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Photo by Breanne Lywood
Whether you’re a fully-fledged rural homesteader, a sustainability-minded urbanite, or simply a curious consumer, you’ve probably heard bad things about how animals are raised on commercial farms. These things take many forms: a dramatic headline, a farm exposé video, or maybe a comment at a dinner party. What many criticisms of animal production have in common is that they fail to paint the full picture and, more importantly, they fail to offer real solutions.
I’m a student of animal biology. Outside the classroom, my journey through the animal husbandry trade has seen me doing everything from shoveling pungent manure out of a small pig barn to processing feather samples for hormone analysis in a lab. I’ve seen the flaws of the food animal industry firsthand, and it’s true that animals suffer to feed humans. For conscientious and compassionate people, is going vegan the only answer?