It’s a harsh fact that every vegan knows too well: every year, humans slaughter trillions of land and aquatic animals for food and other purposes. Even limiting ourselves to domesticated land animals, the numbers remain in the tens of billions.
It’s impossible for us to grasp what TRILLIONS means. The numbers have no sense of reality…they easily become horrible abstractions.
But the awfulness of these statistics is that they are a matter of flesh and blood—an inescapable onslaught of pain and suffering experienced by individual beings.
Business as usual relies on hatcheries, farms, feedlots, battery cages, calf hutches, gestation crates, transport trucks, processing plants, and distribution networks, all before the stolen, hacked up, and packaged parts and pieces of living beings are placed on the grocery store shelves or set out on a farmers market table.
Each and every one of these points of production and consumption exists to turn living beings into parts and products.
There is no other way.
A crucial role that sanctuaries play in the effort to change the system is chipping away at the edifice of the abstract, unseen suffering by helping us to connect with the individuals who have survived exploitation.
Sanctuary residents show the individuals hidden within the abstract statistics of animal agriculture. Each one has a personality, with unique thoughts, feelings, experiences, desires, instincts, and hardships.
When we interact with them at a sanctuary or learn about them online, we can begin to understand the reality that exploitation is never about mere numbers—it is always about individual beings.
Sanctuary residents’ lives and stories make painfully clear that there is no other ethical or defensible response to the realities of animal exploitation than to go vegan, and to advocate for the end of commodification of every single individual creature.
We must continue to see the individuals, not lose ourselves in the terrible, depersonalizing incomprehensibility of abstraction.