The Forgotten 10 Billion Lives: The fight to see the suffering and survival of farmed animals

In 'Censored Landscapes: The Hidden Reality of Farming Animals', artist and author Isabella La Rocca González offers a powerful and emotionally charged exploration of farmed animals. Her camera lens captures the haunting landscapes that depict the animal agricultural industry. The animals portrayed in the book are intended to serve as ambassadors of their species. Their stories are meant to individualize the vast numbers of farmed animals bred, confined, and slaughtered. Animals whose identity, sentience, emotions, and existence are obliterated. The numbers included with the images represent the lives of animals imprisoned within the facility and, along with the extensive and meticulously documented facts, are meant to draw attention to the magnitude of suffering behind the banal exteriors.

ISISABELLA LA ROCCA GONZALEZ: In 2012, in Turlock, California, 50,000 hens were abandoned in an egg farm. Every one of those trapped birds embodied a tragic irony. Birds can fly in the sky, unassisted by metal structures or fossil fuels. They are emblematic of freedom. “Free as a bird,” goes the cliché. For her whole life, each of those hens had been crammed in a rusted cage with three, four, five, even six others; her whole life eclipsed by an obsessive desire to bust out of the cage, to spread her wings and feel the sun and the rain and the breeze, to sashay on solid ground under an open sky, to make a nest and raise her babies.

I imagine the grim days that followed. Now her relentless craving for escape amplified by an urgent need for food and water, the air growing louder—deafening—with the sound of 50,000 hens shrieking from thirst and starvation. Now a cage-mate is dead. Now more hens immobile in the cages, their sounds muted. Now the air is thickening with the stench of rotting flesh. Second by minute by hour, two weeks passed. Finally, state officials began gassing birds by the thousands. After three more days, animal sanctuaries negotiated to take custody of the surviving 4,460 hens.

A year later, I photographed the empty facility. The filthy warehouses I found there did nothing to alleviate my nightmarish imaginings. The ammonia stink of chicken urine still lingered… The photographs I made that February day in Turlock became the inspiration for Censored Landscapes, a photographic exploration that tells a story in which the central characters are innocent of any crime and yet are condemned to imprisonment, torture, and death. It’s a true story of ecological destruction, of worker exploitation—mostly people of color—and of secretive corporations protected by laws and enriched by government subsidies and lobbies. It is also a story that offers insight and healing…

In the agricultural industry, nonhuman animals do not exist as individuals but as capital to be exploited for profit. The word capital comes from the Latin capitalis, meaning head, in the sense of a head of cattle. In medieval Europe, the number of cattle owned by a family stood for wealth and prestige. Cattle were used as currency for large transactions. In the U.S., mercenary corporations are granted personhood, meaning they are entitled to at least some of the legal status, rights, and protections of humans. They can own land and money. Nonhuman animals, however, are deemed property, with none of those rights or protections. How, then to portray the individuals hidden away in remote places and windowless warehouses? A number displayed with each landscape in this project represents the number of animals bred, confined, or slaughtered in the facility depicted in the photograph.

Accessing the numbers wasn’t easy. People who breed, confine, and slaughter animals conceal their enterprise aggressively. In more than half of the U.S. state legislatures, the industry has attempted to pass “ag-gag” laws that criminalize photographing sites of animal agriculture. These laws are contrary to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but they are currently in effect in eleven states. The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is a federal law that criminalizes economic damage to an animal enterprise, including loss of profits. Photographers who expose the practices of these corporations can be lumped into the same category as Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber.

The numbers that form an essential element in this project are revealing, but they’re a pitiful substitute for even one of the animals whose identity, sentience, emotions, and existence are obliterated. Censored Landscapes also includes portraits and stories of individual animals exploited by the industry. The animals I portrayed in this project serve as ambassadors of their species. Their stories are meant to individualize the vast numbers of farmed animals bred, confined, and slaughtered.

Extensive and meticulously documented facts included in Censored Landscapes regarding the treatment of farmed animals substantiate the barbarism and injustice of the industry. For example, virtually all farmed birds, including chickens, ducks, geese, and pigeons, are kept indoors in extremely crowded conditions for their whole lives. In 2022, 9.54 billion chickens, 208.2 million turkeys, and 26.7 million ducks were slaughtered for food in the U.S. Each of the phases involved in arrival at the slaughter facilities causes more suffering for the birds. About twenty million chickens die on the way to slaughter every year…

Censored Landscapes does not focus on the kind of graphic depictions of cruelty found all over the Internet, of men beating turkeys with iron rods and throwing them aside or slamming piglets onto a concrete floor by the hind legs. Atrocities against animals are rife in the industry, but I don’t have the heart to investigate. Most heartbreaking is the innocence of the animals. They can’t possibly understand why this is happening to them — why the contempt, why the cyclonic rage. Beyond unbearable pain, they must feel utterly forsaken by all things good… The dingy, wretched structures revealed in this project insinuate everyone and everything — farmed animals, wildlife, humans, rivers, oceans, forests, soil, air—into their abyss. Censored Landscapes scrutinizes animal agricultural industry standards, business as usual…

But no matter, Americans continue to consume more animals than ever. Animal agriculture is a ruthless and avaricious business that results in ecological devastation, grievous health effects, and colossal suffering. This I know to be true: environmentalism and social justice must include the other animals who share our planet. Imagine flipping the script—subverting the colonizing, profiteering paradigm. Sentient nonhuman animals instead of corporations would be granted personhood; forests, rivers, and oceans valued much more than money; prisons and animal farms morphed into homes and sanctuaries. Every transformation, no matter how preposterous or sensible or liberating or urgent, is kindled with sparks of inspiration. Let this be a spark. May all beings everywhere be joyful and free. SOURCE…

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