Last year, I wrote a great deal about the rise of “ventilation shutdown plus” (VSD+), a method being used to mass kill poultry birds on factory farms by sealing off the airflow inside barns and pumping in extreme heat using industrial-scale heaters, so that the animals die of heatstroke over the course of hours. It is one of the worst forms of cruelty being inflicted on animals in the US food system — the equivalent of roasting animals to death — and it’s been used to kill tens of millions of poultry birds during the current avian flu outbreak.
As of this summer, the most recent period for which data is available, more than 49 million birds, or over 80 percent of the depopulated total, were killed in culls that used VSD+ either alone or in combination with other methods, according to an analysis of USDA data by Gwendolen Reyes-Illg, a veterinary adviser to the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), an animal advocacy nonprofit. These mass killings, or “depopulations,” in the industry’s jargon, are paid for with public dollars through a USDA program that compensates livestock farmers for their losses.
If your question is genuine, these small farms you speak of are still breeding animals with intent to slaughter them. At the end of the day, the only meaningful difference with a small farm is that you can probably shake the hand of the person who needlessly killed an animal. Can’t get that at those big mean factory farms, that’s for sure.
Assuming that’s the intent is an asshole move. What if the primary intent is to extract nutrition from land that is otherwise unproductive?
Is it not the intent? A farmer generally isn’t going to raise an animal for fun. That wouldn’t be profitable, and small farms are already difficult to make a living on.
I can entertain the idea that I could walk up to a farmer and ask them what their intent is, and they reply, “why it’s to extract nutrition from land that is otherwise unproductive, of course!”. But the end result is the same in either case regardless of stated intent: animals are being killed unnecessarily.
To be clear, none of this applies to people who rely on animal products to survive (e.g. people in the unproductive land you mentioned). I’m talking about people like myself (and likely many others here) who have access to supermarkets and other products of a globalized food system. Like Uncle Ben said, with great
powerprivilege comes great responsibility.deleted by creator
Land has more value than economic activity, such as natural habitat and biodiversity and recreation (all things farmers destroy lol)