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Animals

Farmed animals – which include fish! – live a miserable life, and they do suffer unnecessarily. To meet the constant demand of humans (especially in the West) who want to eat whatever they want whenever they want, animals are treated like production machines. They are often "genetically improved" to grow faster and/or produce more (e.g. milk), under very intensive practices – and this creates immense suffering and distress, because they are sentient beings! Some of these standard practice – at least in the Western world – are: male are coerced into ejaculating; females are penetrated and forcibly impregnated as soon as they finish the previous pregnancy, to continue to “produce new creatures” for us to eat. Babies in the diary farms are separated from their mothers after a few days from being born, and they are killed or bred for meat - sometimes transported somewhere else. Piglets tailed get cut off so they don’t bite each other’s tails due to stress. Chicken's and hen's beaks are mutilated so they don't cannibalise each other. And so on... Most animals are confined in small cages or rooms and never see the sunlight for their whole life. Think if this was to happen to your dog, wouldn’t it be cruel? Why would it be ok for other animals to go through this hell, but for your dog or cat it would not? I could go on with more and more examples, but the long story short is: there is nothing "natural" about the meat or animal products that we eat, and we should stop these concentration camps of horror, pain and suffering.

Sources and interesting reads#

My intent here is not to give you a comprehensive view on the current practices in the animal industry, because I am not an expert, and also because they can vary from country to country, and from one place to another. My main sources are UK, US and EU, due to my geographical location.

The aim of this page is to share things I've read or I have come to know, and hope to stimulate some ethical questions on the way humans have come to modify, influence and control the lives of billions of animals - sacrificing their right to a life free of pain, stress and suffering, with the only objective of providing pleasure for ourselves. You can read more on why we don't need to eat animal product in Health

  • The world’s population is more than three times larger than it was in the mid-twentieth century. https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population
  • How animals are killed (UK). https://www.rspca.org.uk/adviceandwelfare/farm/slaughter/factfile and https://www.gov.uk/guidance/slaughter-poultry-livestock-and-rabbits-for-home-consumption#bleeding-poultry
  • What happens in the diary cow industry (UK). https://www.ciwf.org.uk/farm-animals/cows/dairy-cows/
  • Mutilation from beak trimming to chickens and hens (UK). https://www.conservativeanimalwelfarefoundation.org/end-cages-for-egg-laying-birds/a-year-on-ending-debeaking-in-the-uk/
  • Proudly talking about the “progress” of the chicken and egg industry. https://www.britannica.com/topic/poultry-farming
  • Tail cutting is a common industry practice in pork production. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7552632/
  • "Fish experience pain and that pain-related behavioural changes are conserved across vertebrates". https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0290
  • Seaspiracy: the fish industry impact on oceans and planet (documentary). https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81014008
  • Christspiracy: (documentary): a documentary that explores the “morality” of what humans do to non-human animals, and how that’s been influenced by religions through centuries. https://www.christspiracy.com/
  • “How to argue with a meat eater” (books), written by Ed Winters. https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/how-to-argue-with-a-meat-eater-and-win-every-time-ed-winters/7441293?ean=9781785044496
  • Do plants feel pain? https://sentientmedia.org/do-plants-feel-pain
  • Food for profit (documentary). https://www.foodforprofit.com/en/
  • [For Italian speaking] Legal ways to kill animals. https://www.essereanimali.org/normativa-abbattimento-macello-animali-italia/
  • [For Italian speaking] Tutte le crudelta’ (legali) che avvengono negli allevamenti. https://animalequality.it/blog/tutte-le-crudelta-degli-allevamenti-e-dei-macelli/