Today, we launched our inaugural “Christmas of Compassion” campaign
A genocide of epic proportions rages every moment of every day, on every continent, in every town. So vast and horrific the scale of this genocide, that 3,000 lives every second does it claim. Multiply the human population seven times over and you still fall drastically short of the number each year slain. In the US alone, 8.3 billion beings are smothered from existence each year. But across the world, this number swells to more than 56 billion, rising by more than 100 million heads annually. And even this figure drastically underestimates the totality of death by tens if not hundreds of billions of lives lost each year at sea, whose numbers are so great they are measured only in tons. “What is this genocide?” you may ask. This, and only this, is the genocide of animalkind.
Despite this heart-shattering reality, many carnists remain blissfully unaware of the profound suffering behind meat, eggs, and dairy, often remarking “Not all animals are treated like this!” when confronted with undercover videos of factory farms and slaughterhouses. These same carnists will often remark, in some cases with exasperation, in others with blood-red pride, that they only purchase animal products labeled “grass-fed,” “cage-free, “and “humane.” But do the research, and you will see through these the misleading promises of an incredibly inhumane industry; as Harold Brown, a former beef farmer, writes, “animals who are destined for an abbreviated life that ends in a violent death” means, in his own experience and the experience of countless others, “there is no such thing as humane animal products, humane farming practices, humane transport, or humane slaughter.”
And how could there be? These animals still face the same brutal deaths, murdered at a fraction their natural lifespan, at the same atrocious slaughterhouses. Many are raised in conditions which are scarcely better than that of their factory farmed brothers and sisters. And most are raised in conditions practically indistinguishable from the modern factory farm. Most “cage-free” chickens, for example, will still be crowded by the tens of thousands into filthy sheds, suffer several painful mutilations to make such skimpy accommodations remotely livable, and be murdered as soon as their productivity declines enough to significantly impact the industry's bottom line—profit. Worse yet, the baby chicks which feed such operations almost always come from industrial hatcheries, where baby male chicks, the very epitome of innocence and purity, are ground alive just hours after hatching or are literally thrown away into massive dumpsters to die of starvation, dehydration, suffocation, and stress.
Though a precious few animals will indeed enjoy a genuinely good life on the fields of a real animal sanctuary, horrors untold almost doubtlessly lurk behind each carton of eggs, glass of milk, and bite of flesh you consume, whatever its label. Moreover, the mere existence of these lucky few in no way diminishes the cold, inescapable reality that more than 95% of our meat comes from factory farms. Nor does it negate the hard, incontrovertible fact if you eat any animal products at all, they almost certainly come from a factory farm. Nor yet does the mere existence of these animals skirt your responsibility to avoid and eschew animal products as much as possible.
As part of our #ChristmasOfCompassion campaign, we aspire to not only raise awareness about these atrocities, but also to thereby inspire both vegans and nonvegans alike to expand their palette, try new foods, and find delicious plant-based products that cause only a fraction of the harm the modern animal abuse industry causes.
