It's hard to grasp the scale of factory farming. @Lewis_Bollard described what he saw at one farm with 200,000 hens in battery cages (each hen crammed together with 4-6 other hens in a space the size of a microwave oven for years on end, unable to even flap their wings). Consider an alternative civilization where factory farming didn't exist. If we had just discovered that there was one farm treating 200,000 animals this way, it would be a moral emergency. But there are about 8 billion caged hens alive globally at any moment. Which means this one farm is literally just 1/40,000th of the suffering. And that's just for egg production. The whole episode isn't so dire - it discusses the science and economics of the meat industry. But I wanted to highlight this point because it is so easy to flinch away, and not notice how big and important this issue really is.
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