“Animals and humans suffer and die alike. If you had to kill your own hog before you ate it, most likely you would not be able to do it. To hear the hog scream, to see the blood spill, to see the baby being taken away from its momma, and to see the look of death in the animal’s eye would turn your stomach. So you get the man at the packing house to do the killing for you. In like manner, if the wealthy aristocrats who are perpetrating conditions in the ghetto actually heard the screams of ghetto suffering, or saw the slow death of hungry little kids, or witnessed the strangulation of manhood and dignity, they could not continue the killing. But the wealthy are protected from such horror. . . . If you can justify killing to eat meat, you can justify the conditions of the ghetto. I cannot justify either one.”
“However, it is the people living near and working in these industries who are often most at risk of being harmed. Industrialized agriculture manufactures not only animal disability but also human disability. As with plant-based agriculture, the meat industry hires largely low-income people of color, many of whom are undocumented immigrants.”
“But both Eisnitz and Schlosser found that the most common injuries came not from accidents but from the standard practices that made up the jobs. Whether due to bagging intestines, trimming meat, dismembering cows, or bleeding pigs, the most commonly reported injuries in the meat industry are repetitive stress injuries. A Human Rights Watch report titled Blood, Sweat and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants concludes, “The single largest factor contributing to worker injuries is the speed at which the animals are killed and processed.”
“Facilities often operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, killing hundreds or even thousands of animals every hour. One worker said, “The line is so fast there is no time to sharpen the knife. The knife gets dull and you have to cut harder. That’s when it really starts to hurt, and that’s when you cut yourself.”
“These workers also are exposed to a number of harmful gases and regularly inhale particulate matter, which is an innocuous phrase for such things as “dry fecal matter, feed, animal dander and skin cells, feathers, fungi, dry soil and bacterial endotoxins.” 39 In pig confinement operations, nearly 70 percent of workers experience “one or more symptoms of respiratory irritation or illness.” 40”
“Both Schlosser and Eisnitz confirm this policy and culture of speed, repeatedly describing how simple things such as bathroom breaks or taking a pause because of a sudden injury or illness cause people to lose their jobs. Workers are fired for taking doctor-prescribed sick leave, reporting their injuries, and complaining about animal cruelty. A 2016 report from Oxfam found that some poultry workers in the United States are resorting to wearing diapers as they are denied bathroom breaks. 45 These industries are also notoriously good at leaving injured workers without medical coverage, worker’s comp, or any sort of compensation or livelihood. 46 After they are fired, these disabled and often undocumented workers find it difficult if not impossible to find new work or health care. Eisnitz writes, “Drained of their usefulness to the slaughterhouse, [disabled workers] are cast aside, reminders of a system that places nearly as little value on human life as it does on animal life.” 47”
“The workers, consumers, and exploited animals affected by industrialized agriculture have had their bodies battered, poisoned, debilitated, dismembered, and made ill by these entities.”
“Factory farms and slaughterhouses are disproportionately located in low-income communities. So-called hog factories, for instance, produce huge amounts of air and water pollution that largely comes from the manure lagoons—huge pools of pig shit—always and necessarily present at these farms. The Food Empowerment Project reports, “Residents who live near these factory farms often complain of irritation to their eyes, noses, and throats . . . and increased incidents of depression, tension, anger, confusion, and fatigue.” 17 These sites have been reported to have higher concentrations of dangerous groundwater nitrates and hydrogen sulfide, and “runoff from factory farms—containing a wide range of pathogens, antibiotics, and toxic chemicals—can permeate aquifers and contaminate surrounding groundwater sources.” 18 Along with other health concerns, there are strong correlations between these pollutants and higher rates of asthma.” “Yet despite all the evidence of industrial meat production’s environmental and humanitarian harms, many people suggest that vegans aren’t helping to change the world’s food production systems, whereas conscientious omnivores are.”
Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden - intersecting animal and disability liberation.
479 million goats/year [1]🌱 574 million sheep/year [1]🌱 656 million turkeys/year [1]🌱 69,000 million chickens/year [1]🌱 1,500 million pigs/year [1]🌱 302 million cows/year [1]🌱 at least 900,000 million fish/year [2]🌱 at least 300,000 whales and dolphins in fishing bycatch/year [3]🌱 250,000 endangered turtles in fishing bycatch/year [3]🌱 salmon farms pass diseases to wild fish populations [4]🌱 carnivorous fish farms require even more wild fish feed [5]🌱 1/4 shark species threatened with extinction due to fishing [6]🌱 77% agricultural land for only 18% calorie/37% protein supply [7]🌱 livestock account for 31% of food emissions [8]🌱 twice as many emissions for livestock over crops for human consumption [8]🌱 only 6% of soy is grown for humans [9] 🌱 animal farmers given legal exception to bestiality laws [10]🌱 environmental racism of placing polluting animal farms in marginalized areas [11]🌱 65% lactose intolerance worldwide, higher in POC [12]🌱 right-wing ideologies predict greater acceptance of animal exploitation and more meat consumption [13] 🌱 milk and ties to nazis [14] 🌱 working in animal slaughter tied with PTSD, increased violent crimes [15]🌱 imported colonizer animals replacing native biodiversity[16] 🌱 farmed honeybees endanger critical native pollinaters and reduce species biodiversity [17]🌱 human slavery in fishing supply chain [18]🌱 amazon rainforest & indigenous homes destroyed for harvesting and feeding cows [19]🌱 watchdominion.com [20] 🌱 go vegan [21]
1 https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production 2 http://fishcount.org.uk/published/std/fishcountstudy.pdf 3 https://www.fishforward.eu/en/project/by-catch/ 4 http://www.eurocbc.org/Effects%20of%20Aquaculture%20on%20World%20Fish%20Supplies.htm 5 https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/full/10.1139/cjfas-2016-0379
6 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3897121/
7 https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
8 https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions 9 https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/soybeans 10 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320208999_How_Meat_Changed_Sex_The_Law_of_Interspecies_Intimacy_after_Industrial_Reproduction
11 https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC1440786&blobtype=pdf 12 https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/lactose-intolerance/#frequency 13 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886914000944 14 https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1373&context=asj 15 http://animalstudies.msu.edu/Slaughterhouses_and_Increased_Crime_Rates.pdf 16 https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation 17 https://www.wired.com/2015/04/youre-worrying-wrong-bees/ 18 https://www.unodc.org/documents/human-trafficking/Issue_Paper_-_TOC_in_the_Fishing_Industry.pdf 19 https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/11/brazil-halt-illegal-cattle-farms-fuelling-amazon-rainforest-destruction/ 20 https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch 21 https://veganbootcamp.org/