A stark example of animals as objects
After every storm or dreadful accident, they're only sums of money. Is that all there is?
Animals in agribusinesses are only regarded as objects for exploitation and sale. The most obvious instance is what happens after any devastating storm or accident. Is a payout all life is worth?
In 2018, storm Florence hit South Carolina. The death toll for farm animals was approximately 5,000 pigs and 3.4 million chickens and turkeys out of a total 9 million pigs and 819 million fowl populating agribusinesses across the state. Insurance payouts on those ‘losses’ were based on calculating the market value of those lives. The lives of those sentient beings were valued only as the objects they represented, akin to a lost car or mobile phone
Excerpted from Think Like a Vegan p 124-125 (Unbound 2021, 2025)
Photo: Aerial views of flooded CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) farms in North Carolina, USA. Chicken, turkey and pig farms were widely affected by the flooding caused by Hurricane Florence
We Animals contributors travelled to North Carolina to document the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, which caused the death of at least 5.5 million farmed animals and widespread environmental devastation from breaches in toxic manure lagoons
Helene
This weekend, storm Helene made landfall over a 500 mile area including the US states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and South Carolina wreaking destruction and death in its path. In early reports, over 100 people died and hundreds are missing, along with as yet uncounted losses of homes, livelihoods and more. The early images starting to trickle out are shocking
Elsewhere, there have been days of torrential rain in Nepal. This has caused devastating floods and landslides, similarly displacing, injuring and killing people and animals
And surely along with myriad images of destruction and loss in a human context, we will see images like the one above, whether from the US, Nepal or elsewhere catastrophic weather makes life as we’ve known it more and more precarious. As a consequence of Helene, we will see staggering loss of life of animals, whether in agribusinesses and among free living animals. The latter will be impossible to count. The animal lives lost will only matter, if at all, on a spreadsheet as payments from insurance or government sources
Entangled
Imagine a similar scenario in a human context; it’s ghastly. Yet people too won’t come away unscathed from this. Non-human life and human life are inexorably entangled. But contemporary worldview and our human supremacy seems to either disregard this entirely or deeply discount it
Everyone - human and non-human - is suffering the outcomes of our own choices to continue using animals as commodities. Stopping the demand for animal products is the one thing most of us have control over, can effectively do and would make a significant difference to mitigating climate catastrophe
We must abandon this destructive practice. Our – and their – lives are worth more than mere payouts
Please find and support local emergency services and organisations bringing help to people and animals in affected areas. Send money and let locals determine what they need