Stop Industrial Farming Persuasive Essay

As a U.S. consumer I believe that industrial farming is terrible and should be stopped. Industrial farming causes animals to be treated terribly and is unhealthy for the land, water, air, and communities in the surrounding areas. Not only that, but there are many health problems associated with eating the meat of animals that are raised in industrial farms. Industrial farming needs to be stopped.

One of the main issues with industrial farming is the conditions that the animals are kept in. Take pigs for example; they are so intelligent that they understand the concept of a mirror and can even play video games yet they are treated as objects. For instance, baby piglets are castrated and have their tails removed after being born with no pain

Even the piglets who are up to par and are allowed to live are forced to do so in filthy, dark, cramped pens. They never get to experience running in the grass or laying down and basking in the sun like they should; they are born to live a life of suffering. To add insult to injury, after only living for a short six months they are shipped to slaughter factories where they are hung by their feet, get their necks cut open, and then squirm around until they have bled out. (Factory Farming, 2017) There are also female pigs called breeder sows who are raised with the sole purpose of being a piglet machine. When they reach the age of eight months and are sexually mature they are artificially inseminated. During the pregnancy and while the piglets are nursing the breeding sow is contained in an area that is normally only

Projects such as Beyond Factory Farming help promote farming options that are much more humane. More traditional smaller farms are better for the land, animals, and consumers than large industrial farms. For instance, instead of lacing the feed for all the animals with antibiotics to promote growth and prevent disease like industrial farms do, it is much healthier to instead to only give antibiotics to sick animals in need. Not only does overusing antibiotics on animals make it possible for antibiotic-resistant diseases to form which are much harder to treat, it is believed that eating the meat of animals that are over exposed to antibiotics leads to antibiotic resistance in the consumers. This means that antibiotics are less effective to treat humans which leaves everyone, especially young and elderly, at risk of not being able to treat sickness. Beyond the antibiotics issue is the issue of waste. Smaller farms that only raise what the land can sustain will have a much lower volume of manure which they can use to fertilize their crops whereas large industrial farms produce more manure than is healthy for the land. This means that instead of manure being a resource that is utilized to fertilize crops the manure becomes a waste that is either dumped into holes in the ground or it is overused on the nearby crops just so that it can be disposed of. This not only results in smells that are annoying for