Week 7 - Sangkyung

This sixth chapter of Eating Animals, more than those preceding it, seems to have a theme: differences that matter. In chapter 6 (Slices of Paradise/pieces of Shit), the author was trying to get the reader to believe that there are two sides to every single thing and that people should look at both sides of everything before making any decisions especially with the items we choose to consume. Everybody sees the good side of eating meat which is that they provide us with a taste that we all seem to enjoy but the bad side which is the diseases that the meat we eat may carry, the pain the animals endure for our pleasure is ignored. The fact that “today a typical pig factory farm will produce 7.2 million pounds of manure annually, a typical broiler facility will produce 6.6 million pounds, and a typical cattle feedlot 344 million pounds” was really stood out to me. In addition to this, as Foer points out, the pits are filled not only with animal feces but also with whatever will fit through the slatted floors of the factory farm buildings.This includes stillborn piglets, afterbirths, dead piglets, vomit, blood, urine, antibiotic syringes, broken bottles of insecticide, hair, pus et cetera. From this chapter, I really realize that  pollution caused by the millions of pounds of manure that factory farming produces was really huge and factory farming ignores environmental degradation, human disease or animal suffering. After reading this chapter, at least, I could decide that I do not eat factory farmed animals regularly.