Intensive Farming Quotes

If you eat foie gras, I would really urge you to look at the practice that goes in to producing it. It is totally barbaric and involves force-feeding on the most horrific scale imaginable.

China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.

Why...is the hunter who shoots a deer for venison subject to more criticism than the person who buys a ham at the supermarket? Overall, it is probably the intensively reared pig who has suffered more.

I don't want any more concentration camps for animals that are cruelly treated, force-fed to fatten themselves up for our consumption.

I have a tough stomach, and I've put myself through a lot. But when I first found out what happens to animals on modern factory farms and in today's slaughterhouses, I wanted to throw up - I literally couldn't believe it.

I think that if everyone knew how meat and dairy was being produced, they wouldn't eat it.

Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world's problems, but is is remarkable just how many of them intersect there.

What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable... Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying...We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood.

Animal factories are one more sign of the extent to which our technological capacities have advanced faster than our ethics.

Swine!

The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.

To produce foie gras, ducks and geese are force-fed enormous amounts of grain and fat, which causes their livers to swell to many times the normal size.

Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true.

The emergence and spread of virulent strains of avian influenza has been attributed by experts to the intensely overcrowded, unsanitary, and stressful conditions that often characterize large-scale factory farming in industrialized agriculture.

Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production.

Factory farming's evil; you know that.

Factory farming came about from a moral race to the bottom, with corporations vying against each other to produce more and bigger animals with less care at lower cost.

Each year, billions of animals are subjected to cruelty on factory farms, feed lots, and slaughterhouses. The brutality that these animals endure would be grounds for felony cruelty charges if inflicted upon our cats and dogs.

But I think the majority of cows, and even more so chickens and pigs, are leading pretty miserable lives.

A 'farm' today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall.

Less land, less time, more crop.

Foie gras is sold as an expensive delicacy in some restaurants and shops. But no one pays a higher price for foie gras than the ducks and geese who are abused and killed to make it.

Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.

We have to create more and more vegetarians, and help people to understand that it is not only the suffering of the animals (which is what made me vegetarian) but also the incredible harm to the environment, the tremendous amount of greenhouse gas created by the whole vast machinery of intensive animal farming.