Last week, members of Mexico’s congress officially introduced a bill that would make the slaughtering of an animal who had not been properly stunned, illegal. If passed, it will be the first legislation of its kind in Mexico, which reportedly raises approximately two billion farm animals per year.
The history-making move was made in response to the overwhelming international furor generated from one of the “most harrowing and disturbing investigations ever conducted by Mercy For Animals,” an internationally recognized non-profit animal advocacy organization that is dedicated to preventing cruelty to farmed animals and promoting compassionate food choices and policies.
The gut-wrenching video, which was secretly filmed at government-owned-and-operated slaughterhouses across Mexico, shows “cows and pigs violently kicked and beaten, painfully shocked with electric prongs in their faces and eyes, stabbed repeatedly and left to choke on their own blood and vomit, and even cut open while still conscious and able to feel pain.”
Horrified animal activists, including Mexican film and television star Eugenio Derbez, who was recognized by Variety in 2014 as the most influential Hispanic male in the world, demanded that the Federal Government of Mexico send a clear and unwavering message that animal cruelty will not be tolerated; stating that it is “our moral obligation to protect all animals, including those raised and killed for food, from needless misery and suffering.”
Derbez, who narrated the shocking video, preluded a 2016 petition to put an end to these appalling practices with an impassioned plea.
“If you’re like me, you care about animals and you don’t want them to be abused. But what’s happening inside Mexican slaughterhouses will shock and disgust you,” he wrote explaining that he had teamed up with Mercy For Animals after watching some of the most upsetting footage of animal cruelty he had ever seen. “This is disgusting and simply unacceptable. In Mexico, the law requires animals to be rendered insensible to pain before being slaughtered, but this is not happening. Slaughterhouses are breaking the law.”
“As a Mexican citizen and animal advocate, I am outraged. If you help me, I believe we can end this horror,” he implored.
Dip. Javier García (PRD), Dip. René Cervera (Movimiento Ciudadano), Dip. Alejandra Gutierrez Guajardo (PAN), Dip. Laura Esquivel (MORENA), Dip. Vidal Llerenas Morales (MORENA), Dip. Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo (PRD), Dip. Verónica Delgadillo (Movimiento Ciudadano), Dip. Salvador Zamora (Movimiento Ciudadano) and Dip. Federico Döring (PAN) paid heed to the outrage incited by the graphic video, putting forth the bill that would levy “severe penalties on slaughterhouses and workers who fail to render cows, pigs, sheep, and goats unconscious before killing them.”
While undoubtedly a huge step in the right direction, Mercy For Animals strongly advises that “the best way to protect farmed animals from needless cruelty and suffering is to leave them off our plates altogether and switch to a delicious and compassionate plant-based diet.”
Source: Mercy For Animals, Eugenio Derbez
