If slaughtering animals for their meat could be upsetting, torturing them for food should be considered completely immoral. The activities which one could observe in a farm factory constitute torture. Therefore, one could not be faulted when he or she compares a farm factory with a torture chamber. An example of torture in a farm factory is the practice of shearing off the beaks of egg-laying hens in a crowded cage without the benefit of anesthesia.
The idea behind this exercise is so that they could not peck each other to death.However, considered closely, this practice undoubtedly leaves the hens in constant pain since their beak is full of sensitive nerve tissues (Singer, 2006). This leaves one with a moral question: “Is it necessary to torture hens so that people could have eggs for breakfast? ” Broiler chickens which are bred and raised for their meat are also made to suffer before they are dressed and killed to feed man. Imagine a broiler house which sometimes contains 10,000 or even 20,000 chickens which are so crowded that they could no longer move around.
These chickens were especially bred so that they would turn out to be voracious eaters, achieving the desired weight as early as 45 days. Because they grow very heavy in such a young age, their bones do not mature in time to support their weight, restraining their movement. In a crowded house, some of these chickens could no longer make it to the feeding troughs or the water containers and eventually die (Singer, 2006). Their lives, though, do not matter to farmers.
What is important is the meat that they turn out ostensibly to feed humanity but in reality to line the pockets of the farmers. Again, the moral question: “Is torture necessary in this case? ” Before the advent of factory farming, chickens were raised in big yards where they could run around and scratch the earth for worms. They enjoyed their lives at the same time that they nourished man with their eggs and their meat. In the past and even today, torture has become a means to force sensitive information out of terrorists or criminals in the hope that further crimes could be aborted.
However, regardless of the objective, the United Nations has already come out with a position condemning torture. In the case of chickens and the other animals, farmers do not need to force them to yield their eggs and their meat so that man could eat. They are always there for man to take whenever he chose to. Why, then, should torture be resorted to? What is morally wrong, as the authors of the book “The Way We Eat” wrote, “industrial agriculture [or factory farming] denies animals even a minimally decent life” before they are slaughtered.Referencehttp://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/200606--.htm
