They use antibiotics to make them grow faster. That’s half the reason.
> During a visit to Minsk in August 1941, Himmler witnessed an Einsatzgruppen mass execution first-hand and concluded that shooting Jews was too stressful for his men. By November he made arrangements for any SS men suffering ill health from having participated in executions to be provided with rest and mental health care. He also decided a transition should be made to gassing the victims, especially the women and children, and ordered the recruitment of expendable native auxiliaries who could assist with the murders. Gas vans, which had been used previously to kill mental patients, began to see service by all four main Einsatzgruppen from 1942. However, the gas vans were not popular with the Einsatzkommandos, because removing the dead bodies from the van and burying them was a horrible ordeal. Prisoners or auxiliaries were often assigned to do this task so as to spare the SS men the trauma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen#Transition_to_g...
Also, animals kept not in high concentrations have often been given antibiotics since the 50s. It’s not all about supporting concentration.
I understand that animals suffer in mass farming conditions—which is why I don’t buy mass produced meat or eggs or milk—but concentration camps are for people. You cans say animals are just like people, and I may even agree with you mostly, but to me and most people they’re not entirely like people. I understand if they are to you.
The Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock also covers it:
> Certain antibiotics, when given in low, sub-therapeutic doses, are known to improve feed conversion efficiency (more output, such as muscle or milk, for a given amount of feed) and/or may promote greater growth, most likely by affecting gut flora.[15] However, any antibiotics deemed medically important to humans by the CDC are illegal to use as growth promoters in the U.S. Only drugs that have no association with human medicine – and therefore no risk to humans – are allowed to be used for this purpose.[5][16] It is also important to note that some drugs listed below are ionophores, which are not antibiotics and do not pose any potential risk to human health.
They are indeed not growth hormones, but they do change the gut bacteria balance and make it easier to extract calories from the feed stock. This has nothing to do with actually being sick or not.
I'm not sure this is entirely true.
> According to the National Office of Animal Health (NOAH, 2001), antibiotic growth promoters are used to "help growing animals digest their food more efficiently, get maximum benefit from it and allow them to develop into strong and healthy individuals". Although the mechanism underpinning their action is unclear, it is believed that the antibiotics suppress sensitive populations of bacteria in the intestines. It has been estimated that as much as 6 per cent of the net energy in the pig diet could be lost due to microbial fermentation in the intestine (Jensen, 1998). If the microbial population could be better controlled, it is possible that the lost energy could be diverted to growth.
Do you have any material from a peer reviewed source that refutes this?
> then killed about one tenth of the way into our natural lifespan, purely for the pleasure of others
does not seem to be rational. Humans and animals don't eat only for the pleasure, then need to eat something in order to live. Your stomach and other organs do not really care about your conscientious choices about what to eat, whether you had to kill for that or not. The natural lifespan is also partially influenced by 'demand' for the species by the predators, so the fact that some animal populations in wildlife have ten times the lifespan can be explained by the fact that those animals do not have humans in their natural habitat. Those which do end up in farms and their natural lifespan is lower.
Anyway, I believe eating meat is so profound on moral debates only because humans are apex predators and no one preys on us. If there were such things then maybe our moral choices about animals could be more compassionate (in order to possibly influence moral choices of the human-eating predators).
A cow will live about 20 years on average. A dairy cow will live about 4. I'm having a hard time coming up with a definition of "natural" that fits the latter. And for most of human history it was a small fraction of animals in the wild that would up on a human's dinner table (American Buffalo, for example).
It doesn't seem likely that humans are ever going to have to worry about predators again but meat production is a huge contributor to climate change so we are going to pay for our meat habit one way or the other.
Nature is no less cruel.
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
Watch this and get back to me about cruelty.