What a lot of people don’t realize is the horrific abuse that takes place in the lifecycle of livestock in America’s food supply. It occurs from the minute they are born to the minute that they die, with livestock workers often conducting horribly cruel, unnecessary abuse against the animals like this pig above. There isn’t any reason for it. Butchers often note that when the animals come in they’re full of bruises, burns, broken bones and other wounds that have nothing to do with their slaughter.
Virtually every livestock animal is slaughtered within the first year or so of its life, they’re essentially babies during all of this, no different than a puppy or kitten in any way. Livestock, like all animals, are sentient beings that feel, have memories, emotions, fears, need companionship, connection, sunlight. Cows, pigs, turkeys, goats, and chickens normally live up to 40 years in age, and all are known for their compassion, intelligence, and personalities. Pigs are among the smartest animals in the world next to humans.
It’s not a surprise that the animals above look terrified because they are.
These photos are hard to see, but rather than turn away, people can do something to help.
Pigs are kept in crates that are so small they’re unable to stand or move at all, in dark basements and rooms of factory farms packed with millions of other animals. If humans experienced this they would literally lose their minds as the animals do. Cows are often pregnant when they go to slaughter so that they weigh more. The animals try to escape, fight for their lives, including jumping out of the moving trucks during transport. Slaughter houses report that the animals know they’re going to be killed and tremble, cry with tears, and panic.
The animals are not kept on grassy, outdoor farms casually grazing as it’s often depicted, by any means. Those days are long gone.
If most people smelled – let alone saw – where their meat comes from today they would not be able to eat it. I can say this from experience.
Factory livestock farming does not make meat less expensive for people, tons of mass produced animal meat produced goes uneaten and wasted every year, and this approach to the food supply often has negative impact on the environment including water supply. Most of these companies are located in impoverished areas of the country.
What you can do:
1. If you eat meat, consider purchasing it from sustainable, local and small farms that regard animal welfare, humane care and humane slaughter. There are a growing number of these companies available at stores like Whole Foods.
2. There are also a lot of meat alternatives that are so good you wouldn’t know they’re not the real thing.
3. Support the increasing number of sanctuaries and rescues for livestock animals.
4. Encourage a reduction of factory livestock companies.
5. Spread the word, help educate others.
Please care about living things, and this earth. Both matter more than many people understand or know. People think it takes a big effort to help living things or change the world, or a lot of money. In reality all it takes is one person doing something. That’s me, that’s you, that’s all of us.
Before science was able to shed light on human reproduction, most people thought new life arose through spontaneous generation from non-living matter. That changed a smidgen in the middle of the 17th century, when natural philosophers were able (barely) to see the female ovum, or egg, with the naked eye. They theorised that all life was spawned at the moment of divine creation; one person existed inside the other within a woman’s eggs, like Russian nesting dolls. This view of reproduction, called preformation, suited the ruling class well. ‘By putting lineages inside each other,’ notes the Portuguese developmental biologist and writer Clara Pinto-Correia in The Ovary of Eve (1997), ‘preformation could function as a “politically correct” antidemocratic doctrine, implicitly legitimising the dynastic system – and of course, the leading natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution certainly were not servants.’
One might think that, as science progressed, it would crush the Russian-doll theory through its lucid biological lens. But that’s not precisely what occurred – instead, when the microscope finally enabled researchers to see not just eggs but sperm, the preformation theory morphed into a new, even more patriarchal political conceit: now, held philosophers and some students of reproduction, the egg was merely a passive receptacle waiting for vigorous sperm to arrive to trigger development. And sperm? The head of each contained a tiny preformed human being – a homunculus, to be exact. The Dutch mathematician and physicist Nicolaas Hartsoeker, inventor of the screw-barrel microscope, drew his image of the homunculuswhen sperm became visible for the first time in 1695. He did not actually see a homunculus in the sperm head, Hartsoeker conceded at the time, but he convinced himself that it was there.
More powerful microscopes eventually relegated the homunculus to the dustbin of history – but in some ways not much has changed. Most notably, the legacy of the homunculus survives in the stubbornly persistent notion of the egg as a passive participant in fertilisation, awaiting the active sperm to swim through a hailstorm of challenges to perpetuate life. It’s understandable – though unfortunate – that a lay public might adopt these erroneous, sexist paradigms and metaphors. But biologists and physicians are guilty as well.
It was in the relatively recent year of 1991, long after much of the real science had been set in stone, that the American anthropologist Emily Martin, now at New York University, describedwhat she called a ‘scientific fairy tale’ – a picture of egg and sperm that suggests that ‘female biological processes are less worthy than their male counter-parts’ and that ‘women are less worthy than men’. The ovary, for instance, is depicted with a limited stock of starter eggs depleted over a lifetime whereas the testes are said to produce new sperm throughout life. Human egg production is commonly described as ‘wasteful’ because, from 300,000 egg starter cells present at puberty, only 400 mature eggs will ever be released; yet that adjective is rarely used to describe a man’s lifetime production of more than 2 trillion sperm. Whether in the popular or scientific press, human mating is commonly portrayed as a gigantic marathon swimming event in which the fastest, fittest sperm wins the prize of fertilising the egg. If this narrative was just a prejudicial holdover from our sexist past – an offensive male fantasy based on incorrect science – that would be bad enough, but continued buy-in to biased information impedes crucial fertility treatments for men and women alike.
