MATT SIMON: The distribution infrastructure that normally gets plenty of beef, pork, and chicken to American grocery stores has begun to buckle as meatpacking facilities become Covid-19 hot spots and shutter, leaving farmers with nowhere to send their animals. Those livestock are consequently growing too big to process, so farmers across the Midwest are having to gas or shoot tens of thousands of animals and throw them away, all while millions of Americans are going hungry. The core problem behind this wastefulness is the convoluted way we consume protein. Farmers grow protein in the form…

DENA JONES: In January 2020, an estimated 10,000 chickens perished in a fire just west of Winston-Salem, North Carolina... Less than 24 hours after the fire in North Carolina, a poultry house in Fulks Run, Virginia, burned to the ground, killing all 24,000 chickens trapped inside. The county’s deputy fire marshal, Joe Mullens, told one media outlet that the structure, which was built in 1978, was exempt from fire codes; he merely encouraged farmers to practice “good housekeeping"... In 2019, Michigan reported the most animal deaths from fires (more than 253,000 deaths in 17 fires). But…

SINDHU MV: In 1993, eighth-grader Kuntal Joisher wrote his first piece of software code. “Somehow, I felt that I would be doing that for the rest of my life,” he says. But, that’s only a tiny part of what he does today. A part-time software engineer, Kuntal is now a well-known name in mountaineering and vegan circles. In 2018, he summited Mt. Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world at 8,516 metres, and became the first person to ascend an 8,000 metre mountain on a 100 percent vegan lifestyle. A year later, he repeated the feat on Everest, another first for the vegan community. Born…

DENA JONES: Now that the COVID-19 outbreak has shut down, at least temporarily, an estimated 20 major slaughterhouses and processing plants in North America, millions of farm animals are left in limbo with nowhere to go... The meat industry is using depopulation as a quick fix for its lack of emergency preparedness. The conventional animal agriculture industry operates a highly consolidated system that has a hard time adjusting in response to a crisis... In Iowa, the nation’s biggest pork-producing state, farmers are reportedly giving pregnant sows abortions by injection and composting dead…

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: President Trump’s recent use of the Defense Production Act to order slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants to stay open is misunderstood if viewed only as the next tragic misstep in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It marks the nadir of the increasingly broken meat industry. For years, we have knowingly destroyed our planet for the sake of a protein preference. Now, we are sending humans to their deaths. Trump’s “order” was, in fact, the result of meat industry executives requesting his relief from legal liability for worker deaths. The number of…

INGRID NEWKIRK & GENE STONE: The live-animal markets in China, widely thought to be the source of the novel coronavirus, closed temporarily but are now reopening and, like those in the rest of Asia and even Europe and the U.S., are cause for alarm because they are breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases that can have fatal consequences for our own species. On the good-news front, if you care about animals, those subjected to the annual Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo were granted a reprieve when it was canceled; horses got a break when racetracks closed (coincidentally just after a…

SIGAL SAMUEL: Some experts have hypothesized that the novel coronavirus made the jump from animals to humans in China’s wet markets, just like SARS before it. Unsurprisingly, many people are furious that the markets, which were closed in the immediate wake of the outbreak in China, are already reopening. It’s easy to point the finger at these “foreign” places and blame them for generating pandemics. But doing that ignores one crucial fact: The way people eat all around the world — including in the US — is a major risk factor for pandemics, too. That’s because we eat a ton of meat, and the…

PETA: What do top U.S. papers The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Washington Post, The Hill, the Washington Examiner, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today have in common? They’re all printing urgent, full-page warnings from PETA about the dangers of slaughterhouses... U.S. farms and slaughterhouses are as filthy as China’s “wet markets,” where it’s believed the COVID-19 pandemic began. Their floors are splattered with blood, urine, feces, and entrails. As long as slaughterhouses remain open, millions of animals will…

ANIMAL JUSTICE PROJECT: The coronavirus pandemic that has engulfed the world is deadly to both human and non-human lives. With the toll of human victims increasing, the numbers of animals at the mercy of this disease is rapidly growing too. Supply and demand chains have been hugely affected. Millions of animals around the world are being buried alive and slaughtered on farm. They are treated as though they are objects we can simply throw away. Each individual, a sentient and feeling animal who wants to live and thrive, discarded. Whether they are fish from British fish farms or pigs and…

MIKKO JARVENPAA: What are our duties towards others, especially those who are less fortunate than us? Who are such others, and how can we do the most good for them? Philosopher Peter Singer has worked on such questions for decades. Singer is one of the most influential ethicists in the world and has gained this highly visible and sometimes controversial standing due to his focus on two major areas: the lives of non-human animals, and questions concerning human lives at the margins of human experience. Since the first publication of his book Animal Liberation in 1975, Singer has been a key…