Imagine a building, like a large shed. Inside the shed are cages. Each cage is four feet tall, four feet wide, and eight feet deep. The cages are packed tightly, and stacked vertically. Within each cage are ten humans. There are more than six thousand cages. The humans are all grotesuqely obese, and they have never seen daylight. Each human's fingernails and toenails have been burned off and all of their teeth excised. Their eyes are swollen, their skin is raw with infections, their ears are necrotic, and their arms and sternums are misshapen and broken. The men are raped for their sperm and the women are raped in order to make them pregnant. The mothers have not seen their children since they bore them. Nearby, their newborn children are conveyed living and wailing into a bladed maw where they are shredded into a soup to be fed to the adult humans. Humans that survive to maturity are delivered in vehicles, enveloped in oppressive darkness and starved for days, transported to other buildings where they are murdered, often hung upside down, their throats cut, and dead by exsanguination. The humans who resist being dragged from the vehicles and to the slaughter have electric prods shoved into their faces and rectums. Once dead the corpses are washed in a bath of water, chemicals, feces, and flavoring, and they are neatly packaged then distributed to well-lit supermarkets. There the corpses wait to be bought and eaten by beings vaguely aware of but not meaningfully concerned with where the corpses originated from.
Imagine there are more than two hundred thousand of those sheds in the United States alone.
For farmed animals this is not a hypothetical. It is an unexaggerated reality.
All of the crimes that humanity has perpetrated against itself - hatred, violence, murder, genocide - pale in comparison to the evil that humans visit upon other species. Worldwide, an estimated one hundred and fifty billion living, thinking, feeling beings are murdered by animal agriculture every single year, or four hundred million each day. The amount of suffering that those living, thinking, feeling beings are subjected to before they are killed for the taste of their carcasses is inconceivable and unquantifiable. To say that the animals tormented and murdered are not so different from the pets we share our homes and our lives with is inadequate: For neither are they so different from ourselves.
Factory farming is evil. That animal agriculture was ever allowed to exploit non-human animals on the industrialized scale that it does today is evil. That factory farming has continued so long to be the status quo, that it has faced a minimum of opposition, is evil. That it shows no signs of abating, that so many people are so unconcerned with the acts committed in the name of their appetites, is evil.
Do not contribute to that evil.
Bibliography
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