EA - May The Factory Farms Burn 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: May The Factory Farms Burn, published by Omnizoid on December 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Cross-post of this.“King Lear, late at night on the cliffs asks the blind Earl of Gloucester“How do you see the world?”And the blind man Gloucester replies “I see it feelingly”.Shouldn’t we all?Animals must be off the menu – because tonight they are screaming in terror in the slaughterhouse, in crates, and cages. Vile ignoble gulags of Despair.I heard the screams of my dying father as his body was ravaged by the cancer that killed him. And I realised I had heard these screams before.In the slaughterhouse, eyes stabbed out and tendons slashed, on the cattle ships to the Middle East and the dying mother whale as a Japanese harpoon explodes in her brain as she calls out to her calf.Their cries were the cries of my father.I discovered when we suffer, we suffer as equals.And in their capacity to suffer, a dog is a pig is a bear. . . . . . is a boy.”Phillip Wollen in a speech I’d highly recommendWhen a quarter million birds are stuffed into a single shed, unable even to flap their wings, when more than a million pigs inhabit a single farm, never once stepping into the light of day, when every year tens of millions of creatures go to their death without knowing the least measure of human kindness, it is time to question old assumptions, to ask what we are doing and what spirit drives us on.Matthew Scully “Dominion”Some ethical questions are difficult. One can’t be particularly confident in their views about population ethics, most political issues, normative ethics, etc. Yet the morality of our current consumption of meat is not one of those difficult issues. It is as close to a no-brainer as you get in normative ethics. The question we face is whether we should torture billions of sentient beings before killing them because we like the taste of their flesh.Whether pigs should be roasted to death, hot steam choking and burning them to death. Whether pigs who are smarter than dogs should be forced to give birth in tiny crates where they can’t move around. Whether they should be castrated with no anesthetic, have their tails and teeth cut off with a sharp object and no anesthetic, whether parts of their ears should be cut off for identification purposes, cruelly cramped together during transport unable to stand or move around, and whether they should have a knife dragged across their throat. All of these are the price we pay for cheap pig flesh.Whether chickens should be hung upside down by one leg before being brought on a conveyor to a knife being dragged across their throat—the only saving grace being an error prone electric bath that knocks them unconscious; sometimes. Of course, the combination of blade and electric bath is sufficiently error-prone to boil to death half a million or so sentient beings every year. It becomes abundantly clear that we’re acting horrendously when animal advocates are hoping that we’ll gas animals to death—kill them the way the Nazi’s did, for the ways we do it now are far crueler. Whether chickens should be crammed in a space far smaller than a sheet of paper, living their whole lives without seeing the sun, except in the moments before they’re transferred to their grisly slaughter. We do this to about 80 billion land animals and trillions of sea creatures.Are cheap eggs worth forcing sentient beings to live in shit, with the smell of feces being the only thing detectable from inside the barn? Forcing sentient beings to get osteoporosis and heart disease, all in an attempt to reduce the cost of eggs. This barrage of shit is not limited to egg-laying hens—it’s why a full 80% of pigs have pneumonia upon slaughter. A life lived in so much shit that it causes pneumonia the vast majority of the time is not how we ought to treat...