Animal Agriculture: Cruel and Unjust

Killing a sentient being means stealing its life—a life it values as much as we value ours. Because we have no nutritional need for meat, dairy, or eggs, the deaths those products require are unnecessary, as is the suffering.

Below is just a sample of the abuses farmed animals face—abuses that also cause stress, depression, and poor mental health.¹

Violent Slaughter: Shooting | Maceration | Throat Slitting

• Chickens. Chickens are killed in several ways, including manual throat slitting, neck breaking, decapitation, and gassing, all of which are violent and painful. When low-voltage stuns are not effective, many chickens are alive and fully conscious when their throat is slit, and many remain conscious when entering the scalding tank.²³⁴
• Cows. Despite the Humane Slaughter Act, fast line speeds and poorly trained workers mean cows are often improperly stunned and therefore still conscious when their throats are slit. Workers have reported cows blinking and looking around when they should be dead. Many cows have their limbs cut off and even their hides removed while fully conscious.⁵
• Pigs. All accepted methods of pig slaughter are inhumane; these include electrocution, gassing, and shooting (via bolt gun or gunshot). Gassing, which is increasing in use, involves lowering pigs into a gas chamber. The gas “acidifies eyes, nostrils, mouths and lungs, meaning the animals feel like they are burning from the inside out.” Meanwhile, they also suffocate from lack of oxygen and violently convulse due to the abrasive poison in their lungs.⁶⁷⁸⁹
• Fish. Instead of being slaughtered, wild-caught fish are often hauled onto fishing boats and left to suffocate. Fish caught at 20 meters (65 feet) or deeper may suffer rapid decompression when pulled to the surface, which can push their eyes out of their sockets or their organs out of their mouths or anuses, resulting in prolapse. Fish that survive being pulled to the surface may still be alive when put into onboard freezers and slowly freeze to death.¹⁰

Horrid Living Conditions: Confinement | Crowding | Fecal Filth

• Chickens. Chickens in commercial chicken houses may not be caged but are still confined by the mass of chickens around them, which is why Consumer Reports advises to “ignore ‘cage-free’ claims.”¹¹
• Cows. On feedlots, thousands of cows are crammed into and made to stand in small pens that quickly fill up with waste.¹² The huge amounts of manure on feedlots emit gases like methane and ammonia, which may give cows chronic respiratory problems.¹³
• Pigs. After being removed from their mothers, piglets are often crowded into pens with little room to move until they reach slaughter weight.¹⁴
• Fish. Farmed fish overcrowding leads to fecal contamination and routinely causes stress, loss of scales, lack of oxygen, gill damage, and heart problems due to insufficient exercise.¹⁵¹⁶

Painful Mutilations: Debeaking | Dehorning | Tail Docking | Castration

• Chickens. Debeaking is painful, causes lasting suffering, impairs feeding, eliminates exploratory pecking, and impairs preening, which can lead to lice.¹⁷
• Pigs. Per standard practices, pigs are often castrated and tattooed and have their teeth clipped, tail docked, and ears notched—often without anesthetic. These practices are painful (sometimes chronically) and can cause inflammation, abscesses, and other health issues.¹⁸
• Cows. Cows are dehorned on 94% of dairy farms (USDA¹⁹), usually without anesthetic. The excruciatingly painful²⁰ process involves cutting through bone and horn tissue with a wire, saw, or mechanical gouger.²¹
• Calves. Most male calves in the United States are castrated (USDA²²) to reduce aggression and prevent reproduction. The process is acutely painful,²³ and pain relief is rarely provided.²⁴

Denial of Natural Behaviors: Free Movement | Courtship | Sex | Roosting | Rooting | Nurturing and Being Nurtured | Playing | Teaching

• Cows. In the dairy industry, calves are usually taken from their mother soon after birth, which is very upsetting for both. Mother cows have strong maternal instincts and often call for their calves for hours or even days after separation.²⁵ This isolation causes long-term stress and anxiety.²⁶
• Chickens. Crowding hinders or eliminates chickens’ ability to preen, roost, perch, spread their wings, establish social order, peck and scratch for food, teach their young to peck and scratch for food, and other natural things.²⁷ This causes not only discomfort but also constant fear and anxiety.²⁸²⁹³⁰

Debilitating Selective Breeding: Larger Breasts | More Milk | More & Bigger Eggs

• Laying Hens. Modern laying hens produce over 300 eggs per year, which is 50 times more than the jungle fowl from which they are bred. This causes both physical and psychological stress.³¹ This higher production, whether for larger eggs or more eggs, often causes osteoporosis, broken bones, and uterine prolapse³²
• Broiler Chickens. A 2020 World’s Poultry Science journal study found that over the past 60 years, the selective breeding of broiler chickens for rapid growth, larger breasts, and feed efficiency has caused significant problems, including leg deformities, heart conditions, and elevated mortality rates.³³
• Pigs. Pigs have been bred to gain weight so fast that they sometimes struggle to support their own weight.³⁴ This can also lead to joint and leg problems, heart attacks, and stress.³⁵³⁶³⁷
• Cows. Because modern dairy cows have been selectively bred to produce much more milk than their ancestors, they may become deficient in nutrients such as calcium. Many develop metabolic diseases such as milk fever, ketosis, and fatty liver syndrome.³⁸

Reproductive Violations: Semen Collection | Insemination | Separation of Offspring

• Bulls. Bull semen is collected by either painful electro ejaculation or the teaser method, in which one bull is artificially aroused into mounting another bull, often resulting in tissue damage.³⁹
• Cows. Cows. In the United States, approximately 78%⁴⁰ of dairy cows are impregnated via artificial insemination. During artificial insemination, a human inserts a semen injection gun into the cow’s vulva and then inserts their entire other arm into the cow’s anus to feel for and guide the injection gun.⁴¹

Cruel Handling: Beating | Prodding | Transportation | Maceration | Slaughter

• Chickens. Chickens that are being transported or prepared for transport are grabbed by their feet (four chickens at a time) and thrown or shoved into crowded crates, resulting in crushed wings, bones, and heads. The heat, cold, and jostling experienced during transport lead to exhaustion, dehydration, and injuries, often resulting in pain, disease, wing and leg fractures, inability to stand, lesions, bleeding, bruising, and even death by suffocation.⁴²⁴³
• Pigs. Multiple investigations by Mercy for Animals and others have recorded pigs being punched, kicked, beaten, shouted at, violently shaken, poked in the eyes, hit with boards, and having their hair pulled out.⁴⁴⁴⁵⁴⁶

Downers: Dragging | Electrocution | Forklifting | Spraying | Left to Die

Piglets. Sick piglets have been denied veterinary care and thrown into piles and left to die slowly.⁴⁷

Cows. Undercover investigations have revealed downed cows being dragged with chains, shocked with electric prods, rammed with forklifts, sprayed through the nose with water, and left to die.⁴⁸⁴⁹⁵⁰

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Animals slaughtered for meat live only 2%–7% of their natural lifespan, laying hens live less than 20% of their natural lifespan, and dairy cows live 30% of their natural lifespan.

Details

Dairy cows are slaughtered at around 4 to 6 years old, after living less than 30 percent of a 15 to 20-year natural lifespan.⁵¹

Cows used for beef are slaughtered at around 18 months old, after living less than 7% of their natural 15 to 20-year lifespan.⁵²

Pigs are slaughtered at around 5 to 6 months old, after living less than 6% of their natural lifespan.⁵³

In the egg industry, because male chicks can’t lay eggs, males are slaughtered soon after hatching, usually by being ground by steel blades.⁵⁴

Laying hens are slaughtered at around 18 months old, after living less than 20% of their natural 8-year lifespan.⁵⁵

Chickens used for meat are slaughtered at around 5 to 7 weeks old, after living less than 2% of their natural 8-year lifespan.⁵⁶

Humanewashing, akin to greenwashing, is described by Farm Forward as using deceptive labels and imagery to market animal products, “promoting the illusion of animal well-being while concealing the extent of animals’ illness and suffering.”⁵⁷

Consumer Reports determined that cage-free, free-range, pasture-raised, and other labels and certifications are largely meaningless and can be ignored⁵⁸

Consumer Reports also found that audits for certification labels, if they happen at all, are infrequent, ineffective, and unenforced, and there were often no penalties for violations⁵⁹

The Open Philanthropy Project, in looking at the Whole Foods certification program, found that the enforcement is weak and that the standards, even if followed, offer only slight improvements over standard factory farm conditions.⁶⁰

According to Farm Forward’s report on humanewashing, even the more thorough certifications “deceive consumers by branding as humane products from animals raised in intensive confinement on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), animals deprived adequate exercise and socialization, animals genetically modified in ways that promote disease, cattle whose calves are taken from them shortly after birth, and male chicks who are killed en masse immediately after hatching.”⁶¹

Over 70 billion land animals are slaughtered each year (FAO⁶²), and 99% of those have lived on factory farms (Sentience Institute⁶³).

More farmed animals are slaughtered every year than the total number of humans who have ever lived on Earth.

Calculation Details

Public Broadcasting Radio estimates that as of 2022, the total number of humans who have ever lived on Earth is 117 billion.⁶⁴

Annually, over 70 billion land animals⁶⁵ and 51 to 167 billion fish⁶⁶ are slaughtered.

This attitude is exemplified in two quotes from two separate farm publications:

National Hog Farmer:”The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.”⁶⁷

Hog Farm Management: “Forget the pig is an animal—treat him just like a machine in a factory.”⁶⁸