Defining Abuse (Yes, All Farmed Animals Are Abused)

People who insist that "most" farmed animals aren't abused wear on my nerves. I wonder, do they think that nothing short of setting an animal ablaze constitutes abuse? Consider how Merriam-Webster defines it:

abuse (transitive verb): "3: to use so as to injure or damage : maltreat"

maltreat (transitive verb): "to treat cruelly or roughly : abuse"

Now let's consider some of the most common animal agriculture practices, all of which take place even before the hell of transport and the slaughterhouse and most of which are a part of both large, conventional operations and organic, small, and "humane" operations. Consider the following mutilations and cruelties while keeping in mind that painkillers are not used--and you don't have to witness the animals thrashing around and crying out firsthand to know these all would cause much pain and suffering:

• Branding (try holding an iron against your arm at its hottest setting for about 5 seconds and see how that feels)
• Castration
• Chopping off horns
• Cutting off tails
• Cutting (piglets') teeth with pliers
• Slicing off beaks
• Grinding up and suffocating male chicks
• Forcibly impregnating cows and sows (known in the human world as rape)
• Intentionally keeping dairy/veal calves weak and malnourished
• Killing runt piglets via slamming their heads against walls and floors

And oh, does the list go on. But here's the kicker--all these practices? Standard and openly accepted. They're not the worst of what happens to farmed animals, not even close. These are just the practices animal agriculture openly approves of. And remember--no painkillers.

"To use so as to injure or damage." "To treat cruelly or roughly."

Can anyone argue with a straight face that these definitions don't apply to what happens to farmed animals?

People can tell themselves whatever they want about their own farms or about what really happens to the animals they eat. But it's abuse--all of it. From the time male chicks are ground alive or suffocated for the egg industry and piglets are slammed to death and dairy/veal calves are ripped away from their mothers to the time all animals used in animal agriculture, whether for their flesh, their dairy, or their milk, are put through harrowing transport and slaughter, it's an existence of one abuse after another, right up until the ultimate abuse: unnecessary killing, for human pleasure.