That tens of billions of land animals are slaughtered every year in demented torture farms where they are forced to live in filth and feces, where they can’t turn around, where their tails and beaks are snipped off with a knife, and they choke on the noxious fumes expelled from the feces of the caged animals around them—neither able to move nor breathe properly nor express their natural behavior. The humane slaughter they’re routinely afforded is being thrust into a gas chamber, though some have it considerably worse and are boiled alive.
The situations we force on these terrified, innocent, defenseless animals is one that no one would hesitate to call torture if we inflicted it on a dog or a human child. And yet we inflict it on a population more than the number of people who have ever lived for the sake of omelets and chicken sandwiches.
And yet it is relatively easy to do something about it. To end complicity in this deranged holocaust, one must only stop paying for animal products. For just a dollar, one can spare animals from many years in a cage. Evil has no clearer face than factory farming—those nightmare sheds where animals are fattened up and then go to die—and none of us should remain silent in the face of their cries, or be the reason for them.