Degrading animals through Industrial Farming

I believe that one of the biggest ethical issues in the world today is industrial farming. This issue has been growing along with our population, simply because more people want more food, quicker. Industrial farming turns the lives of living breathing animals into simply some cog in a larger machine to get humans their food at an unnatural speed. These animals are injected with chemicals to make them grow faster and larger than how they are evolutionarily designed to grow. They are crowded into tiny spaces, with thousands of other animals, that are infested with disease. They have so little space that the animals develop sores and break bones from being in constant contact with each other. The animal’s quality of life is one of the lowest known in all of the world's history, which is definitely saying something with the amount of horrible things that have happened in this world. The first time i realized all of this was after watching Food Inc. for the first time, which is a very educational and eye opening movie that exposes the lives of livestock in the industrial farming industry. It shows the absolute atrocities that happen to these animals, as if they can’t feel when their beaks are cut off or when they are shot in the head and strung up by their leg without actually being dead. In a way the animals are being dehumanized, even though they are not human, simply because they are being treated like nothing more than a piece of meat when they are actually living beings. Unfortunately this is a very difficult ethical issue to overcome, mainly because the human population is still increasing and humans do need food to survive. Humans have become so dependent on this system that it seems almost impossible to change our ways, because it seems that without something so efficient and effective, how can we feed all the people we are feeding now, let alone how can we end world hunger. In my opinion, home farming is one of the best methods to move away from the cruelness of industrial farming and into a world of compassion and doing good. This would not only allow people to become self sufficient and less dependent on large corporations, but also it would insure the better treatment of livestock animals.