Thanks for writing this. I’ve been interested in the suffering of farmed animals for ten years now, and I’m still discovering terrible things about their fate. One example is the treatment of breeding females chickens in the fast-growing broiler industry. The industry is facing what it calls the ‘broiler breeder paradox’, i.e. the fact that it has developed strains of chickens that put on weight very quickly, which is exactly what they are looking for to produce large volumes of cheap meat, but which has consequences for the reproductive performance of the breeding animals (who obviously share the same genetics). One of their way of ‘dealing’ with this paradox is to subject breeding females to severe food restriction, which causes them chronic, distressing hunger. The Welfare Footprint Project has written on this.
In the case of human populations, the aversive nature of the sensation that accompanies food deprivation has been long used as a method of punishment and torture. Prolonged food deprivation has been described as “excruciating until the point of becoming an unbearable source of pain”, with the obsession with food dominating all thoughts, to a life-threatening point where one would risk their life for a small piece of bread.
Thanks for writing this. I’ve been interested in the suffering of farmed animals for ten years now, and I’m still discovering terrible things about their fate. One example is the treatment of breeding females chickens in the fast-growing broiler industry. The industry is facing what it calls the ‘broiler breeder paradox’, i.e. the fact that it has developed strains of chickens that put on weight very quickly, which is exactly what they are looking for to produce large volumes of cheap meat, but which has consequences for the reproductive performance of the breeding animals (who obviously share the same genetics). One of their way of ‘dealing’ with this paradox is to subject breeding females to severe food restriction, which causes them chronic, distressing hunger. The Welfare Footprint Project has written on this.