Humane Eggs, Dairy, and flesh are a myth
Humane: Marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals.
-Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Use is indeed abuse. Being used as a resource against their will for someone else’s gain causes great physical and psychological suffering to animals who demonstrate their desire to live freely and who resist being dominated and denied the ability to express their essential interests and preferences. Any type of farming guarantees that animals are to be stripped of their freedom and subjugated to the will of their owners. The inhumanity of commodification is further reinforced culturally and linguistically when we refer to an animal as “meat” or some other consumer product. Words like meat intentionally strip animals of their identity, dignity, and value beyond the commodification of their flesh.
— Robert Grillo
Taking a sentient being's life for one's own interests can never be considered humane.
-Hope Bohanec
Most of us are conditioned by the farming industry to believe that animals have to be happy to produce for farmers. “If farmers didn’t take good care of their animals, they wouldn’t produce for them.” Statements like this coming from farmers themselves reveal how we’ve deluded ourselves into believing that farmed animals desire the fate to which we’ve doomed them rather than desire the lives of free beings, free in mobility but also in intention, which can only derive from minds that express a complex range of interests and desires.
— Robert Grillo
It is impossible for a farm to create a truly humane environment - wherein families are allowed to stay together, express their normal behaviors, and live out their natural life spans - and make a profit.
-Hope Bohanec
Importantly, belief in ethical animal farming also reinforces the notion that animals are mere property, inanimate beings that exist only as means to human ends. So long as other animals are considered our property, even their most desperate needs come second to our most trivial wants.
— Jacy Reese
Let's not forget that small farms exist for the same reasons that big industrial animal agriculture does - to raise, kill, and sell animals; essentially, they are in business to make a profit.
-Hope Bohanec
Any time consumers of meat, eggs, or dairy advocate for “humane” treatment, they confront an unavoidable paradox: the movement to treat farm animals better is based on the idea that it is wrong to subject them to unnecessary harm, yet using and killing animals for their flesh and secretions when we have no need to eat them constitutes the ultimate act of unnecessary harm. When we have plentiful access to plant-based foods—and a choice between sparing life or taking it—there is nothing remotely humane about rejecting compassion and choosing violence and death for others just because we like the taste of their flesh, and because they cannot fight back. Might does not equal right.
— Robert Grillo
If producers were genuinely concerned about animals, they would not be in the business of killing animals. Ultimately, much of their "caring" is about appealing to a niche market where they can charge higher prices - they care about their bottom line. It is absurd to speak of humane treatment of animals when it comes to their handling, management, food, and shelter if you deny them the most basic right - to live out their lives - and condone or are complicit in their slaughter.
-Hope Bohanec
We have intensively bred and biologically manipulated today’s breeds of farmed animals to “optimize” their milk and egg production and flesh tissue growth, exacting a heavy toll on their bodies and resulting in abnormalities, diseases, and premature death. As a result, many are frail and highly susceptible to disease. Weak, sickly, or injured animals are a liability to farmers who will not incur the high cost of treating the medical condition of an individual animal; instead, they will be taken out of production and either left to die or sent to slaughter.
— Robert Grillo
It is not our methods of animal agriculture practices that need to change; it is our unwillingness to let go of animal products and animal farming. There is an intrinsic element of cruelty in animal agricultre that cannot be eliminated with any small-scale operation or organic label. Animal agriculture is a business that makes money on the bodies of other sentient beings. This can never be free of fundamental insensitivity toward animals, the subjects of the industry's profits. It is a deep betrayal on the animals that depend on the humans for care. In the same way that one cannot own humans and traffic their bodies for profit in a humane way, it is impossible to humanely profit from the lives and bodies of animals.
-Hope Bohanec
