ASPCA- A factory farm is a large-scale industrial operation that houses hundereds or thousands of food animals (such as chickens, turkeys, cows and pigs) in extremely cramped conditions and treats them as non-sentient economic commodities. These animals rarely, if ever, see the light of day and lead short lives full of pain and frustration. What's more, quality suffers for quantity: meat, eggs and dairy produced on factory farms are often of lower quality than the same products produced by animals raised in healthy environments.
A few of the practices employed by factory farms are:
- The preemptive, constant feeding of antibiotics to prevent disease. Humans consuming dairy and meat products from factory farms may develop immunities to antibiotics and thus lose the ability to fight certain strains of bacteria.
- Tightly controlled light cycles to simulate longer or shorter days. This confuses an animal's body and forces an unnatural growth response.
- Altering animals' bodies to prevent them from acting out on the aggression and anxiety caused by living in such extreme confinement.
- Forcing breeding animals to reproduce at unnaturally accelerated rates, causing them exhaustion, stress and early deaths.
- Rough transportation of livestock to slaughterhouses, after which sick or injured animals who fell or died on the way (referred to as "downers") are forced onto slaughter trucks―often with a bulldozer.
Confining so many animals in one place produces much more waste than the surrounding land can handle. As a result, factory farms are associated with various environmental hazards, such as water, land and air pollution―and people who live in close proximity to factory farms often complain of high incidents of illness.
Animals are being mistreated right under our noses and it is time we put a stop to it. The cruelty of the processes that 'employees' use to confine these animals is unacceptable and downright wrong. We are embarassed to be sharing the Earth with people this heartless. It is bad enough that these animals are being raised to be someone's dinner, and their short lived life is filled with pain, fear and sadness. They do not deserve this. They are living creatures, same as us, with emotions and feelings and the senses we have. This is a humiliation to the human race.
