Civil Eats - It's Time to Ban Factory Farm Ghost Ships

By Erik Marcus
September 29, 2010

"Sixty thousand chickens were found dead this week at a North Carolina factory farm, a result of a failed generator powering the facility’s ventilation system. This sort of tragedy is totally preventable, and, as we’ll see, the owners of this farm ought to be criminally prosecuted. It’s also far from the first time an equipment failure has killed thousands of animals—a similar incident killed 3800 pigs less than a year ago. So let’s look the causes behind these tragedies, and what it would take to keep another incident like this from ever occurring. One of the points I regularly make in my writing is that while factory farming is loaded with horrific cruelties, very little of it is a result of outright sadism. Instead, nearly all the pain and suffering that farmed animals endure is a result of efforts made by factory farms to cut costs to the bone. It turns out that many of these cost-cutting practices entail the infliction of great amounts of suffering..."

http://civileats.com/2010/09/29/it%E2%80%99s-time-to-ban-factory-farm-ghost-ships/