Human Livestock: We’re all just pigs on a big factory farm.

We are being farmed.  We are encouraged to breed in large numbers.  Cows on a farm are bred to make beef, leather and fertilizer.  We are bred to spend money, lots and lots of money.

We are in The Matrix, except we are not farmed by machines but by other humans.

Pigs have cages.

So do humans.

Some animals have nice cages.

Some people do, too.

One difference between other animals and ourselves is that we have been convinced that we like our cages.  We love our cages.  We dream about our cages and all the wonderful time we will spend in them.  We can’t wait to show off our cages.

We even have cages that go with us wherever we go..

Civilization may have taken a wrong turn.  We are no longer a society that makes money by selling a cure for illnesses and threats until they are removed.  We are now a society that creates threats and illnesses, so that people will constantly be forced to buy the cure.

Commerce evolved from trade built upn the idea of making a profit from helping people overcome adversity.  Hunger, weather, dehydration, and disease were killers.  But if those problems go away for good, then the makers of the cure will be out of work.  The idea has become to keep a good supply of misery, so that the cure business will continue. Look at the industries that farm human misery: weapons makers, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, junk food.  Our worldwide economy is built around sustainable misery.

We don’t mind raising animals by literally stacking them on top of each other in tiny, shit covered stalls.  They suffer, they go insane and they live their entire lives in misery.  If we do that to a human being, it is called torture.  For animals, we don’t care.  They’re just animals! Look how we devalue the life of animals.  First, we come up with religious beliefs that tell us that animals are worth less than us. In fact (we’re told) that it is our job, according to God, to do whatever we want to these animals because we have dominion over them.  It doesn’t have to make sense or even be questioned – it’s the word of God.  (What a lucky break, we had the word of God lying around when we needed it.)

Matthew Scully in his book Dominion points out the antiseptic objectivity that encourages humans to do whatever they want with and to animals: (emphasis mine)

They’re in state-of-the-art confinement facilities. The conditions that we keep these animals in are much more humane than when they were out in the field. Today they’re in housing that is environmentally controlled in many respects. And the feed is right there for them all the time, and water, fresh water. They’re looked after in some of the best conditions, because the healthier and [more] content that animal, the better it grows. So we’re very interested in their well-being—up to an extent.

‘So what?’, you may say.  Well, what if the same callousness was applied to you and your family?  What if you were given a number, your every move tracked from birth to death, your only real value being how much money you were making for someone else.  What if your health were only going to get healthcare if there was a good chance that you would make more money than it cost to save your life?  What if all decisions of what you could have or not have were made by judging whether you  had the money now or you would live long enough to earn the money?

The concept is not even reviled.  It is worshiped and honored in our society.  “It’s nothing personal.  It’s ‘business’.”  The death, misery, sorrow or all around tough luck of another person can be accepted, if it’s a business decision.  We have bought into our captivity and harvest – lock, stock & barrel.

Take the tobacco industry.  They found ways to get people hooked as quickly and deeply as possible, knowing full well that it would shorten their lives, make them weaker, make them sicker.  They even discovered a complex cycle of needs and cures.  The smoker begins smoking to ‘get high’ or ‘look cool’, memes produced by the tobacco industry to encourage smoking.  Then, the smoker gets high and very soon (thanks to science) the smoker is hooked.  From then on, the smoker is trapped between the misery of nicotine need and the joy of nicotine consumption.  The same cycles are repeated with our junk foods.  They fill us up but leave us hungry.  They make us fat, which also makes us hungry.  They also destroy our sense of smell, so that we don’t know what we’re missing or eating.

Oil, Pharm, health care, alcohol & drugs.  They all have a system to keep us coming back until the day we die.  And…it’s run in the same fashion as these factory farms we have animals in.  Exactly the same.

From cradle to the grave, we are injected, inspected, trained, indoctrinated, stuffed, checked, valued, de-valued, measured, judged, assessed, bought, sold, traded and given away…all based on our ability to make money for someone.  If a person makes a lot of money, they live in a nice cage.  If they do not, they live in the bad ones.  The privatized prison industry in the United States offers a nauseating testament to the financial viability of human factory farming.

Maybe we’re all just making money about equally.  The mechanic, the architect, the baker, the cashier, the janitor, the policeman, the writer, the dog-walker…and so on.  We’re all just doing something to make a living.  Maybe we’re just passing the time while we’re here.  Maybe that’s how it was – a couple of centuries ago.  Maybe we could do that.

Or maybe, some people watched factory farms and thought how rich they could be if they were farming people.  Maybe there are a class of people at the very top of our society that are moving entire nations of people around like cattle, harvesting the insane amounts of revenue that we produce for them as a herd.

There is so much money and technology spent on factory farming of animals.  How can it not have been applied to humans?  What is to stop people from making billions of dollars in the process?  Investors?  Governments?  Watchdog agencies?  With this kind of money, they could not be stopped.

Thinks about the industries that have humanity ‘on the hook’ for never-ending business…oil, tobacco, weapons, pharm, healthcare, food manufacturing.  All they need is a very tight-lipped group of willing accomplices – no different than any of us.  They just live in bigger cages with more privileges.  But, they are the ones farming us.  They are invested in our welfare as a herd but not as individuals.

The human race is consuming the planet. We’re drinking the water, cutting down the trees, eating anything that moves or grows.  What are we doing with all this energy and real estate?  Making cages to grow more people.  When we run out of fish in 50 years, what will our money buy?  When the trees are gone?  When the water is undrinkable?  When the oil is gone?  When we live in such high density that viruses and germs mutate uncontrollably?

Where is the money going that is being siphoned from us?  Is it going to a space ship to take us all to the next planet?  Is it being used to replant trees?  To restock the ocean?  To clean the water or the air?  To create clean energy?  Or, is it going into nicer cages?

We are going to need to change our behavior or we will amount to little more than all-consuming locusts that have organized themselves into two groups.  A very small group that manipulated the rest for selfish reasons until they all died as a result.

- the national gadfly

Read about Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) at the following links:

Factory Farming (Wikipedia)

The History of Factory Farming (UN)