By Lynn Gallagher, Solon
With industrial animal agriculture, animal husbandry has been replaced by animal science. The animals are treated like machines. From the moment they are born, until they die, we take from these animals everything that would make their lives worth living. Their existence is nothing but misery.
Ruth Harrison, author of Animal Machines, understands: “In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.”
Unbelievably, it gets worse. The animal industry is now trying to “normalize” mass killing using ventilation shutdown. This has been used to kill pigs during the COVID pandemic when there was a back-up at slaughterhouses. It is now being use to kill chickens and turkeys due to bird flu. Ventilation is shut off to the confinement building and steam is piped in to force the animals into heatstroke. They slowly roast to death.
Articles about this “depopulation” often discuss the consequences in terms of higher prices for eggs or for chicken, turkey or pig flesh. The consequences for the animals are ignored. Industrial animal agriculture brings to mind the concept of the “banality of evil.”
Is our society going to accept all of this? Are you?
