When most of us picture a farm, we envision a red barn, green pastures, and open sky. But for the billions of animals raised for food in this country, the stark reality of modern factory farming couldn't be more different from the "Old McDonald" farm pictured in children's books.

Factory farming is a system of industrialized farm animal production that began in the 1950s and 60s. Today, 90-95% of all meat and dairy products come from factory farms. In order to maximize profits, animals on factory farms are treated like units of production rather than as living beings. The instinctual needs of each animal are denied, and most spend their entire lives indoors in filthy, cramped conditions in immense dark warehouses.
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Most will never feel the sun, never feel the grass beneath theirfeet, and many will never be able to turn around with hitting cage bars or another animal. Animals are bred by artificial insemination, and their diet is trypically enriched with chemical growth hormes in order to grow the animal far beyond their usual size at a rate much quicker than would ever occur naturally. This leads to animals that have trouble walking and breathing due to their unnatural girth, and residues from the hormones are in turn absorbed by the consumer. There are no laws regulating the slaughter of 90% of farmed animals, and animals are sometimes slaugthered by being tossed alive into wood chippers or fires. Even those 10% of animals that have some small protection under the Federal Humane Methods of Slaugther Act are often fully conscious when they are dropped into vats of boiling water or have their throats.

Some of the cruelest factory farming practices include the use of battery cages for egg production, gestation crates for breeding pigs, and veal crates for calves. There are currently no federal laws regulating how animals can be treated on factory farms in the United States, though all three of these practices have been banned in the European Union. Battery cages are small wire cages the size of a sheet of newspaper that typically house 5-9 hens. The cages are so small that the animals cannot move without hitting another bird. The cages are typically stacked one on top of the other and so become caked with feces and urine. Birds in battery cages often develop crippled feet from standing on bars their entire lives, and sometimes have their beaks removed with a hot blade. Egg-laying hens kept in battery cages - which produce 95% of the eggs consumed in this country - will never spend one day outside of their cage and never leave the dark, ammonia-filled warehouses that typically contain 80,000 birds each.

Gestation crates are metal cages that house breeding sows on pig farms; gestation crates are so small that the pig is not even able to turn around.. Breeding sows spend an average of four years inside gestation crates, during which time they are repeatedly inseminated and give birth to litter after litte of piglets. Pigs, naturally curious creatures with the same intelligence as a dog or a three year old child, often go crazy in such cramped conditions and exhibit stress behaviors like bar-biting or slamming their head against the cage walls. In the past few years state bans on gestation crates have been passed in Florida, Arizona, and Oregon.

Veal crates are small crates or cages that hold baby male calves, who are often chained by the neck. Sometimes the chain is so short the animal is not even able to sit down, and is never able to turn around. Veal calves are separated from their mother at one day of age and fed an anemic diet in order to make their flesh soft before being slaughtered.

In addition to the animal cruelty, factory farming is one of the leading causes of enviornmental pollution in this country. Factory farming is the number one cause of water pollution (due mainly to manure run-off, as animals on factory farms in the U.S. produce over 160 times more waste than the entire human population of the world) and the second leading cause of air pollution. Factory farming is also extremely resource-intensive in terms of both land use and crop use, and over 70% of the grain grown in this country is fed to farmed animals. Furthermore, The UN report on climate change and global warming notes that factory farming contributes more towards global warming than does automobile use.

As a result of the horrors of factory farming and the devastating environmental consequences, more and more people are choosing to go vegan.