Animals also have a voice
Have you ever really thought about what you eat? Many people don’t want to think about the lives of the animals they devour at the dinner table. We are all animals, all living, breathing creatures and it’s wrong of us to take so many lives each day.
Being a vegetarian for six years, and a vegan for about a month, has taught me to think about the animals. All animals have a voice but unfortunately over 300 million people in the U.S.do not hear their cries for help.
Every year millions of animals are killed for consumption and fashion. Very few of these animals are brought up free range or in the wild. A vast majority are brought up in horrible cramped conditions of factory farms. Most of the livestock America consumes will never see the light of day. Many factory farms cover the windows so people can’t look in, creating a dark cold room stuffed with chickens, pigs, turkeys, or even rabbits.
Animals in factory farms are pumped full with antibiotics and steroids. After the animals consume their steroid cocktail, it’s broken down in their body, which is exactly what you would be eating at a family barbeque. The antibiotics they use on the animals are not fit for human consumption, causing certain antibiotics to be rendered useless for people. Steroids are no better; they can cause weight gain and cause problems later in life for the consumer of the meat. Steroids are used on the animals to cause massive weight gain. Many times the massive growth disables animals and makes their bodies too big for their legs to handle, keeping them in the same spot for the rest of their life until they are slaughtered for consumption.
Not only can the livestock not walk but they are usually so packed together they wouldn’t have much room to walk anyway. The lack of space causes the animals to become aggressive, insane, and cannibalistic. The factory farms’ solution to these actions by their livestock is to cut off beaks, and remove all teeth. During this process the animals are not given any sedative. They cut beaks off chicks by burning them off, and rip the teeth out of other animals as soon as humanly possible, often times causing major infections.
As if the helpless animals didn’t get enough horrible treatment, many animals in factory farms are abused, beaten, killed for no reason, and treated like inanimate objects. Factory farms usually hire people who don’t care about the animals and there are many videos of staff jokingly kicking, hitting, and stunning animals for entertainment.
Many people argue that if we didn’t slaughter so many animals every day, we would be overrun by them. Their argument is completely invalid and shows obvious ignorance. Based on the life cycle and survival of the fittest cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, rabbits, any mass-produced animals would simple fit back into where they came, and would not continue to multiply the way we make them. Factory farms change genes and artificially inseminate their animals, which is not what would happen in a natural environment.
Imagine this: you are a toddler and you are tied up so you can’t move because the factory farm wants you to be almost pure fat without any trace of muscle. You are a mother who has just given birth and all of your children are ripped from you when all you wanted was to take care of them. You are shoved into an assembly line and flipped upside down and slit across the throat and you can feel the blood and life drain out of you but before you die, you are taken to a machine that will burn the fur off of you. You are still alive when your feathers are ripped out of you and are still struggling for life when your neck is slit and you are plunged into boiling water, where you finally drown and are cooked to death.
Everyone needs to be a little more aware of their eating habits. Eating meat is eating our own. The animals were here before us, and we should not continue to exploit them in the way that we do.