The animal as an object

How do you feel when you look at a picture of a typical factory farm for chickens? Thousands of chickens are kept in very small cages. They are fed in them and they live and die in them. The average shed on a chicken factory farm contains 40,000 chickens. The factory farming of cows is a bit better as they are sometimes kept outside and the animals are cleaned, but they're still kept in very small spaces for most of their lives.

Other animals are farmed too. For instance, the number of fish farms is growing all the time. Many of these have 300 fish in one cubic metre - fish can get terrible diseases in these conditions. It's interesting that fish farming is a very old farming method -it was used in China about 2,500 years ago. The Romans also kept fish in ponds for eating, but not in huge numbers like today!

Not so long ago, all chickens and cows were kept on family farms and chickens were kept mainly for their eggs, not their meat. Until quite recently, people only ate chicken on special occasions or on Sundays. Chickens weren't given special food -they found food on the farm.

This is still the situation in a lot of developing countries, of course, and today, free-range farmers all over the world keep farm animals in open, free conditions. But the fact is that two out of every three farm animals in the world are now kept on factory farms.

Factory farming is cruel. Animals are treated as objects, not living creatures that need space to move. And it isn't only the terrible cruelty that is a problem; this type of farming also creates a lot of pollution. But we all know why factory farming is used: it's a lot cheaper than traditional and free-range farming methods. And cheap food means we can feed ourselves and our families with more meat, more fish, more protein.