At Middlebury, we talk a lot about systems. In our environmental studies classes, sustainability-focused clubs and everyday conversation, we discuss sustainability, carbon footprints and Energy2028. Yet, every day in our dining halls, we participate in a system that is largely invisible to us.
We go through thousands of pounds of chicken every year. Chicken tenders, chicken sandwiches, stir-fry. A lot of it gets wasted, scraped off plates into compost bins as we rush to our next class. I eat in the dining halls; I’m not here to scold anyone for grabbing lunch. But I think we owe it to ourselves to talk about what those pounds actually represent.
Eighty billion land animals are killed for food every year. To put that in perspective, there are approximately eight billion humans alive today. The number of land animals we slaughter annually is therefore about 10 times the size of the entire human population. Moreover, the total number of humans who have died in all wars in recorded history is estimated at roughly one billion. This means that we kill more land animals for food every five days than have died in all human wars combined.
This horrifying scale makes the assumption that farmed animals are too simple to suffer appealing. But biologically, pain is not an intellectual achievement; you don't need to solve calculus to feel agony. You just need receptors, nerves, and a brain. Every animal we factory farm has all three.
Chickens have pain-processing brain regions just like us. When a chick has her beak seared off with a hot blade at one day old (standard industry practice to prevent compulsive pecking in overcrowded warehouses), she feels it. Brain scans show sustained pain activity for days. She shakes her head repeatedly, a universal reflex to facial trauma. She is then moved to a windowless grow-out house. She has been bred to grow so unnaturally fast that her legs often cannot support her weight. She sits in her own waste, sometimes unable to walk to water, until she is slaughtered at five to seven weeks old.
At the slaughterhouse, line speed dictates everything. Workers shackle birds upside down, often breaking their bones in the rush. They move toward an electrified water bath meant to stun them. But because the line moves so fast, processing up to 175,000 birds a day, that many birds miss the stun. They arrive at the automated throat-cutting blade fully conscious. If they struggle, the blade misses the arteries. These birds enter the scalding tank, meant to loosen feathers, while still alive. They drown and scald simultaneously.
While Middlebury Dining Services sources some of our meat from local farms, much of our chicken is from these factory farms. Every chicken tender in the Ross line represents a bird that went through some version of this. And frankly, it’s jarring to realize that we scrape so much of this suffering into the compost bin because we took too much General Tso’s.
This system contradicts the very values Middlebury claims to uphold. We worry about public health, yet factory farming is a primary driver of antibiotic resistance. Approximately 70–80% of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. go to animal agriculture — not to treat sick animals, but to prevent disease in filthy conditions. We are effectively funding a public health crisis that the CDC estimates already kills 35,000 Americans annually.
Over 99% of U.S. meat comes from these factories. Even with our dining services working hard to source better options, the scale of the industry makes ethical consumption incredibly difficult. So, what do we do? The problem feels too big for a single student to solve, so many just ignore it. But silence is a choice, too.
I’m not asking for purity, just that we stop looking away. We must collectively acknowledge our responsibility: both for the unfathomable suffering, and for taking steps — even small ones—towards a solution. To start, consider eating a little less meat. Have the veggie burger at the Grille. Skip the chicken tenders when the tofu looks good. If every Middlebury student reduced their meat consumption by just 25%, we’d collectively spare thousands of animals from this system.
And for those thinking about careers after graduation: this is a problem that desperately needs the liberal arts toolkit. We need writers to expose these conditions, policy analysts to model welfare interventions, and lawyers to challenge unconstitutional "ag-gag" laws. We need biologists and chemists working on alternative proteins that can compete on taste and price.
Future generations will look back at the footage of the cages and the scalding tanks. They will see the scale — 80 billion a year — and wonder how we lived with it. The logic of this injustice is identical to so many past practices now viewed as barbaric: we have the power, they have none, it’s convenient. Farmed animals have no voice in this system. But we have a choice. Let’s use it to make the world slightly less cruel, starting right now.
