Why This Factory Farming Advert is Important
It’s one of those songs that stays in your head. It keeps playing and playing.
It’s a really haunting song.
And it’s something that should haunt us.
The video below that I’d like you to watch – one of those lovely, feel-good videos – is actually an advertisement for Chipotle.
Now let me say right from the start that I don’t know Chipotle. Where I live, I can’t buy their products, and I have no idea if their meat suppliers use factory farming or not.
But as I say, it’s a nice, feel-good video (and as I write this, the video has had almost 9 million views on YouTube, so it must be doing something right!).
Underneath the video, you can find out why I think this particular factory farming video is important (and don’t worry, there are no horrible images of the ghastly animal cruelty that goes on in many factory farms).
As you saw, it starts off with just a normal farmer, his wife and their new baby – a family farm.
Of course he needs to make a living, and so he grows his farm – and suddenly, as part of the growth, the animals are no longer animals, but resources, moulded into squares in the video to represent the methods used to gain the maximum meat output in the minimum time and for the least cost.
To my mind, the video does a nice job of showing how easy it would be to get into factory farming.
You can clearly see the change in the animals from being fed natural grass and hay, to tablets, antibiotics and growth hormones.
They grow unnaturally fat and are caged rather than roaming free.
Finally, they are dispatched in the cheapest ways possible, without thought for animal welfare, only profits. The whole process generates lots of horrible green pollution and is really bad for the environment.
In the video, the farmer sees sense, and goes “back to the start” (the title of this factory farming video).
He realizes that factory farming – all the antibiotics, all the unnatural fattening, the animal cruelty and the pollution – is not worth cheap meat.
And so he goes back to more normal, more humane meat production. The baby is now grown up, and they all live happily ever after.
And of course, Chipotle want you to know that that’s how their meat is produced (and no, I don’t know if it’s true or not).
But my point is, while that song is haunting you, playing in your brain, remember it when you next go to buy meat.
Factory farming simply wouldn’t exist if we didn’t all want to eat so much meat and poultry.
It’s just not possible to produce large volumes of meat cheaply, any other way.
So if you do still eat meat, please reduce the amount you eat. And when you do eat meat and poultry, choose it wisely.
Supermarket meat, for example, is nearly always from factory farming. See how to avoid food from factory farming here.
Please share this super video with your friends and family – sharing buttons below and right – thank you!
Related: How to avoid factory farmed products
Related: How to go vegetarian – 3 best tips
Related: Why factory farming is so bad for the environment (and us).
