Book Alert: David Kirby's Animal Factory

Journalist David Kirby has written a book about the factory farm system called Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment. I haven't read the book yet, but you can pretty much tell from the subtitle that this is going to be a damning indictment of the factory farm system. Kirby gave an OUTSTANDING interview to Time magazine about his new book.

PLEASE READ THE TIME MAGAZINE INTERVIEW AND PASS IT ON TO OTHERS!

The factory farm system is one of the most profoundly obscene institutions on the planet earth. The sooner these massive killing machines are declared illegal and promptly dismantled, brick by brick, machine by machine, cage by cage, the better. These immoral industrial plants should have been done away with long ago. Animals housed in these barbaric places need to be liberated right now and each factory farm should be promptly destroyed. This is capitalism at its worst - the free market run horribly, horribly amok. These are America's killing fields. They are what pushed me into veganism and I can never go back to being an omnivore. Sometimes you can say never - and must. And I knew that as long as I consumed animal products, I was perpetuating one of the most ghastly forms of human barbarism that exists in the world today.

Until every cage is smashed open, until every animal is liberated, there will never be peace.

That isn't hyperbole. Read what David Kirby has to say about the factory farm system. In particular, I was haunted by the closing paragraph of his interview with Time magazine. I'll let Kirby have the last word (note: when he uses the acronym CAFO, it means Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, a 50-cent term for "factory farm"):

One time I visited a pig farm, a regular farm — not a factory farm — in Illinois. Right across the street was a hog CAFO. The owner didn't live there, of course. There's no farm house on a factory farm, just business offices. At night, all the workers would leave, and all I'd hear as I was trying to fall asleep was the sound of the pigs fighting each other, biting each other, squealing, screeching all night long. It was like nothing I've ever heard before in my life, and it just didn't stop. It sounded like kids being tortured over there. I'll never forget that sound. It was very sad.