The Thou of Nature by Crosby Donald A.;

Author:Crosby, Donald A.; [Crosby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3408685
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

Using Animals for Food

Sport hunting and fishing affect miniscule numbers of animals when compared with the staggeringly immense numbers of those affected by the day-to-day commercial cultivation and exploitation of them for our dinner tables. In most cases today, the bodies or products (such as chicken eggs or milk) of land and sea dwelling animals are made available to humans through mechanized, repetitive, rapid-production techniques that repress or give little attention to many of the natural needs or normal kinds of behavior of the individual animals involved. The older traditions of individually focused animal husbandry or of selective, small-scale, and frugally conserving ways of drawing upon aquatic populations of animals for food tend now to be left far behind. The industrial revolution has led to assembly-line, factory-like productions and treatments of animals on land in the sea. These animals tend increasingly to be raised or captured and put to use as profit-making commodities or commensurable units rather than as distinct, living, conscious beings. They have become cogs in a machinery of production.

David J. Wolfson and Mariann Sullivan provide us with this picture of the numbers of farm animals in the United States around their time of writing (2004), showing how it compares with the small percentage involved in human treatments of other groups of land animals:

Approximately 9.5 billion animals die annually in food production in the United States. This compares with some 218 million killed by hunters and trappers and in animal shelters, biomedical research, product testing, dissection, and fur farms combined. Approximately 23 million chickens and some 268,000 pigs are slaughtered every 24 hours in the United States. That's 266 chickens per second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. From a statistician's point of view, since farmed animals represent 98 percent of all animals (even including companion animals and animals in zoos or circuses) with whom humans interact in the United States, all animals are farmed animals; the number that are not is statistically insignificant.2

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