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Photojournalist Documents the Health Effects of Living Alongside Animal Farming

From VeganFTA
September 2024

About 11 billion chickens, 142 million pigs, 76 million cattle, 62 million sheep, 12 million goats, and counting: this is the population of invisible animals farmed in Europe every year that live and die on the (dis)assembly line.

cattle feed lot
Cows in a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO), Las Cruces, New Mexico. Image from Shutterstock

Photojournalist Selene Magnolia Gatti has been taking impactful photos that document the effects on human health of living alongside intensive animal agriculture facilities. She and journalist Helena Spongenberg have published an article in the UK newspaper The Guardian showing examples of what they witnessed.

The article focuses not only on the health and environmental problems created by animal agriculture but also on the cruelty of it. At the beginning of the article, we get a glimpse of the magnitude of the problem, as we read, "About 11 billion chickens, 142 million pigs, 76 million cattle, 62 million sheep, 12 million goats, and counting: this is the population of invisible animals farmed in Europe every year that live and die on the (dis)assembly line."

The research undertaken by Selene Magnolia Gatti, Helena Spongenberg, and Coline Charbonnier was funded by a grant from the Environmental Journalism Fund Europe and supported by WeAnimals Media.

They travelled through Europe looking for testimonials of people negatively affected by living close to animal agricultural facilities that contaminate their surroundings.

For example, the masked man trying to breathe the air filled with ammonia from the factory farms around his house in the Po valley in northern Italy.

Or Ans van Maris, the Dutch woman who developed asthma when the farms around her home in Brabant, Netherlands, have expanded in the last 15 years.

Or the woman who lives near an intensive pig farm in Tingerup, Denmark, who must close all windows and avoid going outside every time the wind carries the factory farm smell in the direction of her house.

Or the enormous chicken factory farm in Żuromin district, Poland.

Or the children playing outdoors with their faces covered because they live only 500 metres from an egg-laying hen farm in France.

Posted on All-Creatures.org: September 4, 2024
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