RE: Where Are All The Vegetarian Zoosexuals? (and ending animal slaughter)

I was reading an article on Vivid Random Existence, one of my favorite animal rights and zoosexuality awareness blogs.  The author is extremely intelligent and passionately articulate in conveying both wisdom and sentiment on these and related subjects.  The following entry caught my eye this afternoon:
"Where Are All The Vegetarian Zoosexuals? (and ending animal slaughter)".  Here's a link to the full article:
http://vividrandomexistence.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/where-are-all-the-vegetarian-zoosexuals

*Raises hand*
As a vegetarian and animal rights activist (with a side of zoosexuality, of course!), advocating for "meat" animals is an issue I am very passionate about.
I would reprint the full entry here, but I do not have the Author's permission, so please consult the above link if you'd like more background on the following.
One of the comments evoked a pretty substantial reaction from me.  I've decided to share the comment here, and then share my reply.

Q: "So what would happen is everyone suddenly became a vegetarian? What about the billions of farm animals? Surely their population would increase significantly if we don’t keep it in check anymore, we’ve gotten to a point where we have so many animals used for food that we just can’t turn back. You only think about short term effects."


A: What would happen?  Let's see.  All of the systematically devalued, hellaciously tortured, artificially inseminated, hormone-filled, genetically engineered, antibiotic-laden suffering of BILLIONS of animals every year would end. CAFO's (Concentrated Animal Farming Operations, a nice, neat, sanitized term for nonhuman animal concentration camps; Dante's Inferno for the poor beings imprisoned there); animals forced to grow too fast to support their own weight; pigs going insane, imprisoned in metal cages without room to move; dairy cows hooked to pumps after they have their first pregnancy, pumped full of hormones to make more milk; sucked dry for a few years and then sent to slaughter when they're spent; sows impregnated over and over and never getting to nurture their own piglets, male piglets having their testes ripped off with no anesthetic; weak newborn piglets "thumped" against the floor (workers hold their feet and swing them, smashing their heads into the concrete floor, then toss them into trash bins -- many still alive, piled among a sea of their bloody, dying, writhing brothers and sisters... calves and lambs boarded up in boxes to keep their meat 'tender' (excuse me while I wretch)...and the worst, most horrific torture chamber of death and debilitation of all: that inflicted upon chickens and turkeys.  Poultry species are abused worse than any other 'meat animal' ever.  Broken bones are a given; living in total darkness is the new standard; in a closed warehouse-like building without so much as a glimpse outdoors -- to keep them calm, the 'growers' chant -- hock burns and burning lungs and eyes from standing -- if they can still stand -- on a 'floor' of inches of their own acrid excrement; trampled and crushed under the suffocating weight of their specially-engineered kin...and if a lame bird is found, they are bashed to death with metal poles, left to flop around in an excruciating death before being mercilessly hurled into waste bins.  At transport time, these birds are chucked into cramped transport cages like some kind of sick, twisted ballgame...all this would end.  And what would become of these animals?  Considering the extremely unnatural means for replicating them and keeping them alive long enough to make them sizable enough to send to their deaths, the solution would be to care for those still living for the end of their days...and STOP "GROWING" [breeding] MORE MORE OF THEM.  Yep, to the good ol' meat industry, these suffering beings not even acknowledged as living animals.  You "grow" chickens in industry terms, not raise them.  More nice words to deflect the sickness of the CAFO death houses, far removed from the horrors that go on there.
Did you know that 70% of all the antibiotics manufactured today go into keeping these sick, immunocompromised, poisoned, deformed, suffering creatures alive?  The whole industrialization and veiled "prettifying" of 'meat production' is awful on every level in my opinion.
Oh, and before you ask, yes --  I am absolutely thinking long-term. The number one contributor to greenhouse gasses is the livestock industry!  Not to mention all the nitrogen-overloaded waste these 'operations' produce -- polluting our waterways and suffocating the aquatic animals who live there (algae thrive on animal waste and consume all the oxygen in the water and fish asphyxiate in the water...and then all the species who eat fish starve, too).  We're killing them; we're killing ourselves and this industry is indefensible and ethically reprehensible!  Joe neighbor can flip out about animal abuse because someone hits their dog, but farm animals, that's different!  Hush hush, the "food animals" can suffer, they're just a commodity, right? Speciesism is so very, very, willfully ignorant.
These frankenfood factories need to stop.  If we all went vegetarian, every single mouth in the WORLD could be fed.  The amount of grain, water and land required to 'produce' a pound of beef is staggering.  Don't believe me? Do some research.  You'll see for yourself.

Okay, rant over.