Al Madrigal puts animal rights activists in their place…
In only three years, two hundred fish kills—incidents where the entire fish population in a given area is killed at once—have resulted from factory farms’ failure to keep their shit out of waterways. In these documented kills alone, thirteen million fish were literally poisoned by shit—if set head to tail fin, these victims would stretch the length of the entire Pacific coast from Seattle to the Mexican border.
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| — | Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer |
For corporations like Smithfield, it is a cost-benefit analysis: paying fines for polluting is cheaper than giving up the entire factory farm system, which is what it would take to finally end the devastation.
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| — | Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer |
Fifty billion. Every year fifty billion birds are made to live and die [in the factory farming system].
It cannot be overstated how revolutionary and relatively new this reality is—the number of factory-farmed birds was zero before Celia Steele’s 1923 experiment. And we’re not just raising chickens differently; we’re eating more chickens: Americans eat 150 times as many chickens as we did only eighty years ago.
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| — | Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer |
In 1967, there were more than one million hog farms in the country. Today there are a tenth as many, and in the past ten years alone, the number of farms raising pigs fell by more than two-thirds. (Four companies now produce 60 percent of hogs in America.)
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| — | Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer |
