Animal Welfare
“If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.” - James Herriot
We all love animals. Most of us would do anything for our pets. There isn’t anyone I know who would consider eating their pet for dinner. It’s hard to imagine farmed animals to be anything like our pets, but they are really not that much different. They love to play and they love their friends. Most people don’t know what happens to animals who are bred and raised to feed humans. The industry does this on purpose. Many assume they are treated the best that they can be. We are simply too busy to look into it. If you are unfamiliar with this industry, I am asking you to learn more about where your food comes from, how it is processed, and what is in it. Caring about those who are sacrificed should be a priority for so many reasons.
Since farmed animals have been determined to be sentient beings, they deserve protections. Sentience means that they have the potential to feel pain, fear, sadness, loneliness, love, and happiness that are similar to humans. Of course they are not humans, but they deserve to have some rights. Currently, in the United States they have no protections. Zero. This may not seem to be a big deal, but in the life of an animal bred to be eaten, it is a huge deal. It is the difference between being dragged by a tractor to your death when you can no longer stand, or not. It is the difference between receiving pain relief for medical procedures, or not. And it is the difference between spending your life in a crate in which you cannot move, or not.
If we have laws against treating our pets cruelly, then we should have laws against treating all animals cruelly.
“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
I don’t want to describe gore and guts - there are plenty of documentaries that can do this for you. But I do want to share with you that the practices in place, the practices that are currently accepted in the United States agricultural and animal husbandry business are nothing less than extensive cruelty for most farmed animals. Other countries are not too much different, but some have limits. Many animals experience poor treatment for all of their lives and some for part of their short-lived lives. To be honest, it has never needed to be this way. One of the main excuses for this is efficiency and cost effectiveness. We are all to blame when animals are treated as commodities. Animals have been known to cry on their way to the meat processing plant. Cows have a sense of smell so strong that it competes with animals that are at the top of the olfactory receptors race. They have an amazing sense of smell. This makes the process even more cruel because they suspect the horror that awaits them as the smell of death fills the air. And the experience of being on a feeding lot for the last few weeks of their lives creates so much stress. We cannot stand the smell of strong odors, but we force them to endure it, just because we have more power and control. Do we then consume their stress when we eat their meat? Do we consume their sicknesses and their despair?
https://a-z-animals.com/animals/lists/strongest-sense-of-smell/
Farmed animals can have best friends. They care deeply about their offspring and they oftentimes enjoy each other’s company. They do not deserve their lot in life. The way the system is set up now there is no consistent consideration for comfort, pain relief or happiness. The system of billions of creatures born and raised to serve one purpose, to provide food to humans, is on a scale that earth has never experienced before. And yet, here we are. The only way to change the current system is to reject it. It can be rejected in several ways. You can choose to not buy into the system as it exists today. You can choose to be vocal in grocery stores and restaurants to provide alternatives to meat and dairy. You can discuss this problem with friends and family and to politicians who make the laws. You can provide donations to farmed animal sanctuaries. The best way to reject the current system is to learn more about it and act in a way that can create change. For so many of us, the thought of removing them from our lives and dinner plates sounds outrageous. Eating meat, dairy and eggs has always been part of our human culture. But we now know that we can still live a healthy life without these foods. We can all cut back and demand more accountability. For the animals, it’s their only hope.
https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/latest/blogs/what-animal-sentience/
When efficiency and cost savings get in the way of caring for other species, bad things can happen. Instead of realizing the error of our ways, we sometimes double down and try to ignore the suffering and exploitation that has occurred behind closed doors. Feeling indifferent can help hide the fact that we may be contributing to an extraordinary amount of misery. Out of sight and out of mind. You can think of this industry as having a lot of smoke and mirrors - like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain - reality is not always obvious or straightforward. Nothing is what you hoped it would be or what it seemed to be. And so, as stewards of humanity and life on earth, I ask you to learn more about the creatures raised to feed you. The pretty green pasture on a dozen eggs or a gallon of milk is usually fake and oftentimes isn’t a reality at all for many of these vulnerable animals. In fact, the horror behind the curtain might make you weep. The animals weep, too. Cows have been known to moan in despair when their young calves have been taken away from them too soon, (a common occurrence in the dairy industry.) Pigs are raised in such confined conditions that their tails must be docked to prevent them from being chewed off. This is not normal pig behavior, but when an animal is under duress and stressed they do things they wouldn’t normally do. Baby chicks after birth are grouped by sex - the girls get to live, by laying eggs until they are unproductive. The boys are killed immediately, they are considered to be waste, simply useless. Chickens oftentimes get their beaks cut off to prevent them from pecking each other to death. Again, this is not normal behavior. When animals are confined and kept in conditions that don’t allow them to move, they get stressed and do crazy shit. Cows get their horns cut or burned off to prevent gorging, oftentimes without any pain relief. Although this scenario sounds awful, that is not where it ends.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9757169/
As if the physical manipulation was not enough, humans mess with physiological conditions, too. The use of antibiotics in humans has been curtailed in recent years. Doctors have realized that the overuse of antibiotics can create antibiotic resistant bacteria. This resistance can lead to ineffectiveness in treating illness and may lead to superbugs. This resistance can also lead to epidemics. But what about the overuse of antibiotics in farmed animals? In the name of cost savings and efficiency many animals are given antibiotics not just to treat an infection or an illness, but these drugs are also used to make them grow bigger in record time. This has been commonplace for decades. If the animal can be slaughter-ready at a younger age by feeding them antibiotics, then this is what the farmer will do. But this act, in the name of efficiency and cost savings, can create more problems in the long run. It is estimated that 3/4 of all of the antibiotics used in the United States is used on factory farmed animals. Has there been any thought about how this affects them or us? Worse, can drug resistant pathogens be transferred to humans through their meat? What about antibiotic residues in food? There is so much we still don’t know about the transfer of medicines and microbes to the food we eat. Our increased demand for beef has led to a critical medical crisis with resistant bacteria in humans. Humans are on a slippery slope when it comes to our environment and our responsibility to be stewards of all life on earth. We are running out of time to fix the mess we have created.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11106094/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950194624000645
https://www.cdc.gov/antimicrobial-resistance/causes/environmental-food.html
Cutting out all meat, dairy and eggs sounds extreme. After all, these foods are part of our culture, we grew up with them, we love eating them, and habits are hard to break. But as humans, we must take responsibility for our actions. The way we are heading is not sustainable, something has to give. On social media we have recently had a push in influencers promoting more meat consumption. We are shooting ourselves in the foot as more meat consumption means more forests cut down in the name of making more space to grow crops that feed the animals. We are already at a critical tipping point.
If you love animals and don’t want to contribute to their misery then try to learn more about their plight. There are so many documentaries that can help you understand. We are all in this together. When one goes down, we all go down. We have so much power to make change happen. Now is the time!
Check out this list of documentaries that can help you understand what we are up against. Some are not easy to watch, but nonetheless they are extremely important for all of us to view.
“I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.”
- Abraham Lincoln