Thank you for taking the time to write this and for clearly caring deeply about animal suffering. Two notes:
The species focused on do not reflect the most farmed globally. I see that aquatic animals and insects are not included in this write-up. Ducks are also excluded though many times more ducks than cows are farmed and slaughtered each year. It might be worth acknowledging this toward the top.
The focus is very much on physical suffering and its presumed mental effects are implied, but I don’t see true acknowledgment of explicitly psychological/mental/emotional anguish, such as from the nearly-universal experience of watching friends and family die horrible deaths.
Thanks for the reply! I was focusing on the most common animals that Americans eat, though I should perhaps have noted that. I disagree that the focus was very much on physical suffering—I talk about sleep deprivation and the sadness of being separated from parents, to give a few examples.
I might be taking it too literally, but given these points, it could be worth renaming this post from a “comprehensive fact sheet of almost all the ways animals are mistreated in factory farms” (I wish such a list could fit in a few thousand words...) to something like a “fact sheet of some of the most salient causes of suffering on factory farms.” Then again, I realize that’s a worse title and has way less rhetorical power… maybe you could come up with something more creative than me!
Thank you for taking the time to write this and for clearly caring deeply about animal suffering. Two notes:
The species focused on do not reflect the most farmed globally. I see that aquatic animals and insects are not included in this write-up. Ducks are also excluded though many times more ducks than cows are farmed and slaughtered each year. It might be worth acknowledging this toward the top.
The focus is very much on physical suffering and its presumed mental effects are implied, but I don’t see true acknowledgment of explicitly psychological/mental/emotional anguish, such as from the nearly-universal experience of watching friends and family die horrible deaths.
Thanks for the reply! I was focusing on the most common animals that Americans eat, though I should perhaps have noted that. I disagree that the focus was very much on physical suffering—I talk about sleep deprivation and the sadness of being separated from parents, to give a few examples.
I might be taking it too literally, but given these points, it could be worth renaming this post from a “comprehensive fact sheet of almost all the ways animals are mistreated in factory farms” (I wish such a list could fit in a few thousand words...) to something like a “fact sheet of some of the most salient causes of suffering on factory farms.” Then again, I realize that’s a worse title and has way less rhetorical power… maybe you could come up with something more creative than me!
Thanks for writing this.