Last week it was revealed by the Human Rights Watch that The US government is expanding the number of chickens exploitation companies that can accelerate the speed of their slaughter lines. It also plans to eliminate caps on slaughter line speeds for pigs and cows exploiters in the near future.
Currently, federal regulations allow murdering over a thousand pigs an hour. But a pilot program, which the Trump administration proposes, would allow slaughterhouses to murder as many as they want.
The number of murdered animals per day has already increased over the years, as well as the mass murder goal rate. Now it is going to get even worse. Faster slaughter lines mean even more stress and violence inflicted upon nonhuman animals during the murder process. It’s making one of the worst things in the world even worse.
And to make things even worse than that, the Trump administration has also reduced the number of Occupational Health and Safety Administration inspectors and is pushing for policies that provide greater authorization to animal exploitation companies.
Not only speeding the murder line would increase animals’ suffering in slaughterhouses, if slaughterhouses and corpse processing plants would manage to process more animals in less time, it may also cause a decrease in the prices of animals’ flesh and thereupon an increase in animals consumption.
The speed increase and deregulation would make the hell which is slaughterhouses even worse.
But it is not that the current regulation really helps animals. Every time activists have managed to film inside a slaughterhouse they have documented torture levels which no regulations should have authorized, even under their extremely narrow formal definition of abuse.
But more importantly, even these documents, despite being the most unequivocal evidence of the horror of animal exposition, don’t convince humans to stop supporting it.
Activists are breaking the walls of slaughterhouses for decades now. The walls of the slaughterhouses are already transparent. Nowadays, more and more humans in more and more places are exposed to more and more violence from factory farms by activists who face them with the truth. But the reaction of most is not disgust but indifference.
You tell them the facts. You show them the horrible reality. And it doesn’t help. We will never understand how people can eat the flesh of someone that has been bred in misery and pain. But they do.
It takes much more than making the walls of slaughterhouses transparent.
Many humans find it hard to watch violence towards animals, but it is much harder for them to change their habits. The myths, norms, the cultural symbolism that meat presents, the history, the availability, convenience, and flavor are way stronger.
It is extremely speciesist to suggest the history, the availabilitywaiting for humans to change, as it implies that humans are worth all of animals’ suffering. More than 150 billion sentient beings every single year mustn’t suffer from birth to death so that less than 8 billion humans would briefly enjoy themselves.
Stop hoping that one day all the humans in this world would stop their violent ways, and start acting, so one day there would be the history, no humans in this world.