If you still don’t know about factory farms, these are the hell houses where animals are bred through the harshest, cruelest tortures for the pleasures of the human tongue. Debeaking, dehorning and a lot more unimaginable tortures happen inside factory farms. An eye-opener would be the Indian dairy industry listing cows and buffaloes as commodities, solely as a means for commercial gains, rather than the living beings that they are.
Factory farmed chickens
If you visit an industrial poultry farm, you would be shocked to see the enormous amount of birds being raised. The torture they go through in their very short life is nothing short of the cruelest of ways to treat a living being. For starters, a large portion of their beaks is chopped off with a burning hot blade within days or hours of birth. This leads to the chicks having a hard time eating and drinking, and hence they are injected with chemicals to fatten up. Most of these birds suffer from hunger and dehydration before dying a painful death.
The sheds are then lit in a way to maximize egg production. The hens are force-fed a reduced-calorie diet to process an extra egg-laying cycle. At the end of living in this confinement, their tired bodies, unable to produce more eggs, are sent off to slaughterhouses where they go through some more torture (read: throat-slitting and shackled legs.)
Almost 180 crore chickens (1) are killed for their meat every single year in India alone. In fact, 90% of the broiler hens are raised in factory farms. The nightmare of overcrowding, poor and unnatural nutrition, exposure to disease, and high levels of stress are very much real for chickens raised in factory farms.
Factory farmed cows
Cows are also raised in unimaginable conditions, where males are taken away for slaughter and females are impregnated for calves. The calves are then snatched away from the mother, and the milk, which is biologically formulated for a baby cow, is then sold after numerous chemical processes in packages to humans.
The torture they go through hampers their behavior and many can turn violent and hence, some of them have their horns gouged out or chopped to save humans and other animals from harm. Needless to say, no anesthesia is used for any of the horrific processes above.
To give a rough estimate, there are approximately 1.5 billion cows (3) on farms around the world.
Factory farmed pigs
The conditions that pigs are raised and dwelled in a factory farm are far worse than any! They are unusually cruel to pigs being raised for slaughter. Barbaric practices which are a common norm in almost every pig farm include tail docking, tooth clipping and many other physical modifications that make it horribly stressful for pigs.
Their babies are snatched as soon as they are born and the female is back in the crate for the next forceful impregnation. Once she loses her ability to have babies, she is slaughtered for her meat.
Things are much gorier in real, and we would hate to have you shudder at hearing their cries and seeing them hacked. The torturous and unhygienic conditions they are raised in are also one of the biggest concerns of environmental safety. Most of the pandemics and epidemics like swine flu, bird flu, or the ongoing COVID-19 are known to have spread from infected animals bred in such farms (5).
Now, even after knowing the truth of the situation, would you still love to have eggs or dairy on your plate?
IMPORTANT LINKS
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/196096/total-egg-production-in-the-us-since-2000/https://sentientmedia.org/factory-farms/
- https://www.worldanimalprotection.us/sites/default/files/media/us_files/a_pigs_tale_a41.pdf
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874076/
