The Farm Animal Movement

Book excerpt: America is undergoing an ethical revolution involving the industrial treatment of farm animals. This book tells its stories from midwestern slaughterhouses to the halls of Capitol Hill to Ivy League universities and Silicon Valley laboratories. This is a roadmap for people who want to work to end factory farming. Behind you stand the ghosts of three hundred farm animals killed for every year you have lived. Given the numbers involved, the most significant action you can take to mitigate suffering is to work to improve farm animal welfare. But this book is not about death and suffering. This book is about life and hope. In less than a decade, farm animal compassion has moved from a niche cause into the pantheon of established social movements. America is undergoing an unheralded ethical revolution involving the industrial treatment of farm animals. As the movement’s workforce has quintupled, the funding dedicated to farm animal welfare has increased geometrically. For the first time in history, many Americans are answering the moral question of what to do with their time on Earth by dedicating their lives to helping farm animals. A constellation of activists, capitalists, farmers, lawyers, philanthropists, politicians, professors, scientists, and writers are using different tactics with the same motives and goals to address what they see as the world’s most pressing and tractable problem. Collective actions previously impossible have become self-reinforcing as millions of Americans are speaking loudly and clearly about their priorities with their careers, investments, purchases, and votes. This book tells the stories of this revolution from midwestern slaughterhouses to the halls of Capitol Hill to Ivy League universities and Silicon Valley laboratories. What was once the province of itinerant activists has opened so it is now possible for you—yes, you—to dedicate your life’s work to helping end the world’s largest source of suffering. This book is a roadmap for people who want to learn how to use their career, freedom, and resources to end factory farming in America.