ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on factory farming in the United States because the United States inaugurated the approach to farming the Department of Agriculture (USDA), publishes abundant readily available statistics that reveal the astonishing scale of factory farming in this country. The debate over factory farming is often “complicated and contentious,” with the deepest point of contention arising over the nature, degree, and duration of suffering food animals undergo. The similarities between how Nazis treated people targeted for extermination and how we treat farmed animals are impossible not to recognize. Nazis kept their victims in filthy, crowded camps, fed them as little as possible or not at all, forced them to huddle together naked and defenseless, and struck them with fists and rifle butts to push them along more quickly into the chutes that led to the gas chambers. People in the US have had less and less access to farmed animals.
