Hiding In Plain Sight: The Horror Of Animal Farming

This isn't what dominion looks like

From beasts we scorn as soulless,

In forest, field and den,

The cry goes up to witness

The soullessness of men.

—M. Frida Hartley

Go to nearly any grocery store in the United States—or most other countries—and you’ll find a veritable array of bits of animal flesh on which to dine. Nearly everyone regards dining on their flesh as perfectly morally permissible, and those who don’t are regarded as fringe extremists. It’s widely thought both that the only reason to abstain from eating animal flesh is an in principle opposition to killing animals and that such a opposition is extreme and radical.

Of course, it isn’t hard to find out how the animals lived before they died—when they were living, breathing creatures, before they were merely chunks of flesh. There are documentaries and detailed articles describing how such creatures are treated; Vox articles and Wikipedia pages; newspaper reports and YouTube videos. Reading these is almost universally disturbing—so disturbing that people cover their ears and shut their eyes, ignoring the mistreatment. And yet even after being convinced that animals are treated in utterly grotesque ways—ways that Satan could only dream of—people continue to eat them.

Animals in the factory farms that make up the vast majority of global meat production and over 99% of U.S. meat production are cramped, castrated, caged, and killed. They have no space to turn around or move, no ability to spend time outside, express their natural behaviors, or ever enjoy life, and are subject to frequent horrifying mutilation—their tails are cut off, bits of their ears are cut off, chickens beaks are cut off. Most live in tiny cages, and the ones who don’t live in barren cramped feces-covered sheds where they can’t move because the sheds are so densely coated with other bored, injured, miserable animals. They’re chronically ill on account of spending their time in feces and ammonia, deficient in vitamins and nutrients, constantly injured by rubbing against the sides of the metal cages that confine them. About a quarter of animals—that’s about 18 billion a year, more than there are humans on earth—die before reaching the slaughterhouses because of the brutality of the conditions.

1 in 4. Factory farms kill animals in just the few months that they’re on the farm at around the rate the Khmer Rouge killed Cambodians—and the Khmer Rouge killed the largest percent of a country of any genocide in history. And that’s, of course, ignoring that of the ones that survive, they all meet their grisly fate at a slaughterhouse—hoisted upside down by one leg (this often breaks their leg and is incredibly painful), before being stunned (the stunning often misses, of course) and then having their throat cut. Slaughterhouses run red with the blood of innocent animals—they smell like blood, misery, and terror.

You don’t have to be a radical who thinks animals and people are the same to recognize that this has to end. You don’t have to think animals are just as important as people to believe that we should treat animals better than the fucking Khmer Rouge treated Cambodians. This shouldn’t be a political issue; it’s a test of our basic humanity, whether we’re willing to make sacrifices for the most vulnerable among us, whether we oppose a massive industry dedicated solely to abusing the innocent—to converting them to burgers.

Maybe there’s an ethical way to eat animals. There’s certainly a philosophical question about it. But clearly the way most people do it right now isn’t that. If, as most people do, you go to a restaurant or store and purchase a thing of meat, without vetting it to make sure it was treated well, almost certainly it endured months of hell before being painfully killed. When you have chicken nuggets, for instance, you’re causing an animal to suffer for about a 5 days per serving (remember, meals often contain more than one serving). If we assume it takes 15 minutes to eat a serving of chicken (fairly conservative), you’re causing the chicken to suffer for about 8 hours per minute that you eat it. Hours of severe and egregious mistreatment for just a minute of enjoyment.

Most people seem to think that it’s wrong to eat foie gras, fatty livers of ducks that had a metal tube shoved down their throat for their entire lives as they were force-fed excessive foods to fatten them up. Because foie gras is particularly cruel, particularly heinous, it’s widely regarded as the sort of thing that decent people don’t eat. The same is true of veal—baby cows whose flesh is made tender by being in a small cage where they can’t move and their muscles don’t develop.

But this same common-sense idea that you shouldn’t eat animals that are really terribly mistreated also implies that 99% of meat consumption is bad. The animals in the dairy and egg and chicken industries are treated as badly as those in the veal industries. The 99% of animals that are factory farming are horrifyingly mistreated in ways that make it clearly immoral to eat them. This doesn’t apply to you if you get your meat from an Uruguayan farmer who treats his animals extremely well, gives them daily baths, and tells them that he loves them. But it does apply to almost everyone—for almost everyone gets their meat from an animal that endured Guantanamo-esque conditions for its entire life.

The biggest lie the meat industry ever got people to believe was that opposing them was extreme—the purview of a few radical groups. It’s not radical or extreme to look upon a sea of barely moving, ill, caged, feces-covered animals and recognize that’s not how we should be raising our food. That’s not what dominion looks like—dominion comes with a duty to care for creatures, not a carte blanche right to torment and abuse them.

Many Christian conservatives recognize this. Matthew Scully, a speechwriter for Trump who worked for Bush, wrote an entire book about the horrifying mistreatment of animals. Whether you’re a liberal or conservative, a Christian or atheist, a Muslim or Jew, you should recognize that what we’re doing to animals is the sickest form of cruelty—a kind reminiscent of past injustices, where those who were weak and vulnerable were mistreated in plain view of everyone. Just as the Romans left the weak and vulnerable babies to die, we leave weak and vulnerable animals to be grotesquely tormented because we like the way they taste.

We all recognize cruelty to animals is wrong. It would be evil to torment pigs for their entire lives and then gas pigs to death because you like the smell. But then so too is it evil to gas pigs to death because you like the taste—particularly when you don’t need to. You don’t have to eat animal products—avoiding them is probably better for your health—and if you do, you don’t have to source them from the cruel, industrial farms. It takes work to find a farm that treats their animals well (and, of course, there may still be issues with paying for animals to be killed even if they lived a good life), but it’s much better than what people currently do.

You can also give to charities that effectively combat animal mistreatment—here’s a link to the top charities. This is unbelievably effective, for ballot initiatives and corporate reforms can save millions of animals from a cruel fate—often saving multiple per dollar spent from various kinds of cruel mistreatment. If you recognize factory farming to be the atrocity it is, then the fact that we can very improve the lives of many thousands of animals should make it at least one of the areas you give to.

Our moral intuitions tell us that we shouldn’t be cruel to animals. The fact that there exist vast juggernauts of animal cruelty, that mistreat more animals in a day than all dog abusers have in the history of the world, is a tragedy and a horror. Those of us who remain complicit in this are doing something seriously morally wrong, and should cease immediately. Factory farming is a test of our decency, a test of whether our conscience outweighs our desire for lower pleasures, a test of whether our opposition to cruelty outweighs our desire for flesh.