.

There are over 300 million rabbits like this and it is all legal under EU law (crappy laws). Another total failure of the European Union which is gradually looking a worse and worse institution. This sort of catastrophically cruel farming should have been outlawed ages ago and it has been for chickens in 2012 (but that does not mean that chickens are well treated).

There is no space for the rabbits to stand or hop. The breeding females are in solitary confinement for two years producing a stream of litters. They are pulled from their cages to be artificially inseminated and then thrown back. This is pure horror. How did we, the public, come to accept it? How is it allowed to happen in Europe?

Britain’s 8 million cat owners should be horrified. Many will be. I am.

The information was provided to the Mirror newspaper by (a) Four Paws (b) a French animal welfare group L214 and (c) Compassion in World Farming.

What do the UK pet food suppliers say? They bleat out the usual platitudes and cliches – the sound bites to placate horrified customers such as:

Pets at Home said:

“We have become aware that conditions under which rabbits are bred and reared on farms in Europe fall far short of what we would accept for the rabbits we sell as pets in our stores. So we have decided to stop buying pet food with flavour variants that include rabbit.” (Why didn’t they know abut it before? They must have known.)

Purina (who support animal testing) said they are going to audit all its suppliers! Great. That makes me feel so much better.

Mars Petcare’s sound bite was:

“as a precautionary measure we will reassess the situation with our rabbit suppliers and will make any changes necessary”.

Pet Food Manufacturers Association’s spokesperson said:

“As a responsible industry we are keen to understand more about the current state of farmed rabbit welfare in the EU.

“If there is evidence that poor welfare is commonplace, rather than being an isolated incident, then our members are committed to work with their supply chain to look at how best to improve farmed rabbit welfare.”

Uhmmmm…you didn’t know about this already? Come on guys. Please don’t try and pull the wool over our eyes.

This story is just another example of the lack of integrity in the pet food market. There are other examples and there will be more in the future. Pet food manufacturers and sellers are a rather cynical lot with money on their minds and animal welfare not!

Intensive farming, period, should be banned. Intensive rabbit farming should be banned and the farmers should be criminalised and prosecuted.

Source: Mirror