Factory farming is an abhorrent practice that creates enormous suffering and pollution on this planet. Our treatment of animals is not unlike that of the Africans through the dark era that accepted slavery as a status quo and Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. Millions of animals are kept in concentration camp-like conditions around the planet, making them and us vulnerable to e. coli, Avian Flu and other major health threats.
In my late teens and early twenties, I held the belief that animals were born for food and it didn’t really matter how we kept them. But after visiting a factory farm, researching the practice and meditating on the ethics of consuming flesh from such operations, the notion of supporting the practice through my continued purchase of meat, regardless of it’s source began to feel incongruent with my internal beliefs. The argument that “animals were born for it” began to feel like saying blacks were born to be slaves or the Jews deserved what the Nazis did. Such statements seem absolutely absurd to most people alive now but were not uncommon just 50 – 100 years ago.
It is my hope that we can evolve our collective awareness and reject this practice as we have come to reject racial and religious intolerance. John Robbin’s book, Diet For a New America was highly influential in my thinking on this issue.
To get an idea of the scale of factory farming in the US check out this site: http://www.factoryfarmmap.org/
