The reason behind cruelty

23.

If you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, it’s hard to imagine the depths of inhumanity on farms and most particularly on factory farms. These places serve to illustrate how far we humans might go to secure a living and make money out of animals. It seems we’ll stop at nothing! To deprive animals of their liberty is bad enough, but to deny them any social life, to restrict their bodily movements so they’re unable to turn around or even lie down is the ultimate cruelty. Pigs kept in individual iron-clad stalls, hens tightly packed into small cages in sheds containing many hundreds or even thousands of similarly imprisoned animals, breathing a fetid air which reeks of ammonia from their excreta. Once you’ve experienced this scale of neglect and animal abuse, you’re reminded of the worst scenes of wartime concentration camps. Yet these are the conditions being suffered today by literally billions of animals every day of their lives. It’s being done this way to make them fatter faster, or to make them more productive and all at the lowest possible cost to the farmer. These chickens, pigs, calves or fish, with their sentience never taken into account, are treated like inanimate objects, like so many cabbages in a field. If this seems like pragmatism gone mad, then the farm operator would cite the need for economic reality - “Every competitor is cutting costs by lowering welfare standards, so to stay in business, welfare must be sacrificed”.