Everyone Opposes Factory Farming. Why Don't We Act Like It?

Words are cheap.

Despite the fact that Animal Rights advocates are a tiny and annoying minority, there is at least one thing ordinary people agree with us on. Show any Average Joe what happens on factory farms and they’ll reel just like we do. In fact, apart from those typing behind Ayn Rand profile pictures, you’ll be surprisingly hard-pressed to find someone who’s straight-up chill with tearing a pig’s teeth out with pliers. Shocking, I know. This is why the moderate position you usually see in this space is something along the lines of “Animal Liberation is extreme, but there has to be a nicer way to do this”.

The near-consensus view that factory farming is deplorable raises an obvious question though - who’s buying all this shit? In the US a staggering 99% of animal products come from factory farms. In the UK we’re at 85%. This leaves me confused. Everyone I speak to insists they only buy humanely raised animal products, but the vast majority of animal products sold come from factory farms. Somehow, by some sort of miracle, the industry is enduring a universal boycott. Clearly, Jesus has returned, and he has a vendetta against the chickens.

I imagine the disparity between people’s words and their actions is a combination of two things. First, your average person is just woefully unaware of how ubiquitous cruelty is in animal agriculture. This survey found that 75% of US adults think they usually buy animal products from humane sources. It’d be easy to scoff at their naïveté, but honestly, who can blame them? I certainly wasn’t aware of how common factory farming is for most of my life, and that’s probably because of shit like this.

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I’m sure the male chicks are very happy as they get dropped into blenders.

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Humane washing is rampant. Happy Egg Co. have the gall to claim their “girls always come first” when they force them to live like this.

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These companies lie to us every day, so it’s unsurprising to find that most people take the bait. Shit, they literally say “Happy” on the carton!

So, at least a healthy chunk of factory farming is caused by industry deception, however I wouldn’t let us off that easily. When people say they only buy humane, there’s a healthy amount of cope in there as well. I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that McDonald’s, Burger King, or KFC are champions for animal rights. We all know if you asked the cashier if they source their meat humanely, they’d laugh in your face and kick you in the balls.

Despite this, we all continue to buy from these places. In fact, when Switzerland had the opportunity to ban factory farming entirely, they said no. This makes me think a lot of the “there has to be a nice way of doing this” rhetoric is just lip service. We think factory farming is bad, but aren’t willing to sacrifice a Big Mac to end it (which is roughly the same as not caring about it at all).

I did this for 25 years, so trust me when I say I have no high ground to judge from - but isn’t it a bit lame to say we think factory farming is awful while doing nothing about it? We all sit here and tut at cruelty while being the exact reason it happens. We want a pat on the back for saying we hold some principle, but are unwilling to pay the cost of actually having it. It’s a farce. I don’t think that’s the sort of person any of us aspire to be (unless you have an Ayn Rand profile picture).

What Can Be Done?

You might have read this and felt some discomfort. You might even be angry. Hear me out though - you should be angry. You should be angry at every CEO who’s bold enough to name their company “Paradise Farms” while treating animals like they’re dirt. You should be angry at anyone who’s taken your money under false pretenses and used it to fund evil. You should be angry that you’ve been tricked into torturing animals by heartless corporate automatons. Be angry! I’m mad too!

So, what do we do with this indignation? Well, the first option goes without saying - you could just stop paying for it. Eating a plant-based diet is like skydiving, it seems scary until you actually do it (you also become someone that talks about it all the time). It makes you wonder why you took so long to change. The food still tastes good, but you decrease zoonotic disease risk, antibiotic resistance, CO2 emissions, and heart disease risk. Most importantly, you get to say that you actually draw the line somewhere, and refuse to hurt sentient lives that can’t even defend themselves. You get to say a big fuck you to the Happy Egg Co’s of the world and actually mean it. On reflection, switching to tofu scramble seems like a pretty small price to pay for that.

Another option is to actively help end factory farming. The number of animals you can save from factory farms per dollar is surprisingly high. In fact, if you eat meat, you can save the same number of animals you eat for $23 a month. Now, that calculator I linked has an “offset your diet” approach I’m unsure about. It’s not obvious to me that it’s okay to continue killing animals if you save some (It’s not like if you give to human charities, you get to enjoy a free murder every now and then). However, I can’t deny the numbers are appealing, and the point of this article is to get as many animals out of there as possible - so if linking this helps do that, I’ve done my part.

I would offer a paid subscription to anyone that donates a certain amount, but my paid subs are currently useless because everything I write is freely available for now. So, I’ll be matching donations to Farmkind up to £100 total. Just DM me a receipt and I’ll reply with my own. Let’s save some pigs.

Edit: To clarify, I will be donating 100 pounds max, not 100 pounds per donation. Web Analytics doesn't pay well enough for the latter, unfortunately

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