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In the relentless pursuit of profit, animal agriculture routinely engages in practices that prioritize efficiency over ethics. These practices often result in routine animal cruelty, all in the name of maximizing output in the shortest possible time. Read on to uncover the shocking but standard methods that compromise worker safety, animal welfare, and ethical considerations.
Enforced Growth
In the eyes of “big agriculture,” more weight on an animal means more profit. Meat is often sold by the pound in grocery stores, so animals are kept in close quarters with little to no room to move around, and are continually fed with cheap corn-based feed. In one of the more extreme cases, ducks and geese have tubes forced down their throat and are stuffed with food multiple times a day to induce fatty liver disease to produce foie gras.1 Nutrients are forsaken so that these animals can grow as fat as possible for the lowest possible cost.
Separation of Mothers and Offspring
Imagine giving birth, only to have your child taken away before you even have a chance to bond. This is what hens, cows, sows, and other female animals experience multiple times throughout their lives.2 Fertile female animals are often kept in isolation, artificially inseminated to give birth to as many babies as possible in the shortest amount of time.
No Room to Move
More space equals higher expenses. To cut costs, animals are confined in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions where disease can spread rapidly. The lack of exercise results in heavier, unhealthy livestock. Chickens, for example, often grow so large that their legs cannot support their bodies. This is no way for any living being to exist. The image below depicts a typical setup: thousands of chickens packed tightly together, with nothing but feeding tubes running up and down the facility.
Killing the “Worthless”
In animal agriculture, if an animal doesn’t produce revenue, they are deemed worthless and killed. Male chicks, for example, are ground up immediately upon birth, since they cannot produce eggs.3 In addition, if a calf is unfortunate enough to be born male, and therefore unable to produce milk, he has roughly 24 hours to live before being killed. It is estimated that 700,000 male calves suffer this fate every year. All of this occurs in addition to the killing of animals that are born with deformities, are infertile, or are otherwise deemed unprofitable.
Killing
It follows that in order for meat to be sold, an animal has to die in the process. The way in which workers kill these animals is exceptionally gruesome. For every piece of meat on a grocery store shelf, an animal may have been sliced into their thoracic cavity and down their carotid artery and jugular vein4, forced to bleed out; gassed to death; mercilessly shot point-blank in the head; or manually lowered into an electrified bath, just to name a few ways in which they are killed.5
Animal agriculture uses horrendous practices before, during, and after slaughter in order to minimize business expenses and make the most amount of money per animal. In addition, they lobby heavily and release propaganda to evade responsibility and accountability. This strategy is unfortunately extremely effective; the CEO of Tyson Foods, Inc., one of the major players in the industry, is reported to have made $13.2 million in 2023.6 Don’t the animal agriculture industry get away with murder — go vegan today.
2https://thehumaneleague.org/article/animal-mothers-factory-farm
4https://www.britannica.com/technology/meat-processing/Livestock-slaughter-procedures
5https://thehumaneleague.org/article/animal-slaughter