A Cage Is Not A Classroom

There is something deeply bizarre about listening to a farmer—someone who profits from the captivity, mutilation, and slaughter of animals—explain the "true nature" of the beings they imprison. With a confidence that borders on delusion, they tell you how pigs are “just like that,” how cows are “too dumb to care,” how chickens “barely notice where they are.” They speak in a reductionist manner as if they are scholars of the species, as if their knowledge is rooted in some kind of deep, intimate understanding rather than the narrow, distorted lens of a jailer describing his prisoners.

But what are they actually witnessing? Not nature, but the forced product of confinement. These animals are born into an artificial world of metal bars, concrete floors, and surgical mutilations without anesthetic. They never experience the richness of a natural life—the freedom to roam, to form bonds, to learn, to play, to explore, to be what they might have been. A pig raised in a cramped warehouse, driven to neurotic chewing and tail-biting, is no more a reflection of the species’ true nature than a human child raised in a prison cell, deprived of love, education, and stimulation, would be a reflection of what it means to be human.

If we saw a child who had never left a room, whose every action was dictated by an oppressor, who had no freedom to express their personality or potential, we would not look at them and say, This is what all children are like. We would say, This is what captivity does to a child. Yet when it comes to animals, the logic is reversed. The factory farmer, the feedlot operator, the slaughterhouse worker—they present the broken, stifled behaviors of confined animals as proof that they were never capable of anything more. They point to the stress-born habits of pigs gnawing at bars, to cows trudging blankly toward the kill floor, and they say, See? They don’t think. They don’t feel. They don’t suffer.

And yet, somehow, despite their supposed indifference, these animals are still restrained. Still shocked with electric prods when they hesitate. Still dragged by chains when they collapse in exhaustion. Still cry out for their stolen children, still flee when given the chance. If their nature was truly as dull, as unfeeling, as livestock farmers claim, why must so much violence be used to keep them in place?

But of course, there’s another glaring issue with this argument: money. The people making these claims are not impartial observers. They are not biologists. They are not behaviorists. They are businessmen. Their entire livelihood depends on ensuring that the public never sees these animals as individuals with rich inner lives. They have a financial stake in keeping the truth buried under industry slogans, in twisting unnatural suffering into normality. When a farmer tells you about the nature of animals, they are not speaking from wisdom. They are speaking from profit motive.

It is a grotesque irony—the oppressor defining the oppressed. The executioner declaring the experience of the condemned. The profiteer insisting that the ones he exploits do not mind, as if that ever justified their suffering. But step outside their walls, away from the cages, away from the propaganda, and the truth is clear. The moment a pig touches grass for the first time and runs. The moment a cow freed from a slaughterhouse sanctuary jumps for joy. The moment a chicken who has only known wire cages stretches her wings and basks in the sun.

The farmer never knew them. The meat industry never cared. They were never experts in anything but confinement. And yet, the moment the bars are gone, the animals tell us the truth—louder than any butcher and their industry friends have ever considered doing.