As part of the commemoration of World Animal Day on October 4, and more specifically world farm animal day, which is commemorated every year on October 2, Fundación Vegetarianos Hoy launched the Animal Observatory, a platform that seizes the reality of farm animals in Chile.
According to official figures, an estimated 14,683,402 million egg-laying hens are currently confined to battery cages in Chile, and that the same number of male chickens is slaughtered by the same industry. Also that the fishing industry in general produced 44,996 million tonnes of fish during the period 2001-2011.
And that in 2019 alone, 8,281,566 million animals, including cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, were moved alive between regions nationwide.
These figures are part of the results of the work of the Animal Observatory, the new research unit of the Vegetarianos Hoy Foundation, which seeks to make visible the reality in which production animals live daily in Chile and later in the rest of Latin America. To this end, this project investigates, collects and analyzes information about these animals, subsequently making them known to the public and, in those more serious cases, presenting criminal complaints so that acts of mistreatment and cruelty against these animals are punished.
“Thanks to the Animal Observatory, anyone will be able to know how the production animals live in Chile, and at last there will be a counterpart to what the industry is trying to show through advertising. Only a little research revealed that there are numerous abuse problems,” says Ignacia Uribe, CEO of Vegetarians Today.
On the other hand, Cristian Apiolaza Acevedo, lawyer and legal director of the Foundation, explains that thanks to this work, “we also have the opportunity to detect and act legally in those most serious cases of abuse and animal cruelty, as a case of 2018 in which inside an establishment of Sopraval were sacrificed birds beating them with sticks on their heads”.
To check the complaint of this and other cases, you can enter www.observatorioanimal.org
