Today is World Farm Animals Day. “Farm animals” are actually animals who once were like any other animal until humans have picked them to be its main resource for food. Humans have turned these sentient animals to the poorest beings on earth, not only by confining them in the worst conditions in history, but also by confining them in their own bodies. Humans have so severely modified sentient beings (sentient beings they now refer to as farm animals), to the point that they suffer merely from living in their own bodies.
Every year, humans are doubly imprisoning more than a hundred billion sentient beings. In the torture facilities they have designed to keep them in called factory farms, and in torture facility they have designed to keep them called their own body.
The following are some examples of the second prison of “farm animals”.
Chickens
Picture a six-year-old child weighting 156kg. Terrifying!
Now try to imagine this child walk. Hideous and cruel for a child, but a reality for a six weeks old chick.
Naturally chicks reach maturity at 18 weeks of age, when they weigh less than 1kg (2.2lb). A human child reaches maturity at 18 years of age weighing about 70kg.
By 1976, exploited chickens reached 1kg just after 6 weeks rather than 18. So picture, for comparison, not an eighteen-year-old but a six-year-old child weighing about 70kg.
Today, because of the intensive selective breeding by the chicken industry in the past decades, the six-week-old chicken weighs up to 2.6kg.
Forced to grow three times faster than normal chickens, the chicks suffer from painful skeletal and metabolic diseases. One of the harshest is Tibial Dyschondroplasia (TD), in which the young leg bones of the growing birds develop crippling fissures and fractures.
The combination of forced rapid growth and excessive weight causes chronic, painful lameness and abnormal posture. The bird’s body grows too fast for the bone plates to accommodate. Consequently, the birds develop angular bone deformities and Spondylolisthesis (“kinky back”), in which the vertebra snaps and puts pressure on the spinal cord, causing paralysis. The birds can only move by using their wings for balance.
Several decades ago, 1.2% of chickens suffered from Tibial Dyschondroplasia. Today, 50% of the chickens suffer from this human-created disease.
In addition to TD, genetic manipulations for an accelerated growth also cause about 90% of birds to have a detectable abnormality in their gait. Other pathological leg conditions which have been found in chickens are: Rotated Tibia, Rickets, Angular Bone Deformity and Chondrodystrophy (“slipped tendons”).
Though they live only a few weeks, chickens suffer old-age illnesses such as heart attacks, as their hearts and lungs are unable to keep up with the fast growth of their body muscles.
The strain on their cardiovascular system is enormous, causing “congestive heart failure” which causes ascites ¬- pooling of fluids in the abdomen. The high oxygen demand of rapid growth in the modern farmed chicken combined with restricted space for blood, which flows through the capillaries of the lung, results in an internal accumulation of yellow or blood-stained fluid in the abdomen. Cardiac arrhythmias have been found in chickens as young as 7 days of age.
The accelerated growth rate of chickens combined with the lack of space to move or exercise, force the birds to rest on the wet, dirty, ammonia-ridden litter. This leads to painful breast blisters and hock burns. Foot and breast lesions and ulcerations are also frequent. The chicks can’t stand because their legs are deformed and they can’t sit as a result of the breast blisters and the hock burns. There is no way to avoid constant pain.
Fishes
Farmed fishes have been selectively bred to enhance the industry’s desired traits such as more rapid growth, larger size, greater resistance and “improved feed conversion rates”. Farmed salmon grows twice as fast as wild salmon. The fast growth rates are associated with an increased incidence of cataracts and abnormal heart shape and function.
Also, since sexual maturity reduces the “flesh quality”, fishes undergo another manipulation named Triploidy which makes them sterile. It’s a method of creating fishes with three sets of chromosome instead of the usual two by subjecting newly-fertilised eggs to heat or pressure shock. These fishes are susceptible to a range of health problems, including poorer growth, higher levels of spinal deformities and cataracts.
About 4 years ago the FDA has approved the production, sale, and consumption of genetically modified Salmons, the first transgenic animal approved as “food”.
These salmons are engineered to grow much faster by adding a growth hormone regulating gene from another type of salmon. In addition to being much faster, the growth is also year-round, as a result of another gene added from Ocean Pout.
The genetically modified salmon reaches “market size” in 18 months instead of 3 years. It can mean that the same number of fishes would suffer half of the time, but it would most probably mean that the number of exploited fishes would be doubled. That is what happened in the chicken industry, and it keeps growing every year.
Apart from making the entire system more efficient and thus bigger, genetic engineering would also make the lives of every individual in factory farms even more horrible. Intensive farming already pushes animals to their physiological limits, and now the approved technology of reconstructing their DNA for “higher performance” would further intensify that.
Increasing growth via the manipulation of animal’s genetic code can lead to crippling results. The transgenic salmons suffer from deformities, feeding and breathing difficulties, reduced swimming abilities and lower resistance to diseases.
Sheeps
Sheeps were domesticated about 10,000 years ago and ever since then are bred to suit human desires and bear little resemblance to their wild ancestors.
To provide more surface area for wool, Merinos, the most common type of sheep used in the wool industry, are bred for excess skin wrinkles.
This unnatural overload of wool causes the sheeps to suffer and to die of heat exhaustion during hot months. The wrinkles also collect urine and moisture which attract flies. The flies lay eggs in the folds of the skin, and the hatched maggots literally eat the sheeps alive.
While in full fleece, the sheeps who were selectively bred to grow much more wool than is needed for them, find it difficult to cope with local irritations and usually rub against a post or rail. In the absence of a suitable object to rub against, they will roll on their backs. When in full fleece or heavily pregnant they may fail to get up, and if not seen, will slowly starve or dehydrate.
Pigs
Due to selective breeding for faster growth rates and quicker, heavier muscle development, pigs’ legs are unable to support them. They simply can’t keep pace with the growth rate of the rest of the body. As a result pigs suffer from painful joint and leg problems. Lameness, sores and other leg, back and hip problems are all very common..
Selective breeding also forces the pigs’ muscles to grow out of proportion to their blood-vessels, lungs and heart. They can be physiologically affected by not being able to get enough oxygen into their muscles, and so even a young pig can have a heart attack.
By selective breeding, pig breeders attempt to increase the number of piglets per sow and some have already reached more than 30. The more baby pigs born, the greater the fight between them over their mother’s teats. The industry’s solution is more genetic manipulations of course. They have simply “created” a sow with two more teats. There is no limit to the industry’s effort to squeeze more money at the expense of the poor animals.
Turkeys
The genetic selection in turkeys, have resulted in an adult male bird so large that he can weigh up to 40 pounds, about three times the weight of his wild ancestor.
If a 7-pound human baby grew at the same rate that today’s turkey grows, when the baby reaches 18 weeks of age, he would weigh 150 pounds
This increase in size along with the weight of his massive pectoral muscle, the so-called “turkey breast”, often result in a bird too heavy to stand on his own two feet – his legs are too weak to support him. Turkeys’ legs are too fragile to bear their own weight because their bones cannot keep pace with the high-speed growth to huge unnatural sizes. Their hips may become displaced. As a result some birds cannot reach food and water thus starve to death, if the diseases don’t kill them first.
Turkeys develop congestive heart and lung diseases, accompanied by engorged coronary vessels, distended fluid-filled pericardial sac, abdominal fluid, and an enlarged congested liver. Tens of millions of turkeys suffer from “round heart syndrome” because of the stress of confinement and genetic selection. At an age as young as one week old, they suffer from cardio vascular diseases.
Ducks
Humans have ‘designed’ ducks by selective breeding for a very fast growth rate. As a consequence they are forced to carry high weight on legs and joints which are naturally weak, since ducks don’t need to support their own bodyweight in water. Furthermore, the breeding for earlier muscle development does not coincide with earlier skeletal development and as a result the legs of ducklings are often not developed sufficiently to support their relatively heavy bodies. The ducks can barely walk, some fall on their backs and cannot turn back over, get knocked over by others and are often unable to manage themselves.
Ascites is another common disease caused due to intensive breeding for higher growth rates. Ascites occurs because the growth of the heart and lungs is disproportional to the development of the duck, and so the heart and lungs are unable to supply the cells with the high oxygen requirement as a result of accelerated metabolic rates.
Cows
Generations of selective breeding, driven by the desire for higher financial gain, have deformed cows’ bodies to produce milk in far greater quantities than they require nourishing their babies. Being forced to produce such large quantities of milk, day after day, wears the cow out very quickly, making her more susceptible to infections such as Mastitis and bloat.
Cows today have an abnormally large udder which distorts the gait and posture of the cow’s hind limbs. So the predisposition to foot damage, along with the fact that they are always standing on concrete, leads to lameness, which causes Laminitis (a very painful foot disorder).
The cows’ bodies, who divert all their energy to produce milk, are becoming weaker and weaker, to the point that many collapse and so are considered by the industry as downers.
Humans have transformed cows from strong wild animals, who could run away from predators, to huge milk machines, which cannot even lay comfortably due to their giant udders
Chickens in the Egg Industry
In order to reach the “profit satisfactory degree”, the egg industry genetically manipulates chickens to lay 15 times the amount of eggs they would produce naturally. Each hen lays about 300 eggs per year. This is twice as many eggs a hen produced 50 years ago. Their wild ancestors had laid only about 20 eggs each year. Humans have engineered chickens to be nothing but egg machines . And they have engineered eggs to be too big to be laid, consequently the hens suffer from uterus “prolapse”. Huge eggs pushed through the vagina of small birds, wear out the uterus that is forcefully strained day after day to eject the huge eggs. The result is a prolapsed uterus to the state that it is dragged on the wire cage floor.
The selective breeding for intensive egg production, along with inadequate exercise, also causes calcium deficiency and osteoporosis among hens in egg factories. The quantity of calcium for yearly egg production a hen will use is 30 times greater than her entire skeleton. Inadequate calcium results in broken bones, paralysis, and even death. About 35% of all mortalities during the laying cycle are attributable to bone fragility.
The battery cage has created an ugly new disease of laying hens called fatty liver hemorrhagic syndrome, characterized by an enlarged, fat, friable liver covered with blood
“Farm animals” are animals whose bodies are often the cause of their misery and pain. Their bodies have become like an alien machine, an enemy from inside, designed by the exploiters and working against the animals’ own interests.
Humans severely cripple billions of sentient beings every year for the sake of maximum flesh in minimum time and expenses. They have turned the bodies of sentient beings into a torture machine, a source of suffering independent of external factors.
This is how sick the human race is.
A world in which hundreds of billions of sentient beings are born into these kinds of lives, in which they suffer just from being alive, is too cruel to be fixed. Some things can’t be fixed but must be eliminated. Sick minds who have made so many genetic manipulations which have caused so much suffering shouldn’t exist. Not as revenge for all the horrors they have done and are still doing, but as a preventive measure for all the horrors they would keep doing if we won’t stop them.