I started refusing meat at seven and turned full vegan at ten: I was first a vegetarian because, as I put it so compellingly, "I love animals and I hate meat". I hadn't switched to a plant-based diet out of some deep conviction in my heart - at the time of turning vegetarian, I knew nothing about the factory farming industry. Although my diet was very strict and never made room for the indulgence of meat, others consuming meat spurned nothing but a slight wariness in me (only because I didn't relish the idea of eating flesh and thought the word "slaughterhouse" had an unappealing ring to it).  

A deeper passion for a vegan lifestyle didn't click until three years later when a few articles from PETA and the Animal Welfare Associated began to pop up on my Google feed: curious about the sensationalist titles and muddy, dark images of encaged animals linked as images, I began to grow privvy to the ways of the factory farming industry. Since then, strives toward improving animal welfare in the farming industry have taken place as my number one passion and moral loyalty in my life. Although the driving force behind my plant-based consumption habits has always been a heart for animals and deep disapproval for how they are treated in the industry, I also believe there are countless logical reasons for rebuking the modern farming system as we know it: the top three being lack of concern for worker (human resource) welfare, environmental carelessness, and of course, a system that commoditizes animals and encourages companies to race toward the lowest possible common denominator of treatment standards.

I am a vegan due to personal convictions and passion, and I will share some of the basepoint reasons for why I am vegan: that said, I also like to think of myself as a realist when it comes to this topic. Thus, I don't want to just write out some gruesome details, tell you to go vegan, and then have you leave this essay feeling defensive and even wearier of vegans. I'm more interested in conversations that err toward the persuasive yet land at compromise: I'm interested in having conversations with those who care, but don't care quite enough to be fully invested in the vegan movement.

Animal Treatment

The way animals are treated within the farming industry is, and always has been, the core of my reasoning for rebuking our modern meat, dairy, and poultry production process. Although every animal within the industry is treated poorly, the brightest outrage is sparked in me when I read about the way pigs are treated: allow me to walk you through the life of the average American-raised hog in the U.S., a life that 129 million beings experienced just last year.

A pig is born. Within 48 hours, its teeth are ripped out to minimize the hog's ability to retaliate against other pigs or employees. Pigs that are considered too small to be worth the effort of raising and slaughtering are "euthanized" - or, to describe the process more accurately, they are rammed against the concrete floor until rendered unconscious or dead.  

The pigs that do survive are stuffed into crates so small that they cannot move, lie down, or sit; their "Frankenstein-genetics" (a term used to describe their deeply flawed and man-manipulated gene pool) are often so grotesque that cortisol, or stress levels, are abnormally high in the average pig, and breaking of bones due to a lack of ability to sit down combined with altered genetics that encourages them to grow as big as possible. The food offered is, in some instances, in the form of other pigs' manure to minimize the money that has to be spent on feed (yes, the pork you're consuming contains a cesspool of shared waste that tends to contain a cocktail of various diseases). Because pigs being packed shoulder-to-shoulder and eating (and practically bathing) in each others' waste simply begs for cross-contamination of diseases, pigs are fed a relentless supply of antibiotics, which proposes a myriad of environmental and public health concerns.  

Once female pigs reach the age of fertility, they are artificially inseminated and then confined in a gestation crate or a confinement zone for sixteen weeks. These crates are so repressive that it's not uncommon for pigs to form black, pus-filled sores the size of a fist. Because a pregnant mother who can't sit down, defecate in an area separate from where she lives, or enact any healthy, natural behavior typical of a mother preparing to give birth (such as burrow or collecting leaves and twigs as a resting spot) tends to Because the sows don't want to enter the crates, it's, according to an employee at one of the largest hog-production plants in the United States, "it's necessary to beat the shit out of [the pregnant pigs] to get them inside the crates." Another employee at a different plant said that beating the sows bloody with a metal rod to get them in the crates was the routine - not the rare exception, but the routine.  "One guy smashed a sow's nose in so bad that she ended up dying of starvation" (Foer, 185).

This leads me to my next point, which is that employees are rarely held accountable for their streaks of completely unnecessary cruelty against the animals. At a facility in Northern Carolina, an undercover camera planted by private investigators found workers "administering daily beatings to pigs, bludgeoning pregnant sows with a wrench, and ramming an iron pole a foot deep into a mother pigs' rectums and vaginas. In other videotaped instances at the farm, workers sawed off pigs' legs and skinned them while they were still conscious. [Another investigation] documented workers extinguishing cigarettes on the animals' bodies, beating them with rakes and shovels, strangling them, and throwing them into manure pits to drown." (Foer, 184).

Workers: Poor Conditions, Scant Pay

“What’s the point of complaining,” said Grace D., an immigrant worker at a hog plant in Omaha, Nebraska. “They’re not going to hear us, they’re [just] going to treat us wrong because you put in a complaint, and so the workers put up with it, and put up with it, and put up with it, and put up with it" (McConnell).

Working in factory farms and slaughterhouses is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country: the conditions faced by workers (many of which tend to be undocumented immigrants - which farms love to hire, as illegal immigrants tend to be fairly disinterested in bringing attention to themselves by speaking about how the industry treated them), are so ghastly that the meat industry's worker turnover rate is over fifty percent per year.  

Factory farms and slaughterhouses are miserable places to work, mainly because of ridiculous efficiency quotas employees are expected to meet. According to my research, it seems as though one statement can wrap up the slaughter process: completely and utterly chaotic. A never-ending flurry of screaming, panicking animals is the status quo (workers are often attacked by the claws and wings of anxiety-drenched chickens, and everything - including the people in the facility - is regularly defecated upon due to panic-induced loss of bowel control). Once the animals are properly caught, it's not uncommon for workers to damage, or even lose, body parts while attempting to chain them to machinery moving at a relentless pace.

Since the farming industry sees workers as utterly replaceable, they treat them as though they're utterly replaceable. Companies are so deeply concerned with efficiency and profits that slaughterhouse managers are trained to resort to humiliation, the denying of bathroom access, and threatening to fire employees should they not meet quotas. “No one asks for breaks,” reported Lidia J., a worker at the Case Farms poultry plant in North Carolina, referring to requests to leave the line outside scheduled breaks. “They won’t give them."

Worker injuries are extremely commonplace within the system. For instance, in 2013, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) conducted research on more than 300 employees working at a poultry plant in South Carolina. The study revealed that 42 percent of these workers met the criteria for carpal tunnel syndrome, while 57 percent reported experiencing at least one musculoskeletal symptom (McConnell). 

All of this work is done for an average of fifteen dollars an hour. Fifteen dollars an hour to be placed in an environment where the thick scent of blood and feces lingers in the air; where you're constantly at risk of severe mutilation, or at least a longer-term disability; where the sounds of animals being collected and chained up for their death and heavy-duty machinery permeate the building; where bathroom breaks or moments to catch your breath are routinely denied.  

Environmental Carelessness

In my experiences discussing veganism, one of my major takeaways is this: the general public seems to be under the impression that because manure has been used for fertilizer ever since agriculture was even a thing, waste produced by the animal-product industry is "no biggie". I've even regularly heard the argument that the agriculture industry needs the factory farming industry because with fewer animals we wouldn't have enough manure for fertilizer. This perception of factory farms and agriculture is, by far, oversimplified and clean-cut than reality.

In 2007, farmed animals in the United States produced 130 times as much waste as the human population - roughly 87,000 pounds of poop per second. The polluting strength of this poop is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage. And yet - shockingly - there are no official, efficient methods of disposing of this waste and little to no regulation. And this isn't just regular poop: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorus, nitrates, and heavy metals. On top of this startling discovery, we also know that not all of the waste is just poop, but whatever can fit through the slots of factory farms: stillborn piglets, afterbirths, dead piglets (freshly mashed against the concrete floors), vomit, blood, urine, antibiotic syringes, broken bottles of insecticide, hair, pus, and ripped-off body parts (Foer).

There is way, way more fecal matter to dispose of than could ever fit into fields. So, how do hog farms dispose of it? Two appetizing options are commonly picked: the manure is sprayed into the air, where gasses capable of causing severe neurological damage are permitted to evaporate into the air and nearby communities, or the crap is dumped into rivers and waterways.  In Smithfield’s case, they chose the latter option: one year, they were found guilty of seven thousand violations of the Clean Water Act.  They were fined 12.6 million dollars, which on the surface level seems like a modest victory against them: but in 2012, they grossed 14.4 billion dollars in revenue.  12.6 million dollars to them is nothing - it’s barely even an incentive to start caring.

...Now That's Been Said, I Still Don't Expect You to Go Vegan

Maybe you've found yourself repelled enough by my description of how the average pig is treated within the farming industry. Or perhaps you inherently disagree with how the environment is inversely affected as factory farming grows and companies grow bolder and bolder in their treatment of the earth - if so, I've already won you over - but for those who leave the body paragraphs of this essay feeling somewhat apathetic or nihilistic, asking the question "Why should I care if individual efforts accomplish next-to-nothing? Why should this be the battle I chose to fight?", I want to make a couple of closing points.

The fact is, even as a staunch vegetarian, I empathize with you. What I'm asking you to do right now is cut down on your own utility for a grander cause that feels somewhat unconquerable. I'm asking you to give up Sunday pot roasts and football game Hotdogs and late-night In-N-Out sessions with your friends to make an infinitesimally small difference in the grand scheme of things. I think the trickiest part of "evangelizing" meat enthusiasts toward vegetarianism comes down to how easily one can feel hopeless against the meat industry. 

When I was a younger vegan, my beliefs about converting the current productions of the meat industry to a more ethically conscious formula came down to one core idea: spread the word, and people will stop eating meat. I essentially believed that if I disturbed people enough with anecdotes about how modern pigs are treated during their Sunday bacon indulgence - if they were enlightened like I was enlightened - they would go vegan. I thought appealing to their sense of morality diligently enough could even convert some of the most enthusiastic carnivores I knew.

I was mildly annoyed to find that many people whom I wanted to spread the word to would shut down what I had to say, but I attributed their avoidance to them knowing deep down if they knew too much about how the food they were plowing into landed on their plate, they would be too guilt-ridden to pick up the fork. This, however, only fed into my beliefs: "They're not listening to me because they know I'm right" was the self-righteous salve I applied to the pain and indignance of being ignored and my most deeply-esteemed beliefs belittled. 

I was utterly blown off-course when I found that somebody listening to me fully: looking at the videos and images I showed them, paying attention as I rattled on about the archaic of the farming system - wasn't enough to get them to convert. I showed my brother images of battery cages and pigs stewing in their gestation crates, and he waved it off and said "Okay. It's cool that you care, but I kind of don't, because the utility I would lose from going vegetarian or vegan doesn't outweigh what a small change doing so could make." My brother was the first to break this news that he didn't happen to care much so candidly to me, but several followed after: and, the older I get, the more I do understand where he's coming from - but also, the older I get, the more I realized that attitudes and approaches towards food affect not only yourself, is deeply interrelational and cultural.

Here's the thing: how we approach food - what we eat, how we eat it, when we eat it, where we eat it, what we eat it with - is contagious. Your decision not to regularly consume meat wouldn't only affect you: it would affect those that you choose to dine with (and I'm guessing much of my audience regularly eats with their family). You don't have to entirely disown the side of you that enjoys indulging in some meat - after all, asking families and friends to embark on a "culinary journey" with you that involves offering Tofurkey on the table instead of a real turkey would result in scoffs, laughs, and perhaps even gossip - but what about all the random Mondays and Thursdays around the year where no official cause for celebration is apparent? What if you taught your children and introduced the idea to your friends that meat enjoyment doesn't have to be entirely usurped by a moral code, but that we also shouldn't treat an animal's life as though it's nothing?  

I've seen this idea in action, and I've seen it manifest in inspiring ways. When I turned vegetarian my mom told me she would support me in my decision, but that I also needed to learn how to cook for myself, as she didn't have the time to make vegetarian dishes and dishes for the rest of my family. Taking on the challenge, I learned to cook - and I learned to cook well. Because I knew how to make a satisfactory vegetarian meal that my whole family could enjoy, our overall meat intake and even my dad and brothers' attitudes towards a meat-free meal started to shift toward the positive. In turn, the rest of my family started to eat meat around three or four days a week instead of expecting or feeling entitled to it for all seven. My dad stopped seeing meat on the table as a given and started to view it as a treat.

The average American consumes 150 times more chicken than we did a century ago, and I genuinely believe a general sense of entitlement to meat is how we've arrived at the point of such moral deprivation in the meat industry.  I think we've reached the point we have because we overfeed ourselves and our overall culture underappreciates what meat is when we eat it. Even adjusting our attitudes from believing because meat is always available to us we should always consume it to "I enjoy meat, and I enjoy cultural celebrations that involve the consumption of meat - but I also want to be conscientious about the sheer fact that when I tear into a chicken bone or eat a burger, the true cost of my enjoyment isn't being paid by me." 

 Thus, here's my prescription for those who care about what I told you - for those who disagree with pigs' bones breaking in the name of efficiency, or the pleas of marginalized immigrant workers being systematically overlooked by the industry, or companies unapologetically dumping millions of gallons of pure filth and disease into our country's rivers - but who don't care quite enough to go vegetarian or vegan - is to accept living in the tension. Your opinions, and applications of those opinions don't have to exist on one polarized end of the dichotomy (and if you force yourself to care, by the way, then I can almost guarantee that your 100% vegetarian lifestyle will have an expiration date of around three weeks from now). Recognize that what the animal product industry is doing is simply not okay, but also don't use the fact that the industry feels untouchable as an excuse because it's not. Factory farms are more scared of the majority of the population reducing their meat intake by 20% and spreading ideas about deeper conscientiousness with their friends and family than a handful of hotheaded vegans reducing their intake by 100%. If you can't go the 100%, then go the 30% - and share your reasons for doing so while you're at it.

Sources Cited:

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Eating Animals. Penguin Books, 2018.

McConnell, Matt. “‘when We’re Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting.’” Human Rights Watch, 28 Mar. 2023, www.hrw.org/report/2019/09/04/when-were-dead-and-buried-our-bones-will-keep-hurting/workers-rights-under-threat.

“Factory Farming and the Environment: Impacts on the Planetthehumaneleague.Org › Article › Factory-Farming-and-the-Environment Factory Farming and the Environment: Impacts on the Planet.” Thehumaneleague.Org, thehumaneleague.org/article/factory-farming-and-the-environment. Accessed 24 Oct. 2023.