>>332705While we often forget about these later, when they’re happening, they feel like the most significant thing in the world. They’re extremely bad, if you offered me $1,000 to get severely bitten by a dog, its teeth ripping off a chunk of my flesh, or have needles pierce my skin hundreds of times, I wouldn’t take the deal. Certainly I wouldn’t undergo childbirth for 1,000 dollars, especially if it was without anesthetic
Sadly, on average, the animals that we eat endure hundreds of hours of this kind of debilitating agony over the course of their life. They endure somewhere on the order of an hour a day of this pain.
I’ll just discuss one such case, the case of the egg-laying hen, with the facts gathered from this report.
https://welfarefootprint.org/research-projects/laying-hens/Egg-laying hens in conventional farms endure about 400 hours (!!!!!) of this kind of disabling agony. Remember, this is agony about as bad as the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, unless you’ve had an experience as bad as being severely tortured. This is the agony that makes it impossible to think of anything else. The hens endure about an hour of a day of this extremely intense agony.
This intense pain comes from many sources including (this list is non-exhaustive):
Bone fractures.
The majority of hens experience a bone fracture over the course of their life. On average, they have three. Imagine if you broke the same bone three times This is, and I can’t emphasize this enough, what most hens deal with the industry that produces our eggs is so cruel that it breaks the bones of most hens multiple times.
In fact, the situation is much worse for hens than it would be for us because the area around their keel bone, which is the most common kind of fracture, has a huge number of nerves. While such experiences in humans usually produce disabling pain for about a day, for chickens, such pain lasts about a week