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”.
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