If farm animals are treated as badly as you say, why are they so productive? Wouldn they stop producing meat, milk and eggs if they were treated inhumanely?
Farm animals can be profoundly mistreated and still “produce,” in the same way that profoundly mistreated humans can be overweight, sexually active and able to produce offspring. Like humans, farm animals can “adapt,” up to a point, to living in slums and concentration camp conditions. Is this an argument for slums and concentration camps? Farm animals do not gain weight, lay eggs, and produce milk because they are comfortable, content, or well-cared for, but because they have been manipulated specifically to do these things through genetics, medications, and management techniques. For example, cage layer producers artificially stimulate and extend egg production by keeping the lights burning for 16 or 17 hours a day to force the hen’s pituitary gland to secrete increased quantities of the hormone that activates the ovary. Animals in production agriculture are slaughtered at extremely young ages, before disease and death have decimated them as would otherwise happen even with all the d
