We have built hell and condemned hundreds of millions of innocent beings to a fate worse than death for their entire lives, all for the crime of having flesh that tastes nice. If you wanted a definition of wickedness, a clear example to help someone grasp the concept of wrongdoing, you couldn’t do better than showing them a factory farm. We have mechanized mass murder. We do it out of sight and out of mind, using euphemistic phrases to cover up the carnage. Our society is powered by blood and flesh and bone.
BENTHAM’S BULLDOG: Extreme suffering is bad. Anyone who has been tortured, beaten, or severely hurt in some other way knows that. Its badness doesn’t go away just because the victims aren’t smart. Babies aren’t very smart, and there are some mentally disabled people whose cognitive capacities are similar to animals. No one would seriously claim that if we inflicted the grievous tortures on babies and the cognitively disabled that we inflict on animals, it would be anything other than an unspeakable atrocity. So neither can we claim that the suffering of animals isn’t a big deal because of their cognitive deficiencies.
Every year, more animals are cruelly slaughtered on factory farms than humans have ever lived. Animals epitomize the Stalinist quote “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” If someone tortures a dog in a basement, they’re universally condemned. But when the factory farms cruelly slaughter 200 million chickens every single day, no one cares much. If you complain about it, if you call it the crime that it is, you’re thought of as a nutty extremist—a vegan radical. The sane and moderate position is to look away and ignore the nightmarish holocaust that goes on every minute.
But we shouldn’t look away from the death and torment that exists on such a staggering scale that one can scarcely grasp it. We have built hell and condemned hundreds of millions of innocent beings to a fate worse than death for their entire lives, all for the crime of having flesh that tastes nice. If you wanted a definition of wickedness, a clear example to help someone grasp the concept of wrongdoing, you couldn’t do better than showing them a factory farm.
We have mechanized mass murder. We do it out of sight and out of mind, using euphemistic phrases to cover up the carnage. Our society is powered by blood and flesh and bone. As Sam Wong noted, “When humans have vanished from the planet, one of the most enduring marks of our impact on Earth will be the sudden appearance in the fossil record of copious chicken bones.”
We must reckon with this fact. The world is engaged in animal cruelty on a scale that can barely be fathomed. If you lived the life, back to back, of every organism who ever lived, you’d spend far more time being tortured in a factory farm than living as a person. To one who was forced to endure both the pleasures of meat and the suffering it causes, veganism would seem obviously obligatory, and vegan histrionics about factory farming would seem, if anything, understated. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEOS: