The fate of industrially farmed animals is one of the most urgent ethical questions of our time. Tens of billions of sentient beings,each with complex sensations and emotions, live and die on a production line
Animals are the main victims of history, or the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history. The march of human progress is strewn with dead animals. Even tens of thousands of years ago,our stone age ancestors were already responsible for a series of ecological disasters. When the first humans reached Australia about 45000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first meaningful impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet’s ecosystem. It was not the last.
About 15000 years ago, and humans colonised America,wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. many other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia and from the myriad (a very large number) islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same unhappy memoir. The tragedy opens with a scene showing a rich and varied population of large animals, and without any trace of Homo sapiens. In scene two,humans appear, evidenced by a fossilised bone, or a spear point,or perhaps a campfire. Scene three quickly follows, in which men and women occupy centre-stage and most large animals, and along with many smaller ones,have gone. Altogether, sapiens drove to extinction about 50% of all the large terrestrial mammals of the planet before they planted the first wheat field, or shaped the first metal tool,wrote the first text or struck the first coin.
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Source: theguardian.com