EA - Here's a comprehensive fact sheet of almost all the ways animals are mistreated in factory farms by Omnizoid

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Here's a comprehensive fact sheet of almost all the ways animals are mistreated in factory farms, published by Omnizoid on May 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Crosspost of this on my blog.1 IntroductionSee, there's the difference between us. I don't care about animals at all. I'm well aware of the cramped, squalid, and altogether unpleasant conditions suffered by livestock animals on many factory farms, and I simply could not care less. I see animals as a natural resource to be exploited. I don't care about them any more than I care about the trees that were cut down to make my house.Random person on the bizarre anti-vegan subredditI’ve previously argued against factory farming at some length, arguing that it is the worst thing ever. Here I will just lay out the facts about factory farming. I will describe what happens to the 80 or so billion beings we factory farm every year, who scream in agony and terror in the great juggernauts of despair, whose cries we ignore. They scream because of us—because of our apathy, because of our demand for their flesh—and it’s about time that people learned exactly what is going on. Here I describe the horrors of factory farms, though if one is convinced that factory farms are evil, they should stop paying for their products—an act which demonstrably causes more animals to be tormented in concentration camp-esque conditions.If factory farms are as cruel as I suggest, then the obligation not to pay for them is a point of elementary morality. Anyone who is not a moral imbecile recognizes that it’s wrong to contribute to senseless cruelty for the sake of comparatively minor benefits. We all recognize it’s wrong to torture animals for pleasure—paying others to torture animals for our pleasure is similarly wrong. If factory farms are half as cruel as I make them out to be, then factory farming is inarguably the worst thing in human history. Around 99% of meat comes from factory farms—if you purchase meat without careful vetting, it almost definitely comes from a factory farm.Here, I’ll just describe the facts about what goes on in factory farms. Of course, this understates the case, because much of what goes on is secret—the meat industry has fought hard to make it impossible to film them. As Scully notesIt would be reasonable for the justices to ask themselves this question, too: If the use of gestation crates is proper and defensible animal husbandry, why has the NPPC lobbied to make it a crime to photograph that very practice?Here, I will show that factory farming is literally torture. This is not hyperbolic, but instead the obvious conclusion of a sober look at the facts. If we treated child molesters the way we treat billions of animals, we’d be condemned by the international community. The treatment of animals is unimaginably horrifying—evocative of the worst crimes in human history.Some may say that animals just cannot be tortured. But this is clearly a crazy view. If a person used pliers to cut off the toes of their pets, we’d regard that as torture. Unfortunately, what we do to billions of animals is far worse.2 PigsJust like those who defended slavery, the eaters of meat often have farcical notions about how the beings whose mistreatment they defend are treated. But unfortunately, the facts are quite different from those suggested by meat industry propaganda, and are worth reviewing.Excess pigs were roasted to death. Specifically, these pigs were killed by having hot steam enter the barn, at around 150 degrees, leading to them choking, suffocating, and roasting to death. It’s hard to see how an industry that chokes and burns beings to death can be said to be anything other than nightmarish, especially given that pigs are smarter than dogs.Factory-farmed pigs, while pregnant, are stuffed in tiny gestation cr...