My Experience as an Investigator: The Testimony of Ariel Nessel

My name is Ariel Nessel.
I’m here in India because I was
invited to join Animal Equality
for their investigation into
how animals are raised here
for the production of meat,
dairy and eggs,
as well as to bear witness
to the suffering
of what is conventionally
known as animal agriculture.
At some of the
facilities we went to,
the animals didn’t really die,
they just suffered to death.
They suffered from
the ammonia in the air
that was eating
at their lungs;
from the genetics they had been
chosen through that made them grow
much more quickly than
their bones could allow
and inclined heart
attacks as babies.
They suffered through watching
the deaths of those around them;
They suffered from the
separation from their moms;
They suffered through
the pain that comes
from not being able to
express any basic need.
There are more vegetarians
I believe in India
than in the rest of
the world combined.
And there’s an aversion here
towards eating cows
- they see cows as sacred - and I
find it to be a very beautiful thing.
That’s beginning to change
as the country "modernizes".
But the converse of that is
that if you just see the cow as sacred
but not the chickens, and
you just eat chickens,
you’re probably eating a
hundred times more animals
than if you were eating cows.
So what you see here, which is a
much smaller scale than others,
is a large shed with
thousands of chickens in it.
And in about 8 weeks,
they’ll be fully grown, and at the point,
they’ll be slaughtered for food.
So these animals, their whole
life - their entire life -
is worth less than
$5 to someone.
I wanted my friend Amruta to
show me these farms in India.
When we see the entire cycle of
production of chickens in India,
it’s more or less similar to what
happens in countries like the US.
They’re fed hormones; they’re
fed antibiotics as growth promoters.
They’re handled in
the most cruel manner.
They’re not fed the right kind of food or
the right kind of veterinary treatment.
Sometimes there’s no
veterinary treatment at all.
There are a lot of other
cruel and illegal practices
- they’re slaughtered
in roadside shops
which is completely illegal
and needs to be stopped.
It’s strange to be visiting India to
investigate the ways that animals
are raised for food here.
In the system that’s growing
here of factory farming and a diet
that is more and more
becoming meat centric,
from a country that originated
the vegetarian diet
and brought us the practice of Ahimsa,
that is now copying my country’s practices
of ultra-confinement of animals, of increased efficiency in the way we treat animals
in the production of these foods,
and of a diet that is grossly
overweighted towards eating
meat, eggs, and dairy.
These were the perfect
conditions for bacteria to thrive
and for diseases
like salmonella to take root.
India is considering banning
these cruel confinement practices
known as battery cages.
Factory farming has no
place in a civilized society.
I could relate to their suffering.
When we can feel as they feel
then we become compassionate.
I shared my experience
with five people today.
I told them how hens are
kept confined in battery cages
for one and a half to two
years in horrific conditions.
We exploit them and make them
go through extreme pain and suffering
just so that we could get their eggs.
After seeing all this,
I felt that I should not consume eggs.
So if cows are held to be sacred,
and this is how they live,
as a creature that is so
worthy of consideration,
what does that say about
how we treat creatures
that aren’t considered sacred.
The moment I went to the farm,
I had seen all of these animals
and how they are treated
and the conditions
- the process of all these dairy products -
literally shocked me a lot.
I was completely blindfolded
with that process
- how it comes - and to see them
imprisoned, which really shocked me a lot.
This calf is, we were just told,
15 days old and they don’t feed it.
Because of that, it will
die in a couple days.
It’s interesting because what they won’t
do is send their cows to slaughter
because they think
that’s really bad
but they’ll tie up a baby cow
to slowly starve to death.
I asked a dairy owner what his
favorite part of the job was
and he said
"serving the animals."
Ironically, just a few feet way,
there were some stuffed animals.
These were baby calves that had
recently died and he had cut off their legs
and filled them with hay and
put them next to their mothers
in hopes of inclining their mothers
to produce more milk
thinking their
baby was still alive.
Some of the cows are in extreme pain.
They want to be free.
It's really sad to see that
they have no freedom.
Nowadays cows are being
exploited for their milk.
In earlier days this
was not the case.
In Indian culture, cows are
considered sacred and worshipped.
Earlier they used to
be part of the family.
Our ancient sages
revered cows as a mother.
However, later when the cow was
commodified, people became greedy for profit.
Wherever there is greed
there is exploitation.
Nowadays as people are only
thinking about consumption,
the cow has gotten
separated from the family.
People are still aware of
the holy status of the cows
but in reality some people
don’t treat them that way.
We’re at a fish market, the largest
fish market in Hyderabad.
Usually the way people
like to buy their fish here
is they have it alive just enough
to prove that it’s fresh.
So they pack it in ice
and the fish remarkably
can stay breathing in very small
amounts of water when it’s really cold.
As you walk through the market
and you saw the water
that was being used to clean
the fish was contaminated
with what looked
like in cases like feces,
the bodies of other dead fish
that long ago had disseminated
under the fish that were
laying on the ground.
It’s very easy to be desensitized
to the pain of fish.
They don’t look like us,
they don’t move like us.
We can’t discern their emotions; they don’t speak in a way that we can follow.
But when you see a live fish
being held down by a child
who didn’t know any better
and slightly beat it
but not at all close to being killed
and then skinned alive,
you really get to see how a
problem this indoctrination
we have into animal
agriculture is.
Visiting these places brings immense
gratitude to me for the investigators.
At one point, our safety
was in great danger
and I realized these investigators
go through this almost every day.
At one point as we were
walking through a slaughterhouse
filled with hundreds of men in every
direction grabbing sheep and goats by the ears,
by the legs, hoisting them
up and slaughtering them.
It became clear to us that they were murmuring,
saying things like “they’re shooting YouTube.
They’re going to post
something on WhatsApp.”
And so there was this difficult
decision we had to make
- how much longer could we capture
the footage to disclose what
was really go on there and how much
longer could we stay there
until our safety was
at great risk.
We took a few more minutes of
footage and we could hear
what was going on around us
thankfully from our translator
and we got out of
there just in time.
Blood on the floor,
animals fighting for lives,
other animals
looking on in horror
as to what awaited
them next.
Mahatma Gandhi said "The greatness
of a nation and its moral progress
can be demonstrated by
the way it treats its animals."
Looking at the way my country, the United States,
and the country of India treats its animals,
greatness is not something
I’d use to describe it.
I think we collectively
need to open our eyes
because as an Indian, I don’t
know even - you know -
I have been so many times in these kinds of farms or animal husbandry
I have seen lots of people to see this
as a livelihood, but underneath
I was missing this suffering.
So how we can participating
or joining to just be aware,
or just waking up our eyes.
Animals suffer silently.
They live their lives
by the laws of nature.
They can’t fight for their rights
and are at the mercy of humans.
They are part of nature and
if we disturb nature’s balance
then our future will
be disturbed as well.
Our nature is our future.
All the elements including animals,
trees, water, etc is nature.
It’s very clear to me which one
those practices, those ways of eating,
support the world I want
my children to grow up in;
support the way I want
human’s hearts to grow in.