ABSTRACT
This chapter is the first of three about animals as food. This one provides an overview of the history, economics, and welfare impacts of contemporary intensive animal agriculture and aquaculture—drawn exclusively from industry and industry-friendly sources. This chapter is very light on philosophy, but the empirical issues are so important—and so often misunderstood—that they need to be set out in some detail. So, after mapping out the rise of intensive animal agriculture, the chapter summarizes the lives of pigs, cattle, and chickens in contemporary production systems. Then, the chapter turns to aquaculture, which is far more complex because so many more species are involved. So, instead of trying to be exhaustive, the chapter simply offers a rough sense of contemporary fish farming by considering some representative examples.
