Right now, a calf is crying out.
He is crying for his mother whom he was separated from several minutes ago, before being hit and kicked so that he’d get on a transport truck. The two will never see each other again. He will be fed a fattening, sickening diet for a few months, before being transported in bone breaking conditions to a slaughterhouse, where he is dangled from one foot, stunned, and stabbed in the neck. The place will smell like blood and death and fear.
His mother will be repeatedly held down, forcefully impregnated, then she will give birth, her babies will be stolen, she will be milked, and the cycle will repeat. Soon enough, she will be slaughtered, having known nothing more than sexual abuse, heartbreak, and pain.
Right now, a baby male chick is being dropped into a blender just because he is male. Because male chickens cannot lay eggs, they are seen by the industry as an expendable byproduct and ground up on their first day of life. His fate is shared by around 6 billion baby male chicks every year, roughly the number of people alive today.
Right now, a piglet is being slammed headfirst against concrete. His skull cracks, brains and blood leaking out, turning the snow scarlet. This is perfectly legal and is considered by the industry to be humane. Other pigs are choking and spluttering in gas chambers and getting scalded to death by 150-degree steam over the course of an hour. It’s worth thinking about what it would be like to undergo such an experience.
Right now, a chicken is locked in a cage. She’ll spend nearly her entire life in that cage, not even able to turn around. Her beak will be sliced off with a knife. Her legs will be injured from constantly pressing against the metal. She’ll break bones multiple times. The only time she sees the sun will be when she’s sent off to be slaughtered.
Right now, a lobster is being boiled in a pot; a turkey is being held down and impregnated; a lamb is being castrated; a fish is being suffocated; a shrimp’s eyes are being crushed; and billions of other animals are screaming in agony and terror. Only 110 billion people have ever lived, and yet we kill around 80 billion land animals every year, along with trillions of sea creatures. They are dredged up from the depths of the sea and left to suffocate on a boat.
We claim to be a society of animal lovers. We condemn China for eating animals while they’re still alive. We condemn hunters for shooting animals who are peacefully grazing in the fields. We condemn people who hit and kick dogs. And yet what we do as a society—to the roughly 99% of consumed animals who are factory farmed—is far crueler. If someone did these things to a dog, they’d be hauled before a jury for violating animal cruelty laws. And yet we routinely do this to a population greater than the number of people who have ever lived and no one bats an eye.
We say that we oppose cruelty and that we stick up for the rights of the meek and vulnerable. Yet there is scarcely a better example of abuse of the innocent than what goes on in factory farms, where animals who have committed no crime are starved and caged and gassed by the billions. If we inflicted these indignities on any human, no one would hesitate to call this torture.
So cruel is the industry that it must operate in the dark. Politicians pass ag-gag laws that make it illegal to record acts of animal cruelty. How cruel must an industry be to spend billions of dollars lobbying for laws that make it illegal to film what they do? When investigators go undercover, they find animals being hit, kicked, and punched; they find animals living for weeks next to rotting corpses; they find cows being bulldozed by a forklift; and they find myriad other cruelties so grotesque that millions of people demand reform. It is no surprise that the industry does not want this to get out.
The myth that we are told as children is that animals spend their days in humane little barns that dot the countryside. The reality is that virtually no animals spend their time in such conditions. Instead they spend their days castrated and caged—unable to turn around or move—before being slaughtered after just a few weeks. Like the Nazis, we have created vast camps dedicated solely to extermination. As Isaac Bashevis Singer notes, “In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”
People get outraged when you refer to what we do to animals as a holocaust. But what else could it be when an industry is dedicated solely to torturing, murdering, and dismantling? When we transport sentient beings across vast distances to kill them in the night? Perhaps if the industry does not want to be accused of carrying out a holocaust, they should not lower millions into gas chambers.
Holocaust is also a useful term to communicate the gravity of the situation. We slaughter, every year, a population greater than the number of people who have ever lived. This isn’t some minor wrong. It is a hideous atrocity—a source of vastly more suffering than every wrong inflicted upon humans.
When a pig is kicked and beaten; when a cow is impregnated and has her baby stolen from her; when a chicken is deposited into boiling water, probably she feels relatively like a baby would in a similar situation. Animals do not understand what is happening to them, just as a baby, dog, or mentally disabled person doesn’t understand what happens when they are abused. But they suffer nonetheless. The brain regions that produce pain in humans exist in every mammal and bird we eat.
Suffering isn’t less bad because the sufferer is less intelligent. When a person is beaten, gassed, or castrated, their entire world is pain. That pain is also present when animals suffer, and it is bad for the same reason. It is bad because it hurts to an unimaginable degree. We inflict on almost every animal we eat—a population more than the number of people who have ever lived—an experience much worse than the worst experience you’ve ever had.
It is easy for this whirlwind of adjectives to blur together in your mind. You hear words like torture, abuse, and so on. But it is worth reflecting on what is really happening. It is worth thinking about the fact that there is a real, actually existent sentient being—one that can feel fear, pain, and love—that is being bludgeoned to death against concrete, and another starved and being kept sleep-deprived to boost egg production, and a third being forced to constantly lie in others’ feces. These beings are, in respects relevant to how much they suffer, like us.
The good news is that there is something that can be done about it. Already activist organizations have freed hundreds of millions of animals from cages. Animal Charity Evaluators, which ranks animal charities by effectiveness, has a new list of highly effective animal charities. I would highly encourage you to donate given that each dollar spent can plausibly spare animals from years in a cage. If a bird was trapped in a cage, and would remain for a year unless freed, it would be worth spending a dime to free it. That is how much good one can do by donating to effective animals charities.
I think you especially ought to donate if you eat animals. If you eat animals, there are more suffering animals in existence because of your actions. By eating meat, you cause more factory farming. It costs around 20 dollars a month to offset your meat consumption. Surely you owe it to the animals to spend a few hundred dollars a year so that you are not responsible for worsening this incomprehensible horrorshow.
The industry runs not just on blood and flesh, but also on excuses. People look away from the ghastly images because honestly confronting what is done to procure one’s meat is too disturbing. If you look away, you don’t have to tell yourself that you know what’s happening. But looking away from the carnage does nothing to stop it. Donating does. And each of the excuses for why our current treatment of animals is acceptable—and why it’s alright to eat them—crumbles in the face of about a minute of reflection. Yet the excuses shamble on zombielike, because it is hard to convince one of a moral judgment that implies his own behavior is wrong.
We say that animals kill other animals, even though we’d never, in any other context, argue that an action is automatically right because animals do it. We say plant-farming kills small animals, even though many more animals die to feed the animals that we eat. We say it’s natural, even though malaria is natural and yet still a bad thing. None of the excuses we give is anywhere near sufficient to justify cows being ripped away from their mothers, pigs being lowered into gas chambers, and chickens having their skin peel off as they’re boiled alive.
We justify this cruelty by saying that our victims are inhuman. But in doing these myriad despicable acts, it is we who become inhuman.