"How Much Cruelty Can You Swallow?" is the theme of 600 anti-meat ads from Chicago-based animal-rights group Mercy for Animals in the city's elevated trains, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

The ads, slated to be displayed for two months, depict cows, pigs and hens in cramped, dirty cages and gestation crates.

"Our goal is not shock value," Nathan Runkle, the group's executive director, told the Sun-Times. "These really are rather mild images of what happens to farmed animals. We haven't shown the gory slaughterhouse photos that I think people would be even more shocked and appalled by."

By Ann Bagel Storck on 7/21/2008