Activists call it rescue. Farms call it stealing. What is ‘open rescue’?

A new generation of animal welfare activists argue that U.S. state bystander laws give them the right to save animals in distress—including those in factory farms.

 Essay on Factory Farms: Reasons for adopting a plant-based diet

What makes factory farms so unspeakably horrific is that all the animals are treated as though they are simply unfeeling ‘things’. Yet, as we now know, they are all capable of rich emotional lives. They know depression, frustration, boredom, fear, terror. All feel pain, including fish. You only have to watch calves gambolling in fields, cows standing together in the shade or lying and chewing their cud, pigs rootling in the grass or grunting in pleasure as they lie dozing in the mud, a hen, duck or goose leading her chicks from one place to another, calling to them when she finds food, to realise what the factory farm prisoners are deprived of.

 How Does Factory Farming Contribute To Climate Change?

Factory farming is not only a disaster for animals, it’s a disaster for us too. It creates a dangerous pandemic risk while at the same time driving antibiotic resistance. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it also damages our planet in multiple ways. Here we focus on just one: climate change.

 Pandemics & Factory Farms: Is Eating Meat a Pandemic Risk?

The coronavirus pandemic has shone a blinding spotlight on how human activities are endangering our own future. Researchers and academics have been telling us for decades that what we eat and the way we farm animals pose a very real threat to our health. Hunting, trapping, caging, farming, exploiting, trading, slaughtering, butchering and eating animals creates and spreads infectious diseases. It also drives ecological breakdown. If we want a future on this beautiful planet, there are some hard lessons we must learn, and some changes we absolutely must make.

 Switzerland Could Be the First Country to Ban Factory Farming

Switzerland also already has some of the toughest animal welfare regulations on the books, many of which were introduced through the direct democracy tool of popular initiatives. Its long history of animal protection laws dates as far back as 1893, when a popular initiative made it illegal to slaughter animals without first anesthetizing them.

 This Generation Won’t End Factory Farming – But The Next One Might

It can’t be denied that overall, people are more concerned than ever about the effects of their diets on animals and the environment. Over the last couple of decades, thanks in part to the mainstream penetration of books like “The Omnivore's Dilemma” and documentaries like “Cowspiracy,” it’s become more common knowledge that industrial animal agriculture is a significant culprit behind the release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and thus a major contributor to climate change. Factory farming also uses vastly more water and land than any other kind of food production. It’s hardly a secret that environmental experts believe a mass reduction in meat eating is one of the most important things we can do to protect the future of our planet.

 What Is Factory Farming and Why Is it Bad?

The vast majority of farmed animals are raised under this system, which continues to grow and be applied in more and more countries worldwide. Yet factory farming is also responsible for animal cruelty, public health risks and massive environmental impacts. The factory farming industry cannot continue its current rates of expansion and production without severe damage to the planet and global food system.

'Enough Is Enough': US Factory Farm Takeover Continues With 1.7 Billion Animals

The USDA's new data show that without policy changes, factory farms will continue to get bigger and bigger, wreaking havoc on public health, the environment, and the climate...

Agriculture and Climate Change: Environmental Impact of Factory Farming

Animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to climate change due to its heavy resource use, chemical runoff, and excessive GHG emissions. In the U.S., around 40 percent of all agricultural emissions stem from animal agriculture, and two-thirds of that comes from ruminants animals, mostly cows.

Animals That Love Pain: How Factory Farming Explains Abuse

Long gone are the days when defenders of factory farming argued that farm animals simply aren't capable of suffering, or are too stupid to even know they're suffering, as was sometimes self-servingly claimed. Today's proponents of animal agribusiness instead acknowledge that of course they're concerned about preventing animal suffering, but that our nation's billions of chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other farm animals could hardly be happier.

Avoiding Factory Farm Foods: An Eater's Guide

Eventually, I mostly gave up on supermarkets and began exploring new ways to get at the good food I was seeking. My goal was simple: I wanted all my food to come from places I would enjoy visiting.

Ethical arguments won't end factory farming. Technology might

"This is an insane system." — Bruce Friedrich, The Good Food Institute.

Factory Farming and its Dire Consequences

The ills of factory farming reach beyond the ethical as immunologists grow increasingly concerned about a vaccine-resistant virus.

How to stop cruel factory farming: start with one animal

But as difficult as this would be, the challenges to ending the farming of one animal species do not seem insurmountable. They are certainly not as intractable as those we would face if aiming to abolish all animal farming at once. A lot of people who could not be convinced to give up meat altogether — because they would miss the general taste and texture, or because they are persuaded that they need some meat for their health — might agree to give up the consumption of at least one species of commonly farmed animal.

Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history

The fate of industrially farmed animals is one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time. Tens of billions of sentient beings, each with complex sensations and emotions, live and die on a production line.

Looking forward to a future without factory farming

Rather than harming rural economies, the end of factory farming is an invitation to revive reciprocal practices as well as develop compelling new possibilities rooted in interspecies respect. It is a clear opportunity to create new income sources and humane jobs for diverse people. After factory farming, we will all be better off.

Meat production leads to thousands of air quality-related deaths annually

Air pollution remains a major cause of death in the United States, one usually associated with tailpipe exhaust and factory and power plant smokestacks. Now new research shows that 16,000 U.S. deaths are the result of air polluted by growing and raising food—and 80 percent of those result from producing animal products like meat, dairy, and eggs. Additional deaths are attributable to products we don’t eat, including ethanol, leather, or wool. That brings the total number of deaths from agricultural air pollution to 17,900 a year.

Peter Singer’s fresh take on Animal Liberation – a book that changed the world, but not enough

Some animal advocates hope for the eventual extinction of these much-abused species, while others allow for mutually positive relations with humans, as seen on some farm-rescue sanctuaries.

The fight against factory farming is winning criminal trials

Since its founding a decade ago, DxE, a grassroots animal rights group, has been testing out this strategy, which it calls “open rescue”: activists walk into factory farms and slaughterhouses and simply remove animals suffering there, taking them to receive veterinary care and eventually to live out their lives peacefully on animal sanctuaries. The tactic serves an elegant double purpose, saving animal lives in the immediate term while intentionally provoking conflict with a legal system that treats living beings on farms as though they were inanimate property rather than sentient individuals.

The Problem with Factory Farms

In his book Animal Factory, journalist David Kirby explores the problems of factory farms, from untreated animal waste to polluted waterways.

The Woman Going Undercover to Expose the Brutal Animal Torture in Factory Farms

As an animal farm investigator, Lisa moves constantly, getting jobs in the agricultural business to document the horrific abuse she's dedicated her life to stopping.

The worst horrors of factory farming could soon be phased out in Europe

Europe is on track to ban cages for farm animals as soon as 2027. The US could take much longer.

There Isn’t Any Humane Meat From Animals

Unfortunately, most meat, dairy and eggs labeled “humane” comes from inhumane farms where animals are treated more like commodities than as living, feeling beings.

There's no such thing as humane meat or eggs. Stop kidding yourself

Many people think they consume humane meat, but only a tiny fraction actually do. The majority of consumers are totally wrong about what they eat.

Why factory farming is not just cruel – but also a threat to all life on the planet

It’s time the world woke up to the real impact of modern, industrial farming, says Philip Lymbery, author of Farmageddon and the Deadzone