Lewis Bollard: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's just striking me now that the way to think about what we're doing to these animals is not even… This would already be just incredibly immoral, finding creatures in the wild and then caging them up and then putting them through awful tortures. Rather, we are manufacturing creatures basically optimized for suffering. It's not even like, “We found this chicken and now we're going to put this in this little cage.” It's like, “We have designed this chicken to basically suffer as much as possible. We have literally genetically changed it as much as we can plausibly change it given the technology available to us today, in this Frankensteinian way, to suffer as much as possible.” That framing just makes it especially gruesome. I agree. This is the story of the chicken meat industry. They have just bred and bred so that these animals suffer more and more. I'll give you another example of that, which is the breeding birds. The birds that they have that are raised for meat are optimized to only survive until about seven or eight weeks of age. Even by that age, a lot of them are keeling over, getting lame, collapsing. But they're not at puberty yet. So they need to raise some of these birds past puberty to raise the next generation of birds. For those birds to not totally collapse under their genetics, they have to starve them. What they do is they give the breeding birds about 30% of the feed that the birds would eat on their own. They're starving them 70%, because that is the only way to stop these birds from completely collapsing under the genetics that they've inflicted on them. In just reading about the accounts of, for example pigs in gestation crates, and the medical symptoms like swollen ankles, broken bones obviously from chewing the iron bars, all the bruises that cause ulcers, tumors, cancers, pus, etc… These are not rare medical emergencies, but the regular anticipated, expected outcomes across populations of pigs. Individual farms will house thousands of them and, of course, around the world a billion. I'm sure you've visited many of these places yourself or have had friends who've done so, right?…

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