The perception that lots of people have of vegans is that we’re a group unusually prone to hyperbole. While you try to eat your hamburger in peace, we start screeching about gas chambers, rape, torture, and murder. Can’t we just leave you alone? And why do we need to make such extreme claims all the time?
The fact that a group is making extreme claims doesn’t tell you if those claims are correct. The quantum physicists say all sorts of nutty things, but their claims are correct. You need to figure out if the extreme claims are justified. In my view, most extreme claims that are made by vegans are correct. Animal farming is depraved enough that accurate descriptions sound like outrageous hyperbole.
For example, vegans commonly claim that meat production involves torture. This is an outrageous and scandalous claim. It also happens to be true. Animals routinely undergo conditions that we’d all agree were torture if you did them to a dog. For example, they’re often locked in tiny cages where they can’t turn around.
If someone locked a puppy in a cage for its whole life, it would be reasonable to say they were torturing the puppy. Similarly, if after doing this, they cut off the puppies’ fingers without anesthetic and burned it with a hot iron, calling this torture would not be outrageous hyperbole. It would be accurate. But all this things are routine in the animal farming industry.
Some of the widespread practices that are reasonably called torture:
Grinding up baby chicks in shredders. This happens to billions of them every year.
Suffocating fish to death (after starving them for several days).
Selectively breeding animals to be barely able to walk.
Locking them in tiny cages where they can’t turn around.
Sending them into transport trucks so that a huge fraction of them break bones.
Systematically starving millions of egg-laying hens to boost egg production.
Disbudding with a ~600 degree iron.
Debeaking.
Branding.
These were just examples from memory—many more examples could be given. And these describe ordinary industry practices. If one accounts for what happens when ordinary practice is not followed—say, when a million birds are boiled alive every year, or when a chicken’s foot is ripped off, or when tails are torn off slowly with dull pliers, or when workers hit and kick animals as they do routinely—then torture is even more common and extreme.
Or, to take another example, vegans talk a lot about murdering animals. People think this is outrageous. But if I shot a puppy in cold blood for no reason, few would think it was outrageous to describe it as murder. So if we kill animals by the billions, despite not needing to, and torture them as well, then this is accurately described as murder.
Why do we talk about gas chambers so much? The answer is that animals are often killed or stunned* in gas chambers*. I recommend ▶watching videos of it if you deny that it’s a horrific experience for the animals.
Why do we talk about rape? Because the conditions animals undergo are ones that you’d call rape if someone did them to a human. For example, this is what’s done to turkeys (similar things are done to cows):
The hens weigh 20 to 30 pounds and are terrified, beating their wings and struggling in panic. They go through this every week for more than a year, and they don’t like it. Once you have grabbed her with one hand, you flop her down chest first on the edge of the pit with the tail end sticking up. You put your free hand over the vent and tail and pull the rump and tail feathers upward. At the same time, you pull the hand holding the feet downward, thus “breaking” the hen so that her rear is straight up and her vent open. The inseminator sticks his thumb right under the vent and pushes, which opens it further until the end of the oviduct is exposed. Into this, he inserts a straw of semen connected to the end of a tube from an air compressor and pulls a trigger, releasing a shot of compressed air that blows the semen solution from the straw and into the hen’s oviduct. Then you let go of the hen and she flops away.
If you hold a creature down and inject it with semen against its will, we would call this rape in other contexts. Or, at the very least, we’d consider it a serious kind of sexual assault. So it is alarming that we do this to so many animals.
Here’s the most outrageous claim of all: animals experience more suffering in a few years of factory farming than all the suffering of human history. If you torture tens of billions of beings in the most horrendous conditions imaginable, so that in two years a population of land animals is slaughtered that surpasses the number of humans that have ever lived, and more than one order of magnitude more sea creatures are killed than land animals, then the above claim is very plausible. If animals can suffer, as overwhelming evidence indicates they can, the cry going out from the factory farms is loud enough to to drown out all the cries in human history.
The animals that are being tortured by the hundreds of billions are, with respect to their mental capacities, like very mentally disabled humans. Insofar as their suffering matters due to how it feels, as ours does, then factory farming is worse than all the suffering in human history.
These are, as I say, outrageous and incredible claims. But sometimes outrageous things are true. We should direct our outrage at the factory farms that do these wicked things, rather than at the people who point them out.
