Food for Thought (no pun intended).

Here are some facts for you to think about as your eating dinner tonight.

At the beginning of this year, the Ward Egg Ranch in California killed approximately 30,000 of its hens that were no longer productive by throwing them into wood chippers.

When Cypress Foods began experiencing financial difficulties at the beginning of last year, the company did not feed more than one million chickens on its farms in Florida and Georgia for more than two weeks. About 20,000 of the birds died, and more than 180,000 of them ended up being euthanized.

So-called "broiler chickens" are selectively bred and given growth hormones so the birds will have especially large thighs and breasts. These practices do create plumper chickens and thus maximize profits, but also make birds so heavy that their bones cannot support them.

Turkeys also are selectively bred and given growth hormones, and as a result often die before becoming 1 year old if they’re not slaughtered beforehand.

Severe overcrowding in pens often causes pigs, which are very intelligent and social creatures, to fight amongst themselves and in some cases kill each other.

To help ensure that pregnant sows will not be harmed, they usually are confined in gestation crates, which prevent them from not only turning around, but lying down comfortably.

Many cows never get out of the barns in which they’re kept.

Since few farms are adequately prepared for emergencies, many animals die during heat waves, natural disasters, power outages and so on.

Every time you bite into a piece of meat, you support animal cruelty.