We didn’t meet Maggie until she was an adult, crammed into a cage on an egg farm, but we know how her story started. Like all egg-laying hens she was born in a hatchery that produces tens of thousands of baby chicks each day. Because male birds don’t lay eggs, they’re of no use to the egg industry. So at just a few days, old Maggie’s brothers were tossed into a giant grinding machine that tore their small bodies to pieces. As terrible as their fate was, Maggie’s was even worse.

While still just a baby, Maggie’s beak was sliced off with a hot blade. She was then stuck into a small metal cage with seven other birds, a cage where she would spend two agonizing years. For her entire life, Maggie had less living space than the size of a sheet of notebook paper. Confining hens in such restrictive cages is standard egg industry practice. While she was only a year old when we met her, Maggie’s feet were already mangled from living on wire mesh flooring. Patches of pink skin covered her back in places where her feathers had fallen out from constantly rubbing against the cage bars. The shed she lived in housed almost 100,000 birds, and the five-foot-high mounds of feces that had built up beneath them made it painful to even breathe. Sadly, Maggie would remain locked in her miserable cage until she was shipped off to the slaughterhouse at age two.

It was during an undercover investigation that we met Sara on a large dairy farm that produces milk for millions of customers across the U.S. and Canada. In the dark shed where she was kept, Sara and her fellow cows were driven into milking booths three times a day. For years, 60 to 140 pounds of milk had been pumped out of Sara every day; eventually, her swollen and infected udder hung so far beneath her she had trouble walking. When she did slip and fall on the feces-coated floors of the shed, workers beat her with whips, chains, and bars to get her to stand up and keep moving.

Like human mothers, cows only produce milk after they’ve given birth. In order to keep her producing, Sara was impregnated over and over again. Just days after each calf was born the baby would be taken away from her. We watched one day as Sara bellowed and cried for hours when her calf was dragged from her side. Any boys she gave birth to were sold to veal farms where they would be chained by the neck in solitary pens. Any girls she gave birth to would soon be turned into new dairy cows. This terrible cycle would continue for Sara until her milk production began to decline when she was about five years old. When that day came, Sara was sent to the slaughterhouse to be killed and sold as low-grade meat.