Is Industrialized animal farming, the slavery of our generation?(Details.)

I think it will. I have read that pigs in slaughter houses realize what is going to happen to them and freak the f out. Some to the point of having a heart attack. I have tried to be a vegetarian at least three times, and was completely serious, like 3–4 months to a year. Each time I ended up with depression. I had to come to the conclusion that physiologically, I needed to eat animal protein. We all do, our teeth tell the story of what our diets are tuned to be. Nature is a brutal, unforgiving thing and we are a product of it. I try not to think about it too much. Most of my protein comes from eggs and chicken.

I think most pet owners understand, regardless of species, that their little companions have a personality, emotions, and an internal life of their own.

The animals bred in their trillions for meat production are no different.

The vast majority of people seem unaware of the utter brutality of industrial faming, and the horrendous nature of animal slaughter.

Apart from the incredible levels of harm to sentient beings, which should rest very uneasily with anyone who has such ethical concerns. there are other issues:

Meat and dairy production is one of the single largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

It is land inefficient, requiring massive forest clearing. More land is used to grow animal feed than food for humans!

It’s water intensive, and water polluting.

There’s a huge disease risk, as we saw with the recent pandemic, and many regular smaller outbreaks.

Meat is not even particularly good for you. Red meats, and particularly processed meats, increase cancer risk, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. High temperature cooking methods used even in white meats will create harmful compounds.

When it comes to negative externalities, environmental damage, exacerbating global warming, health risks, and the simple morality of it, meat production is arguably about the worst thing possible. And yet it’s massively subsidised.

We have a hugely distorted market in which this awful and inefficient system of food production is overly incentivised and everyone’s dairy and meat products are around a third of their real price.

Due to the opportunity costs of meat production, all your fruit and veg are more expensive than they should be, and people who don’t eat meat are effectively punished for it. It’s frankly an insane system, and the fact there’s been almost nothing done in decades should tell you how comically little interest politicians have in tackling climate change, or promoting public health.

Apart from the perverse incentive structure of unhealthy and damaging foods being far cheaper than they should be, I think the single largest barrier to most people not adopting a plat-based diet or becoming vegans is that plant-based convenience foods are very expensive and very limited depending on where you are.

If you don’t know how to cook well for yourself, or to take the time to find some simple recipes that will work for you, it can be a struggle, which is perhaps what @Blackwater_Park ran into.

I would like to point out that our canines are not evidence of a carnivorous past or some sign of a carnivorous dietary imperative. Many herbivores have much larger ones, and canines are also used to break tough plant flesh. Ours are now pretty small and feeble.

Factory farming may be inhumane and immoral but I think it is a stretch and an insult to call it analogous to slavery which totally dehumanized the enslaved.

it’s not. But it is very untastefull to set equal actual slavery to factory farming. Slavery is still sadly a thing. Slavery is this generation’s slavery

I’m an omnivore, but I try to minimize my carnal intake.
Because of the compassion they practice for nonhuman animals, I regard vegetarians, and especially vegans, as being morally superior to me in that regard.

Respect to you Hawaii_Jake, Kardamom, tinyfaery, and my brother.

@Kropotkin

By red meat, do you mean meat from any mammal?

I made oatmeal with brown sugar.. ... and butter and heavy cream. :(

Well yeah. That’s what red meat is @Brian1946.

@MrGrimm888 You’ve saved me the trouble of explaining why I’m a vegan.

I think a lot of people already look at large commercial farms as inhumane.

I don’t eat veal because of how the calves are often kept in boxes that they can barely move, but you can buy veal from small farms that the calves are not treated that way.

There are cage free eggs in most supermarkets.

Some farms supposedly do everything they can to not traumatize cows before slaughter.

Artificial insemination of cows is arguably rape.

Forcing cows to continuously lactate sounds like slavery to me too.

I am not vegan, but I can get my head into that space.

Animals are commodified, exploited and deprived. They’re often confined to pens, living in their own shit, sometimes walking over corpses of their own species. They’re preemptively pumped with antibiotics and left with various ailments and diseases untreated. Then they’re industrially slaughtered at a fraction of their natural lifespan.

If we treated any humans the same way, it would be regarded as the greatest ethical transgression in the history of the Earth. We’d have to invent a new word, because “slavery” wouldn’t do it justice.

Yes, I think that if we survive the OTHER various self-imposed ecological catastrophes we’ve caused (climate change, extinction crisis, ocean acidification, overfishing, habitat destruction, etc), and if we don’t become a hellish dystopian culture of one sort or another, then eventually we’ll accept animals as sentient people who ought to be cared about, and future generations will regard industrial farming as having been at least as horrifically barbaric and ignorant as human slavery.

Because, it is.

@Kropotkin There was a TV series called “The Strain.”
It’s a really dark horror series, produced by Guerrero del Torro.
Anyways it’s a modern vampire story. They tie vampires to WWII, and it’s really wild.
The vampires in America, make factories for processing humans, that are essentially the same as the ones we use for animals. It’s beyond disturbing.
I’m not a vampire fan, at all, but the series was exceptional.

This actually all started a few months ago, when I signed a online petition against octopus farms. Set to be a new farm animal, the octopus is one of the “smartest” animals we are aware of. The thought of them being treated like other animals is horrid. However. The way we currently do it, is certainly awful.

I also get lots of articles about biology in my news feed.

I was thinking about how there were obviously people (mainly white,) who didn’t own slaves, and maybe didn’t like it either.
But, they just lived that way.

I think that once it became an obviously “un-American” thing, a lot of people already thought of it as barbaric, and it was natural to collectively agree that even though it was a radical change, it was necessary.
Yes, there was a Civil War, but I’d prefer to skip to are current perception of slavery. That it’s bad…It was shameful. It’s hard to try and put myself, in the shoes of a white person alive during slavery.
I wonder if future generations will look back on us, and wonder why we didn’t mutually stop industrial animal farming…

It’s really a time when we have to consider what our species is doing to the planet.

I think that is a factor.

Ideally, we act on the understanding that many industrial processes (although profitable to a few,) are things we should ultimately abandon.

Anyone who’s seen those big ones know its inhumane, at the least. Baby cows tossed head first into overcrowded pens and much worse. They should be outlawed immediately unless they meet strct oversight requirements.

I’m just remembering an Oprah show where they showed dogs in horrid conditions being abused and tortured. It was like the worst type of slavery. In cages, their feet on grids,,constantly pregnant, not fed well, it was gut wrenching to witness. They were breeding places, I think they are called puppy mills, and the comment on the show was that in Pennsylvania the laws for keeping dogs were the same as the laws for cattle. My immediate reaction was, why would that be ok for cattle?! The show was so focused on the dogs that they weren’t even touching on no animal should be treated that way.

I’m pretty sure laws were changed regarding dogs in that state, because I remember a congressman or the governor at the time got in touch with the Oprah show and promised to do something, but I have no idea if the law was changed for the cattle.