Crisis: Factory Farming (& Cruelty To Animals)

If the way we raise animals for food isn't the most important problem in the world right now, it's arguably the No. 1 cause of global warming: The United Nations reports the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. It's the No. 1 cause of animal suffering, a decisive factor in the creation of zoonotic diseases like bird and swine flu, and the list goes on. It is the problem with the most deafening silence surrounding it.

People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.

The film examines the evidence for this confusing tangle of theories, but it ultimately settles one another cause altogether: pesticides... These pesticides aren't intended to kill bees. But, according to filmmakers, around the time bee deaths started being reported, a new type of neonicotinoid-based "systemic" pesticide produced by Bayer Crop Science and other agrochemical companies was deployed by farmers

Consuming dairy products -- milk, cheese, yogurt, sour cream, ice cream, etc. -- is not green and it's not healthy.

We were in Taiji on the first day of the scheduled resumption of the killing season, and the media glare we brought helped ensure that no dolphins were killed. Days later after we had left they captured about 100 dolphins and 50 pilot whales. While the pilot whales were regrettably killed, something unprecedented happened: the fishermen chose about 30 dolphins for captivity, but then released 70 back to freedom, instead of killing them. The fishermen admitted that they did so because of worldwide public outcry, from you and me and many thousands like us...

In Douglas Adams's novel The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, the character Arthur Dent is horrified when a cow-like creature is wheeled to the restaurant table, introduces itself as the dish of the day and proceeds to describe the cuts of meat that are available from its body. The cow has been bred to want to be eaten, and to be capable of saying so. As so often happens with Adams's work, the truth isn't too far behind...

Today is September 1st, the first day of the dolphin slaughter season in Japan. But when I arrived today by bus from Kansai Airport with media representatives from all over the world, the notorious Cove from the movie was empty. There were no dolphin killers in sight.

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon -- circa 2009.

Thrown, dropped, mutilated, and ground-up alive. This is the disturbing reality faced by hundreds of thousands of chicks each day at the world’s largest egg-laying breed hatchery Hy-Line International in Spencer, Iowa.

In The Cove, a team of activists and filmmakers infiltrate a heavily-guarded cove in Taiji, Japan. In this remote village they witness and document activities deliberately being hidden from the public: More than 20,000 dolphins and porpoises are being slaughtered each year and their meat, containing toxic levels of mercury, is being sold as food in Japan, often times labeled as whale meat.