Causes of Our Unethical Treatment of Farm Animals

In the book The Ethics of What We Eat, Peter Singer and Jim Mason expose the cruelty in the way that animals such as chickens, pigs, and cows are treated on factory farms in the U.S. According to the information that Singer and Mason have provided in this book, it seems as though the major reason (or at least one of the major reasons) why this cruel treatment persists despite its immorality is the fact that factory farms are run by profit-driven industries that are more concerned with making money and running the most productive and profitable businesses possible than with ensuring that the animals involved in their businesses’ operations (which are not treated as animals at all but rather as insentient commodities) are treated with care and in an ethical manner.
What Singer and Mason could have clearly stated in their book that would support their effort to expose what’s wrong with the way American factory farms operate is that our capitalist economic system is at the root of the environmental, health, and animal welfare problems that factory farms create. The need to outcompete other meat production businesses and the need for money that capitalism creates are the causes of farm workers becoming “desensitized” to animal suffering and ignoring any innate ethical tendencies they may have to treat animals kindly. These same drives produced by capitalism are what possess farm workers to use environmentally harmful chemicals (e.g., pesticides) that can help increase crop productivity.
Even if we didn’t abolish capitalism or alter the way it functions in our society, we could at least follow Europe’s example by implementing stricter regulations that ban artificial hormones and antibiotics that pose risks to human, animal, and environmental health. Singer and Mason do devote much of their book to discussing the implications of market competition on animal welfare and the environment and the tighter regulations that exist in Europe, but specifically defining solutions to these current problems associated with factory farming would have strengthened their analysis.