Tuesday, April 21, 2015

The Worst Crime in History - by Yuval Noah Harari

Excerpt from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind...

Link to excerpt: The Worst Crime in History
Today, the majority of large animals on planet earth are domesticated farm animals that live and die as cogs in the wheels of industrial agriculture. Earth is home to about 7 billion humans, weighing together about 300 million tons. It is also home to several dozen billion farm animals – cows, pigs, chickens and so forth – whose total biomass is about 700 millions tons. In contrast, if you took all the large wild animals left on earth – all the penguins, baboons, alligators, dolphins, wolves, tune fish, lions and elephants – and put them on a very large scale, they will weigh together less than 100 million tons.
The disappearance of wildlife is a calamity of unprecedented magnitude, but the plight of the planet’s majority population—the farm animals—is cause for equal concern. In recent years there is growing awareness of the conditions under which these animals live and die, and their fate may well turn out to be the greatest crime in human history. If you measure crimes by the sheer amount of pain and misery they inflict on sentient beings, this radical claim is not implausible. 
.....................

Related previous post: "The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race" – 1987 article by Jared Diamond

Related videos:

Yuval Harari's Talk at Google

(Not the best audio on the 2 videos below)

Yuval Noah Harari & Jared Diamond - Part 1

Yuval Noah Harari & Jared Diamond - Part 2