Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.
We in America have gotten addicted to cheap food. The result of that is antibiotic-laden fish, foods that are bred to be portable.
Hunting really divides people in Britain. We keep pets, and we name our animals, but we're not too worried about industrial hunting practices.
Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.
I drove through the stockyards of Texas on a motorcycle. It doesn't let you escape what surrounds you and what it smells like and feels like - and what hit me was the realization that something that was alive and had feelings will suffer before a piece of it is placed on our plates.
Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution. Two years ago, Pfiesteria outbreaks connected with wastes from industrial chicken factories forced the closure of two major tributaries of the Chesapeake and threatened Maryland's vital shellfish industry. Tyson Foods has polluted half of all streams in northwestern Arkansas with so much fecal bacteria that swimming is prohibited. Drugs and hormones needed to keep confined animals alive and growing are mainly excreted with the wastes and saturate local waterways.
Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution.
The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America's rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of U.S. citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty.
A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief.
Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat.
I truly don't judge other people's actions. But I think that factory farming is an abomination.
Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.
Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.
As soon as I realized that I didn't need meat to survive or to be in good health, I began to see how forlorn it all is. If only we had a different mentality about the drama of the cowboy and the range and all the rest of it. It's a very romantic notion, an entrenched part of American culture, but I've seen, for example, pigs waiting to be slaughtered, and their hysteria and panic was something I shall never forget.
We need to realize that these industrial methods of farming have gotten us used to cheap food. The corollary of cheap food is low wages. What we need to do in an era when the price of food is going up is pay better wages. A living wage is an absolutely integral part of a modern food system, because you can't expect people to eat properly and eat in a sustainable way if you pay them nothing. In fact, it's cheap food that subsidized the exploitation of American workers for a very long time, and that's always been an aim of cheap food.
I saw 'Food, Inc.' last night - it was like a horror movie. I'm definitely thinking about my food supply now and how I want to grow my own.
You know, in our culture today, our Western, reductionist, Roman, linear, fragmented... culture, we don't ask how to make a pig happy. We ask how to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, and that's not a noble goal.
I'm not a vegetarian. Now, don't get me wrong - I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left.
I'm standing in a slaughterhouse where the cattle are begging to become hamburgers. I have a right to be jumpy.
We can produce more per acre on a fifth of the fuel as the industrial food system.
Factory farmers talk about their desire to feed the world. That's not what they're doing. They're feeding the world with really, really cheap stuff.
Viewed from a holistic ecological perspective, some meat - such as conscientiously hunted animals - involves less suffering and environmental damage than arable agriculture, while both of these are significantly less harmful than indiscriminately purchasing meat on the market.
Animals feel pain and love and joy, just as humans. But in the industrialised meat, dairy, and egg industries, animals are denied everything that's natural and important to them. Some of them don't even feel the fresh air. They don't see the light.
I'll never stop eating animals, I'm sure, but I do think that for the benefit of everyone, the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly.
Take pandemics. There could easily be a severe pandemic. A lot of that comes from something we don't pay much attention to: Eating meat. The meat production industry, the industrial production of meat, uses an immense amount of antibiotics.We're now running out of antibiotics that deal with the threat of rapidly mutating bacteria. A lot of that just comes from the meat production industry. Well, do we worry about it? Well, we ought to be.
