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by GuiA 2510 days ago
Which is ironic, because I have many old relatives who used to live on farms, and they are all very attuned to the feelings of animals. They can tell when one is in pain, how to take care of it, etc. Note that it is not at odds with the fact that there are raising the animal for meat, in some cases.

What is problematic is when decision chains get abstracted out and decisions depersonalized, and a bunch of company executives in a room decide how many chickens they need to fit per square foot of space in order to turn a profit next quarter, rather than those decisions being made by the people who take care of the chicken every day.

In that light, the psychology and social systems at play in industrial farming isn’t too different from that of prisons, internment camps, etc. Lives that are abstract numbers in profit equations to decision makers who don’t have to see up too close what those numbers really represent.

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Tyson Foods, the biggest chicken firm, gives (sells) chicken to family owned farms that make the decision to cram the chickens in small space, and then Tyson Foods buys back the big chickens. The business is done in a way so that Tyson Foods has all the upside and little downside. I do not think they bore themselves with the logistics of raising chickens, they think of how to market their chicken scam to other family farms.