The Industrialization of Animals: What happened to ethics?

"The animal-industrial complex achieves the annual slaughter of in excess of 56 billion farmed animals (a Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) figure), a figure that excludes marine animals, experimented animals and those farmed animals that don’t make it to the slaughterhouse count.

This figure deserves some pause for thought. It’s an annual figure and it’s on an upward trajectory.

To underline, the animal industrial complex performs the annual repetitious killing of in excess of 56 billion farmed land animals.
Furthermore during the latter half of the 20th century we witnessed the emergence and rapid growth of global livestock genetics companies which now form an absolutely pivotal role in the animal industrial complex. As a part of this they may work in relation with the university sector or indeed, more autonomously, employ people who have formerly held academic animal science positions. The financial incentives to switch careers to the private sector, one can only assume, must be considerable.
More recent developments in the corporate manoeuvres of livestock genetics companies point to significant developments expressed in vertical and horizontal integration. Thus in horizontal integration, companies once specialising in the research and dissemination of particular breeding lines of a given animal such as the pig have tended to amalgamate into cross-species companies increasing both their profitability prospects but also protecting themselves from species specific downturns such as disease outbreaks.
A good example was the 2005 acquisition by bovine genetics specialist Genus plc of the Pig Improvement Company (PIC). Genus plc is now the world’s largest livestock genetics company.

The assumption of course is that because most people normatively consume animal products they implicitly support such research.
Yet because the animal industrial complex involves so much violence and killing it is unsettling for the vast majority of people. Actual practices of killing are spatially removed and performed by those exploited according to social class position, gender or ethnicity.  Just as most people would rather not dwell on this or bear witness, it is likely the case that the role of cutting edge scientific knowledge in the further industrialisation of animal agriculture is similarly something that most people would rather not know about.
Nevertheless what if, within these discourses and practices, people discovered a reflexive knowledge? Perhaps a critical knowledge that until a certain point in time had passed under the radar of habitual practice, but now had the capacity to provoke reflection upon our complicity with particular damaging relations toward other people, and toward ecology, and toward nonhuman animals."

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