Chapter 3: Down on the Factory Farm Summary and Analysis

Or what happened to your dinner when it was still an animal.

The closest contact that most modern suburbanites have with non-human animals is at dinner time when they eat them. As much as animals are abused in other ways including during research, the mistreatment of animals raised for food far exceeds them all. In America over 100 million cows, pigs and sheep are raised each year only to be slaughtered for human consumption. Buying meat in a grocery story or at a butcher shop reveals little about the process. The packaged meat seems like something other than a hunk of dead animal. There's hardly any blood and the hunk of meat is cut into a shape that is familiar and pleasing to our eyes. Our idyllic images of farms are child-like...