Thursday, March 28

Factories of animals for human consumption



Don’t be fooled: they are euphemistically called “macro farms”, but they are actually meat factories for human consumption.

Meat factories where animals spend a good part of their lives, if not all, locked in small cages that barely let them move or even turn around to look at the calf that has just given birth.

These are conditions of extreme confinement, sometimes accompanied by mutilations such as the amputation of tails, horns or beaks so that they do not bite, attack or peck. Such is the stress they suffer!

Can anyone imagine that the meat of animals raised – it is a saying – under these conditions is equivalent in quality to that of those others who enjoy enough space and can breathe the pure air and see the sun at some point in their lives?

Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of “Sapiens: Animals to Gods” calls factory farming “one of the worst crimes in history.”

“Tens of billions of animals capable of complex sensations and emotions live and die in a production chain,” he writes.

The most scandalous thing is that many governments subsidize a livestock production system oriented mainly towards export while small farms have disappeared one after another.

According to a study by the NGO Friends of the Earth and the German foundation of the environmental party named after the writer Heinrich Böll, between 2015 and 2020, the sector also received 478,000 million dollars in investment and pension funds, banks and other entities, especially in the US and the European Union.

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How can we be surprised that with such generous aid, intensive or industrial livestock farming has a powerful “lobby” that defends it from criticism from environmental organizations?

Well, it is not just about the torture of all kinds daily inflicted on animals destined for sacrifice for human consumption.

Factory farming, the objective of which is to fatten animals as quickly as possible to obtain the maximum benefit – that of a few – in the shortest possible time, also causes enormous damage to the planet and to those of us who live on it.

This type of livestock makes use of enormous amounts of fertilizers, in addition to pesticides and antibiotics, which in turn generate bacterial multi-resistance.

The contamination of the aquifers by the filtration of the nitrates of the slurry – the excrement mixed with the water-, the increase of the greenhouse effect due to the CO2 emissions of animal origin and the deforestation for the production of animal feed are other disastrous consequences.

Therefore, the statements of the Spanish Minister of Consumption, Alberto Garzón, to the British newspaper The Guardian, in which he criticized the misnamed “macro-farms” and defended, on the contrary, traditional livestock farming, have full meaning.

The fact that other members of the Government and socialist politicians – let’s not talk about the opposition anymore – have distanced themselves from his words is only explained by hypocrisy, cowardice and inconsistency when many politicians talk about fighting climate change.

As Minister Garzón says, for the benefit not only of our health, but of the future of the planet, we must eat less meat and that the meat we consume is at least of good quality and not from stressed or tortured animals such as those that come out of these supposed farms.

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