Locking an animal away from experiencing the joys of life doesn’t take away the desire for that life. Young girls kidnapped at an early age and made to live with a pedophile as his wife and kept sequestered away from other humans dulls their senses and deadens their emotions. Does that mean that their lives don’t matter? Because going by this argument, because they didn’t live, their lives and their desires don’t matter.

A retarded boy kept locked in a closet his entire life doesn’t ever get to experience life, but the fact that he’s unable to experience life doesn’t mean he doesn’t yearn for it. Perhaps he doesn’t know what type of life he’s missing, or exactly what that life entails and includes, but that’s exactly the point. The entire possibility of life is removed from him, which isn’t humane. And the same thing happens with these animals. They’re disallowed to have any possibility of living the life they would normally lead. And the lives chickens would have had might not be much to you, but to them it’s all they have. To them, it’s the only thing worth living for. And because that one thing is taken from them, they develop disorders that cause them to bite their fellow inmates, or cause pigs to resort to cannibalism, or cause dogs in puppy mills to develop anxiety disorders that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

You say that if you look into the eyes of one of these animals, the eyes are blank. This is precisely the point. They aren’t in there, they aren’t active, because they’ve been torn down and had everything that meant anything to them ripped away, and couldn’t actively live. And that’s just the same look you’d see in that young girl 20 years after she was kidnapped. She isn’t in there, she’s dead inside. Any spark that once was in her young eyes is gone, and now they’re just blank. It wasn’t the kidnapper’s right to take her life away from her and turn her into an empty shell, and it isn’t our right to take life away from animals in the way that we do. It was alright in the early days when people hunted and only took what they needed, and thanked the animals for their sacrifices. But now, with our burgeoning growth, the world can’t keep up with our inexhaustible appetites, and as such we’re slowly devouring the world.

that’s completely a NOGO bio centristic nonsense argument for veganism, gee and by the way, once I saw this funny Ali G show in TV with a veggie and Ali G saying something like “Eat this chicken” Veggie: “No!” Ali G responding “Eat this chicken or I kill that other one…” ;)

peace