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by jm__87 1831 days ago
Humans are still doing some pretty awful things to each other, I'm not sure our treatment of animals is really near the top of the list. We can obviously do much better with regard to our treatment of animals, but the same can be said about a lot of things.
1 comments

I think we have too look at the numbers. There are 600 million pigs kept worldwide, most of them in miserable circumstances. The more this number grows (and it is on a growth trajectory) the more we should be concerned about this. (Though my personal opinion is that the current number is already unacceptable.)
There are 700 million people below extreme poverty level(less than 1.90$ a day. Tell them how concerned you are about pigs.
We should be concerned about both.

That said, whether to spend your energy on global poverty or abolishing factory farming really comes down to how you highly you rank animal suffering.

Is a thousand chickens tortured from birth to slaughter, worse than someone dying from malaria? What about ten thousand?

It's not at all obvious to me how animal sentience compares to human sentience, but it's clear to me that we should at least give it some consideration.

Even when I give animals only a fraction of the concern I have for humans, it's clear to me that factory farming is an incredible source of unnecessary suffering.

I hope we can learn to be considerate of not only humans different from us but other species too.