Avecaust And Mamocaust

Most birds and mammals on earth are currently being tortured for food

It’s a bit hard to get an intuitive sense of just how bad factory farming is.

Like, sure, it’s not hard to read some article describing that we torture and kill lots and lots of animals. That the population of animals we torture and kill every year is much greater than the current population of humans—that every two years, more animals are born, tortured, and killed than humans have ever existed in the history of the world. But even after that, it’s hard to get an intuitive sense of just how utterly mind-bogglingly evil the factory farms are. Even after hearing lots of abstract intellectual arguments for why factory farming is by far the worst thing ever, it’s still sort of hard to believe it.

I propose two new terms. These would help correct our scope neglect, help us grasp, on an intuitive level, the unspeakable agony and evil we are causing. These terms should convey intuitively how revolting it is that we are, every few years, inflicting more suffering on animals than has ever existed in human history. Hopefully, if these terms catch on, one day they will be regarded like the term Holocaust or genocide—as crimes so unspeakably evil that no one should carry them out. But first, some background.

In Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, the main character, Ender, wipes out an entire species of intelligent, sapient, aliens. This was based on a misunderstanding, based on a fundamental failure to grasp the aliens’ abilities. After the aliens are extinct, humanity realizes that their provocation of us was based on a misunderstanding of us, and that in wiping them out, we committed the gravest crime—eradication of an entire species that is, relevantly, like us. That crime—wiping out another intelligent species—is termed Xenocide. Ender is called Ender the Xenocide in subsequent books, and regarded as the worst criminal in history—worse than Hitler, worse than Mao, because he didn’t just kill millions of people; he eradicated an entire civilization, an entire species.

I think Xenocide is a pretty good term. It conveys, on an intuitive level, just how horrible the crime of eradicating the aliens was. The term effectively conveys just how much worse this crime was than anything else. Xeno means other, cide means destroy, so Xenocide means destroyer of the other. It conveys just how horrible humanity’s crime was—that the only other we ever discovered that was like us is now no more, because of our actions.

In the spirit of that, let me propose two new terms that I think convey the horror of factory farming: Avecaust and Mamocaust. Mamo signifies mammals, ave signifies birds, and caust means to burn. It’s what gave the term holocaust it’s meaning; the term conveyed that an entire group of people was sacrificed, given up as a burnt offering.

But what we are doing to animals is not just killing lots of people. Entire classes of animals—birds and mammals—have been relegated mostly to the factory farms. Right now, most birds on the planet are being farmed. Factory farming is not just a small, limited crime, it is why most birds on the planet live miserable lives.

And it’s not just birds. The majority of mammals too are currently being tormented in the factory farms (or at least the majority of mammalian biomass). The kingdom animalia is divided up into various classes. We have taken several of those classes, and decided that they do not deserve to flourish, or live lives that we wouldn’t describe as torture if given to humans. Significant chunks of various kinds of life on earth are no longer around in the wild, having mostly been relegated to the torturous factory farms.

I think that these terms do help convey the scale of the horror. Once you realize that we are literally torturing and killing most birds on Earth and also most mammals; that one species has reduced two other entire classes to mere playthings, beings we torment and abuse and kill when convenient, the horror of what we’re doing begins to sink in. We’re not just committing a small crime here—we are committing the worst conceivable crime against most birds and mammals. If the human afterlife looked anything like the lives that, because of our cruel decisions, most birds and mammals have to endure, we would call it hell.

So humanity’s greatest crime is not any atrocity we committed against other people. Man’s inhumanity to man is a vanishing scintilla compared to man’s inhumanity to animals. We have played God, built hell, and we consign more beings to it every 2 years than there have ever been humans. If an animals’ pain is a thousandth as bad as a person’s pain, then what we are doing to animals is, by far, our greatest crime. Most birds and mammals will never move much, never escape the confinement far crueler than any prison, that leaves sentient, feeling beings living in feces and amonia, unable to ever turn around or experience any joy. Our mamocaust and avecaust will go down in history as the worst things humanity ever did.