Numbers
Over 70 billion land animals are consumed each year by humans, and an estimated three trillion fish. Calculated by biomass, a staggering 96% of mammals on earth today are our livestock and domestic animals (around 60%) or humans (around 36%). Just 4% of mammals are wild.
It is a commonplace of communication strategy that people are not moved by statistics. We are moved by stories. The runaway cow captures hearts, not the 200 million land animals killed each day for food.
Personally, I am moved by statistics. I find their insights fascinating. When I first encountered the statistics above, I was stunned. They mean that we humans have created a global ecosystem that is radically different from that which would exist without us.
Humans have changed how life is experienced on earth.
The most numerous bird today, for example, is the chicken (70% of the bird population by biomass). Indeed, there are more chickens than humans: there are an estimated 23 billion at any time, and around 66 billion are killed each year.
Since we have made this change to the world, it seems important to ask what kind of lives our domesticated animals lead?
Lives
[Please note: the websites linked may contain disturbing footage.]
Let’s consider the life of a female pig. While pregnant, many pigs are kept in a sow stall, a narrow metal cage fixed onto a concrete floor, with a metal grid below her for faeces to drain away. The cage is so confining that the pig cannot turn around, and may not even be able to stand. Pregnancy lasts sixteen weeks. Once she gives birth she is moved into a farrowing crate, another narrow metal cage. The main difference is that now there is space between the cages for her piglets suckle. She cannot follow her natural instinct to make a nest for her babies, nor to explore with them, forage and develop bonds. She cannot even turn to see them. When the piglets are big enough to be taken from her, she is inseminated again, and the cycle repeats, until after three years she is killed.
Some of her babies will become breeders and their lives will be much like hers. Others will be fattened for slaughter. They will live their lives in a crowded enclosure, never seeing the sky or daylight until they are killed.
Pigs are sociable, curious animals, whose intelligence can be compared to dogs or to chimpanzees.
Each animal is an individual.
Nearly 1.5 billion pigs are slaughtered annually for meat. Can you imagine the amount of suffering that represents?
Chickens are our most numerous domestic animal. Most chickens (around 70%) raised for meat live in factory farms. They live their whole life in barren, crowded sheds with tens of thousands of other chickens, the floor littered with faeces. They have been bred to grow quickly. The average chicken today is four times heavier than a chicken in the 1950s. Rapid growth leads to painful leg disorders, and lameness that can make it impossible for the chickens to move, even in order to feed.
Egg-laying hens may be confined to battery cages. Battery cages are banned in the EU, but the majority of eggs from the rest of the world come from this system. Chickens are kept in cages of up to ten birds, with less space than a sheet of A4 paper each. The floor is wire mesh. The cages are stacked upon one another.
Chickens in such places have no chance of living according to their natural desires to nest, perch, dustbath, play and build social bonds with one another. It is a life of intense suffering, ended only at the slaughterhouse.
In 2016 scientists gathered to discuss renaming the present epoch the ‘Anthropocene’, a new geological era named to acknowledge the massive impact of humans upon the earth’s geological processes.
It’s clear that humans have already changed ecosystems radically, but a geological era must leave fossilised markers. One strong case for the term Anthropocene is the number of chickens upon our planet now. Their bones will appear suddenly in huge numbers in the planet’s geological substrates. These bones are not like those of their jungle fowl ancestors. They are less dense and often deformed.
The chicken bones are a signal of the world we have made and remake each day. They are a sign of suffering constructed on an enormous scale.
Stories
Our farmed animals outnumber people. They are the most numerous members of our society. We rarely hear their stories.
There are stories needing to be told of mother cows whose babies are taken from them and of what happens to their babies, of the unwanted male chicks of egg-laying chicken breeds, of the terror and violence in slaughterhouses, of ducks who live their whole lives in sheds without water to be plucked for our pillows, of fish in their billions suffocating to death.
A great violence is happening in our world, mostly shielded from view.
Most people do not want to hurt animals. Animal agriculture has therefore been shifted out of sight. It’s hard to visit a chicken shed or a slaughterhouse. The lives of the majority of farmed animals are hidden, and we are presented with different images of farming: the old-fashioned family farm where a few chickens scratch around in the yard and the cows graze peacefully alongside their babies.
In children’s books, mother animals are often drawn with their children. Happy pigs relax with piglets. A brood of fluffy chicks follow their mother hen. Mother cow and calf graze together.
My children read these books and imagine farmed animals enjoy their lives, and humans look after them. I can’t bear to tell them the truth, which is that the vast majority of pigs, chickens and cows do not get to enjoy lives like this.
Most chicks, for example, will never see their mothers. Around springtime cute advertisements show fluffy little chicks pottering through grass. But most chicks are born in hatcheries. Layer chicks are placed upon a conveyor belt where the male chicks are separated from the females then gassed or cut to pieces in a macerator.
The difference between the imagery and the reality could hardly be starker.
Humans are animals, so we know what it is to feel pain and to suffer. Like other animals, we are capable of empathy, imagining the suffering of others.
If you are a parent, you most likely know the strong urge to feed and protect your child. If you remember childhood or have spent time with little children recently, you’ll probably understand a child’s desire for belonging with family, to play and explore, and to feel safe. Other animals share these instincts, and the happiness that comes from fulfilling them. And billions of animals living for us in factory farms suffer from not being able to live according to their instinctive desires.
In recent years the media has publicised many strong reasons for going vegan, especially how veganism can reduce harm done to the environment and harm done to human health. Movies like Cowspiracy and The Game Changers have persuaded many people to eat more plant-based food.
Oddly, the lives of animals have received less attention.
Even to speak of it at all opens us to accusations of extremism, self-righteousness, hypocrisy and naivety. Most commonly, we get called ‘annoying vegans’.
And we continue to live with this amazing thing happening in our world: billions of animals suffering and dying needlessly, concealed, scarcely acknowledged.
You already know what I’m going to say next. Of course, we don’t have to support this suffering in the era of human choices. We can choose not to buy and eat animal foods. Every food purchase is a decision about what kind of world we should make in the Anthropocene. We have power together.
Want to know more?
To learn more about animal agriculture, check out the movie Dominion or Earthlings, or read Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals.
To try switching to a plant-based diet, sign up to Veganuary or Challenge 22.
References are given in the links. Referencing is not an endorsement. Some websites contain disturbing footage of suffering caused to animals.
