Most of the animals who are killed by humans are those who are killed in order to become food for humans to eat. Moreover, the number of animals who LITERALLY suffer to death as a result of animal agriculture dwarfs the number of animals killed for fur, killed in shelters AND killed in laboratories combined. Your food choices matter MOST.

Over at the nerdy blog Counting Animals, the author has taken a close look at the number of animals who suffer to death as a result of animal agriculture. These are the animals who don’t die as a result of slaughter, they literally suffer to death as a result of factory farming methods.

The analysis begins:

“There is no dispute over the fact that well over 95% of the animals that die at the hands of humans are those that are killed for food. But, unfortunately, it is also true that they receive a smaller share of human compassion than that warranted by either their numbers or the intensity of their suffering.”

I added the emphasis above (bold) while the Counting Animals blogger did the other addition. The numbers came out to be these below.

Animals killed for fur, in shelters and in laboratories: approximately 19,523,000

• Fur: approximately 3,873,000 animals killed for fur each year. Some are wild animals like foxes caught in traps but most are minks raised on fur farms.
• Shelters: an estimated 4,000,000 animals are killed in shelters each year. These animals are mostly cats, dogs, and rabbits.
• Labs: about 11,650,000 animals are killed in research facilities every year. Most of these animals are rats and mice.

Animals who suffer to death: over 137,831,000

• Chickens: each year about 7,533,000 hens suffer to death as a result of battery cages in the egg industry, about 98,014,000 chickens suffer to death as a result of leg deformities in the meat industry, and approximately 32,284,000 chickens suffer to death during transport from farm to slaughter adding up to approximately 137,831,000 chickens who suffer to death before slaughter.
• Other farmed animals (turkeys, pigs, cows): not counted in this examination.

Check out the whole article for details on how the numbers above were crunched. The link is http://www.countinganimals.com/is-vegan-outreach-right-about-how-many-animals-suffer-to-death/

Looking purely at the issue of animal death and disregarding suffering, Animal Visuals has created a useful tool that compares various food sources and the related numbers of animal deaths each food causes. Take a look:

There, the creator Mark Middleton concludes:

“A diet of plants causes the fewest animals to be killed. Leaving chickens and eggs out of our diets will have the greatest effect on reducing the suffering and death caused by what we eat.”

For the complete analysis by Middleton, read his detailed examination at http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/data/1mc

Clearly, the numbers indicate that the largest abuse of animal welfare and animal rights take place in animal agriculture. You can “save” more animals simply by refusing to eat them and by encouraging others to do the same than by virtually any other form of animal advocacy.

Despite all the above, Ward M. Clark has published a rant against veganism based on the unlikely possiblity that a very carefully planned omnivorous diet consisting of meat sourced from either farmed animals who graze purely on land unfit for any other more environmentally-sound purpose or animals who have been hunted in an environmentally-friendly* manner might cause fewer animal deaths than some vegan diets:

“A pound of wild venison (net cost in animal death: about 1/120th of one animal) almost certainly causes less ‘death and suffering’ than a pound of rice (net cost in animal death: including rodents, insect, reptiles and amphibians, number of deaths may range into the hundreds).”

Clark compares apples to oranges, ignoring the primary reason that the majority of Americans do not hunt or work in slaughterhouses: there is a difference between intentionally and needlessly killing an animal versus accidentally causing the death of an animal. For example, if we are unable to stop our car just as a squirrel runs into the road that accidental death doesn’t give us license to breed, confine, mutilate, and slaughter rabbits to make fur hats.

Consistent with his bias, Clark doesn’t address the fact that most people who eat meat do not eat meat that could be described as humanely sourced; most people eat animal products that come from factories:

“For each food animal species, animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm - 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat, 96 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle”
source: Eating Animals

But the most compelling argument against Clark’s claim is that even if the diet he imagines is possible for some people, it’s still the case that most people will not have that possibility. There simply isn’t enough land to feed everyone in a way that is both “humane” and omnivorous. The math on that is easy: if everyone ate wild venison (aka Bambi’s mother) then there would quickly be no more deer.

The truth is undeniable: anyone who thinks that animal suffering and animal deaths matter will embrace a plant-based diet. Whether they should go 100% vegan or not may be debateable depending on their particular circumstances, but there is simply no ethical justification whatsoever for consuming factory farmed animal products.

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*Environmentally-friendly hunting is usually an oxymoron. See why in this article >>

Hat tip to Marcus for drawing my attention to these articles.

In a recent study, [Criminology professor Amy] Fitzgerald crunched numbers from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database, census data, and arrest and offence reports from 581 U.S. counties from 1994 to 2002.

“I have a graph that shows that as the number of slaughterhouse workers in a community increases, the crime rate also increases,” she says. [...]

Fitzgerald compared slaughterhouse communities to those with comparison industries — dangerous, repetitive work that did not involve killing animals. These were not associated with a rise in crime at all, she says. In some cases, they seemed to bring the crime rate down.“The unique thing about (abattoirs) is that (workers are) not dealing with inanimate objects, but instead dealing with live animals coming in and then killing them, and processing what’s left of them.”

You can read the whole article here >>

And for further reading on this same topic, consider reading these previous Vegan Soapbox articles:

• Let People Care
• When Visitors Come
• Workers Suffer Alongside Animals
• Overworked, Underpaid Turkey Killers
• Race, Class, And Industrialized “Food”
• Resources For The Human Animal Rights Discussion
• Animal Rights Violations Beget Human Rights Violations
• Slaughterhouse Workers

Got more to add to the discussion of the link between violence to animals and violence to humans? Say your piece below in the comments!

“Although physically hidden from view, the grim realities of the factory farm are now widely known due the pioneering work of an influential cadre of writers. Peter Singer (Animal Liberation), Anna Moore Lappe (Diet for a Small Planet), Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), and Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals), among others, have succeeded in rattling mainstream nerves with their forthright analyses of factory farming. Passively or actively, we have absorbed their messages in all their gory detail and, with good reason, declared ourselves to be disturbed–often deeply so–with factory farming. Consumers are disturbed for the simple but powerful reason that, however unexamined the sentiment might be, we believe that farm animals deserve better.  Deep down–again, however vague the notion is– we oppose factory farms because we know that animals matter enough not to be unnecessarily harmed.” read the rest >>

The notes below are from a talk given at one of the morning plenary sessions by Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy and Why They Matter as well as Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. According to Literati.net, he has published more than 200 papers and 22 books!

From his talk:

• Why do we slaughter sentience? How do we decide who lives, who dies, and who suffers?
• Why do we do invasive things to animals in the name of entertainment or science?
• Who do we eat and why? WHO not what.
• Power doesn’t mean license.
• Good welfare isn’t good enough.
• What do the animals feel about what we do to them?
• Fish feel pain. There’s actually more scientific evidence that fish feel pain than there is that human neonates or preterm infants feel pain.
• We’ve recently discovered more data on the emotional lives of animals formerly thought to be unemotional: bees and jellyfish.
• Chickens can empathize and do math.
• Cows and pigs respond positively to touch and friendship… just like humans!
• Chimpanzes suffer PTSD from captivity.
• The differences between humans and animals are of degree, not kind. We all suffer, we all experience joy.

Here is a video of Marc Bekoff describing what he does:

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Our notes from the 2011 AR conference will be all at http://www.vegansoapbox.com/topics/ar2011/. Notes from 2009′s conference are at http://www.vegansoapbox.com/topics/ar-2009/.

From Striking At The Roots blog:

Undercover videos and other images taken inside factory farms are unquestionably among the most powerful tools activists have in the campaign for animals. But if lawmakers and animal ag interests in Iowa and Florida have their way, they could earn investigators prison time in those states.

Mark Hawthorne explains some recent bills that would restrict the ability to obtain undercover video exposés of animal agribusiness and the reactions from some animal advocates:

Not a single federal law protects farmed animals from cruelty during their short lives in factory farms, and Iowa specifically excludes these animals from anti-cruelty protection. “Without undercover investigations, there are no meaningful watchdogs protecting animals from egregious cruelty in these facilities,” says MFA’s executive director Nathan Runkle. “This bill is a blatant violation of free speech and freedom of the press. It keeps consumers in the dark, threatens public health, and hurts animals by shielding animal abusers from public scrutiny.”

Animal law expert Bruce Wagman says these laws will have a chilling effect on the ability of animal advocates to expose abuses. [...]

“I would think that the lobbyists behind this campaign to quell scrutiny of existing industry practices would, if their clients truly had nothing to hide, be pushing for public funding to install streaming web cameras so their clients could show off their state-of-the art operations rather than trying to prevent those who question current practice from exposing them,” says attorney Scott Heiser, director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s Criminal Justice Program. “At a time when many have lost faith in government’s regulatory abilities, I can’t help but wonder how much factory farming profits would drop if the average American consumer were confronted with candid and accurate images depicting the conditions endured by the animals used to produce their food.”

Read the entire article here >>

And here’s another link about the issue:

• HSUS: http://hsus.typepad.com/wayne/2011/03/anti-investigation-bills.html

Remember, if they won’t let you see where your food comes from, DON’T EAT IT!

In short, if I keep a pig as a pet, I can’t kick it. If I keep a pig I intend to sell for food, I can pretty much torture it. State laws known as “Common Farming Exemptions” allow industry — rather than lawmakers — to make any practice legal as long as it’s common. [...]

thanks to Common Farming Exemptions, as long as I “raise” animals for food and it’s done by my fellow “farmers” (in this case, manufacturers might be a better word), I can put around 200 million male chicks a year through grinders (graphic video here), castrate — mostly without anesthetic — 65 million calves and piglets a year, breed sick animals (don’t forget: more than half a billion eggs were recalled last summer, from just two Iowa farms) who in turn breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria, allow those sick animals to die without individual veterinary care, imprison animals in cages so small they cannot turn around, skin live animals, or kill animals en masse to stem disease outbreaks.All of this is legal, because we will eat them.

We have “justifiable purposes”: pleasure (or, at this point, habit, because eating is hardly a pleasure if you do it in your car, or in 10 minutes), convenience — there are few things more filling per dollar than a cheeseburger — and of course corporate profits. We should be treating animals better and raising fewer of them; this would naturally reduce our consumption. All in all, a better situation for us, the animals, the world.

For more on CFEs (Common Farming Exemptions), please take a look at these websites:

• http://humanefacts.com/
• http://www.farmsanctuary.org/issues/factoryfarming/
• http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/death-on-a-factory-farm/index.html
• http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/campaigns/factory_farming/
• http://humanemyth.org/
• http://www.farmforward.com/farming-forward/factory-farming
• http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/factoryfarms/
• http://www.eatinganimals.com/site/book/

Where Bittman’s analysis falls short is in his assumption that there aren’t good reasons why companion animals have more protections than farmed animals. Certainly, looking purely at the aspect of cruelty, environmental damage, and risk to human health, there is no crime worse than factory farming. In that, Bittman and I agree completely. However, there’s really no need for Bittman to belittle the suffering endured by a pet hamster who was tortured and killed.

Bittman’s rage against factory farming cruelty doesn’t seem to stem directly from concern for cows, pigs, or chickens. Rather, it seems to come from outrage that a pet hamster might have any legal protections at all. He finds that entire notion absurd, commenting “the city routinely is poisoning rodents as quickly and futilely as it possibly can” while pet owners can’t legally do the same to their rodents.

Indeed there is a contradiction in the amount of suffering these animals may endure. If we quantified animal suffering and measured it against human pleasure, there’s no question that the “food industry” causes far more ‘units of suffering‘ per ’units of pleasure’ than the pet industry, even including puppymills. And thus, when it comes to animal rights and welfare, there is no better cause than vegan advocacy.

However, that doesn’t mean we ought to abandon the legal enforcement of laws that protect companion animals. That doesn’t mean we ought to joke about “hamstercide” or that we ought to ignore an angry teen who killed her sister’s hamster. Recognizing animal cruelty when it takes place inside a family home is a first step to societal recognition of animal cruelty when it’s hidden behind closed doors at factory farms.

Let’s begin with the things the article got right:

• “If you think about it, and it’s much simpler not to, it can be hard to justify other beings suffering pain, fear and death so that we can enjoy their flesh.”
• “The differences that do seem to matter are things like the fact that plants don’t have nerves or brains. They cannot, we therefore conclude, feel pain.”

Now, before I get to what’s wrong with the NYT article, I’ll ask you to please watch this video:

OK, now let’s talk about the article’s issue: plant pain. The article author, Carol Kaesuk Yoon, argues that since there is a teeny tiny possibility that plants feel pain then animal pain doesn’t matter.

Here is all you need to know about plant pain in relationship to eating animals:

1. Whether or not plants feel pain DOES NOT MATTER in the cotext of OBVIOUS suffering shown in the video above.
2. There is NO EXCUSE for the suffering that farmed animals currently endure. NONE.

Go ahead and debate the possibility of plant pain all you want. Sure, it’s possible that plants feel pain. Unlikely, but possible. And if you want to become a fruitarian I won’t interfere. Go right ahead.

But don’t think – even for a second – that there’s anything about the possibility of plant pain that can justify factory farms and the horrific cruelties endured by billions of farmed animals.

From the water to the cutting table, fish are tortured – suffocated, skinned and dismembered, all while conscious. The are cruelly killed; they feel pain.

Learn more here >>

Even after watching the funny and non-gory mockumentary American Zombie, which features a vegan zombie, I had nightmares.

Here’s the trailer for American Zombie:

And so it was with reluctance that I watched the premier episode of The Walking Dead after my own mother who knows how freaked out I get about zombies tricked me into beginning it. Alas, I was hooked and I just had to finish the episode. I needed to know what happened.

Later that night, the nightmares came and I vowed not to watch any more episodes. I went back to another kind of gore and I watched the last season of Dexter in two days. Dexter, a series on Showtime about a serial killing vigilante doesn’t bother me as much as The Walking Dead, a show on AMC about zombies.

There’s something strange about me: the more realistic the violence is, the less it haunts my subconscious. I think it might be due to an active imagination. The horrors created in mind are intangible and thus never conquerable. The horrors of factory farms, however, are real. And even though the cruelty, gore, suffering, blood, and death that surrounds them is unimaginably terrible, we don’t have to imagine it, it’s reality. As horrific as it is to think about the torture that most farmed animals endure, this problem is conquerable. This problem is solvable. We can fix this. The solution is simple: vegan.

Back to zombies: I’ve still been thinking about that new AMC show that’s getting such rave reviews. And I kind of want to know what happens after the pilot. Zombies, though incredibly scary, are fascinating. So when I stumbled upon a blog post called “A Vegan Take On The Walking Dead” at I Eat Grass, I thought the list of zombie pros and cons was rather funny. Among them:

Pro: “Level 10 vegan guilt trip: ‘Hey, you remember that zombie who ate Fred the other day? That’s how I feel when you eat steak.’”
Con: “Your compassion for all life, even the undead, may be your downfall.”
Pro: “You can finally get everything you want at Whole Foods because it will be free!!”
Con: “Zombies caught one of those emaciated junk food vegans and word gets out that vegans do taste better. So you’re kind of a delicacy.”

Read the blog post for the whole list >>

I thought of a few more myself:

Pro: Other surviving humans would never see you chowing down on something bloody, accidentally mistake you for a zombie, and shoot you in the head.
Con: Your lack of experience at killing might be a disadvantage if zombies attack.
Pro: Remember, if every vegan convinced one person to go vegan and that trend continued so every new vegan convinced another person to go vegan, we’d have a vegan world in under 10 years. But now that the human population is much smaller, the task of convincing them all to go vegan is so much easier!
Con: Eating raw no longer implies eating vegan.

What do you think might be the pros and cons for living as a vegan in a world full of zombies?

And if you don’t believe it, there’s now a whole book dedicated to the subject: Do Fish Feel Pain? by Victoria Braithwaite.

Discovery News explains:

Braithewaite found that fish have the same kinds of specialized nerve fibers that mammals and birds use to detect noxious stimuli, tissue damage and pain. She also explored whether fish are sentient beings and whether an organism must possess “awareness” to experience pain.

“We now know that fish actually are cognitively more competent than we thought before — some species of fish have very sophisticated forms of cognition,” she said in a press release. “In our experiments we showed that if we hurt fish, they react, and then if we give them pain relief, they change their behavior, strongly indicating that they feel pain.”

Of course, all those studies to find out if fish feel pain were likely incredibly painful to fish.

From the New Yorker:

Intuitively, we all know that animals feel pain. (This, presumably, is why we spend so much money on vet bills.) “No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face,” Foer observes [talking about his book, Eating Animals]. And yet, he notes, we routinely eat fish that have been killed in this way, as well as chickens who have been dragged through the stunner and pigs who have been electrocuted and cows who have had bolts shot into their heads. (In many cases, the cows are not quite killed by the bolts, and so remain conscious as they are skinned and dismembered.)

How many studies, how many books, how much evidence do we need before we say “Enough is enough! It’s wrong to cause so much suffering!“