All animals deserve consideration. Animals have an interest in staying alive. Therefore animal agriculture and its factory farms, who package disease along with the tortured body of someone who wanted to live, need to be abolished. The industrialized, global meat (murder) industry, is extremely harmful to animals and the environment. COVID-19 began in the cages of a factory farm created to torture and kill animals. In order to mitigate the murder of animals, and current/future pandemics and natural disasters, we need to abolish the animal agriculture industry.

Factory farms package poop, blood, and the body of an animal who wanted to live. How can this be healthy to consume? The body of someone who sat in their own excrement their entire life, was murdered as a baby when they could’ve seen 5-20 happy years, and never got to see sunlight.

Smithfield Foods, the largest (dead) pig producer in the world, is responsible for millions of murders, huge scale environmental degradation, and is a breeding ground for illness. When these large factory farms breed animals for the sole purpose of torturing and murdering them to sell as food, the conditions they provide will obviously not be ideal for a living being. Pigs are kept in cages so small they cannot turn around or properly feed their piglets, they never get to see the light of day or run in a grassy field, and they spend their short lives sitting in their own feces. Not only does Smithfield make the pigs they kill sick from their own poop, they also make nearby humans in the community sick as well.

Every year, Smithfield Foods sprays millions of gallons of poop on nearby neighborhoods. In North Carolina, United States, Smithfield Foods decided to build their factory farms near Black and Brown neighborhoods:

“Industrial farms, in this case the hog lobby, have managed to deregulate their industry since the 1990s. Enormous hog CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) spray noxious waste held in “lagoons” on neighboring fields, making local people sick. Research shows that African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans are significantly more likely than white residents to live within three miles of industrial hog operations.” “A million tons of feces and an unbearable stench: life near industrial pig farms”

This is environmental racism.

People of color also make up more than half of the workers in slaughterhouses. Enacting and experiencing this kind of violence on a daily basis is detrimental for the workers, their loved ones, and everyone who lives in the community near a slaughterhouse. Abolishing animal agriculture, closing slaughterhouses, and reallocating resources to farms that grow plants can help mitigate environmental racism.

“Across all the occupations of people working in the Animal Slaughtering and Processing Industry, more than half of all workers are people of color (34.9 percent are Hispanic, and 22.5 percent are Black).” “Meatpacking Workers are a Diverse Group Who Need Better Protections”

Rates of domestic violence are also much higher in neighborhoods near slaughterhouses and people who work in animal agriculture are more likely to take the trauma from the violence they enact on a daily basis from murdering animals, out on their partners and families.

See: Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates

Which brings me to this:

Humans are animals.

Do you want to be complicit in a system of disease and murder?

How much environmental racism could we mitigate if we closed all slaughterhouses?

How much environmental degradation could we mitigate if we abolished animal agriculture?

How many animals would get to live a happy life if we didn’t forcibly conceive them to be murdered?

How much of the Amazon rainforest, and global rainforests, could be saved if the whole world went vegan?

How do humans commodify and objectify other living beings as food, clothes, or property?

How do humans view themselves in relation to the rest of the animal kingdom?

How much money, food, time, and space could be saved if we didn’t use so much water, grain, and land in animal agriculture?

How can we reallocate resources from animal agriculture and factory farms to grain, vegetable, and fruit farms?

How many millions of gallons of waste and pollution could we make totally disappear?

Are humans selfish for killing millions of species for land and resources we don’t need?

What can you do in your own life to be actively anti-speciesist and anti-oppression?