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The type of animal exploitation that directly harms the most animals is their use for food. Due to speciesist thinking, many people have never stopped to think about this and just take it for granted that using animals for food is fine, and that animals aren’t harmed much by it.
The reality, though, is that animals are harmed very much not only by being deprived of their lives, but also by other harms that come from the production of animal foods.
Although aquatic animals are often disregarded, more animals are harmed by fishing for food than by any other human use. These animals, billions each year, suffer terribly in different ways when they are fished and killed.
After fishing, fish farming has the next highest number of victims of human exploitation. In fish farms, animals endure terrible conditions before they are painfully killed. Their situation is not any better than that of animals in land factory farms.
The lives of chickens and hens are short and full of suffering. The vast majority raised for their flesh or eggs live crammed together in tiny spaces. They only see sunlight when they are taken to a slaughterhouse. During their lives, they live under artificial light, which results in more economically profitable exploitation, but alters the hens and chickens’ biological cycles. It generates tremendous stress, which leads to behaviors such as pulling one another’s feathers out and cannibalism. With the aim of minimizing the harm done by such behaviors, it is normal for the chickens’ beaks to be partially amputated, a painful operation usually carried out with a blade, or using other methods such as infrared beak trimming.
Many people think that, though killing animals to eat their flesh harms them, using them for milk production does not. This is not correct, though. Cows are forced to give birth so they will give milk, and their calves are taken from them and sent to slaughterhouses. Cows are also killed in their youth when their production decreases. Calves are often killed when they are just babies to be eaten as tender meat, or raised for a few months for “veal” or “beef” production.
In most farms pigs live in filthy conditions with very little space. Sows used for breeding are locked in crates in which they cannot move, and their children are mutilated in different ways and killed when they are only a few months old.
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