Chickens’ lifespan
In the wild = 3650 days
In a factory = 43 days
Sheep lifespan
In the wild = 4380 days
In a factory = 92 days
What do you see when you hear a word ‘farm’?
I picture a gentle green slope, a herd of goats forever looking for
greener patch of land with red and blue markings on their back, a man in a
tractor, the smell of manure and of course a barn cat. It’s teamed with
varieties of animals and calls for an intense human attention. What about
with ‘factory’? I imagine an antipodal site of a department store, all
without a single window. So how can those two words come together? Is
factory-farm a factory? Or a farm?
This oxymoron of a concept, fashioned in 1960s, now almost completely
overtook the previous family farm model. What’s funny is, it is now
concurrently part of the linguistic ammo of moral neutralisation. Does
free range mean factories are half-providing what farm provides? A right
to uproot fresh dandelions and a gentle hand stroking your head once in a
while? To echo Hickel’s argument in ‘eating animals’, it’s clear that
larger scale moral disengagement techniques are working wonders
considering the increase in average per capita meat consumption.