Philip Lymbery is the CEO of Compassion in World Farming and an advocate for raising food animals with compassion and respect. He works to educate farmers and ranchers about raising food animals humanely, steadfast in his conviction that no animal needs to suffer to feed us.
Meat production has almost quadrupled since the 1960s, from 71 million tonnes to over 280 million tonnes in 2008. Two out of every three farm animals are now factory farmed. The way they are treated, raised, fed, and cared for is barbaric. Over half of the 26 million hens currently producing eggs in the UK are kept in battery cages. Roughly 60 billion food animals worldwide are slaughtered yearly after living stressful lives in CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations).
The current industrial farming and livestock-rearing paradigm is unsustainable – and it is enabled by the public’s willful ignorance of that fact. Will you do your part to change it? Philip Lymbery may inspire you.
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So easy. The animal doesn’t feel a thing – because some human says it doesn’t. Even easier …suggest the human swap places and step first into the… frypan/boiler/muncher/cruncher/puller/ripper/zapper/shooter etc.
Talk about double standards. But then, look how we treat other humans. We really are a totally barbaric species and some.
Sometimes I feel like you do, Lee. But it can be unfortunately self-fulfilling to think of humans that way. I prefer to say that the cost of being unconscious of – or ignorant to – what it takes to live the life of a consumer is a chain of suffering. Being conscious about our role in that chain, and accepting responsibility for it, places us at a crossroads of consciousness where we can choose. And that’s actually an opportunity 🙂
Realizing that we support things in more ways than voting is one of several very important wake-up calls for people in developed countries. There’s hope for us yet; as with anything else, we just need to stop being willfully ignorant in such large numbers.