Professor Aaron Gross (vegan) - Dismantling Animal-People Factories in the US, Part 1 of 2

Today, we meet with Dr. Aaron Gross, a vegan professor in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at the University of San Diego in the US, who has been devoted exclusively to putting an end to animal-people raising factories. Dr. Gross is on a mission to eradicate animal-people raising in the United States. He says that once people have an accurate and clear picture of what’s really going on in this gruesome industry, they will choose to stop supporting it.

“The human-animal relationship is just absolutely profound, and the biggest one is the relationship we have with the animals that are involved in agriculture. And currently, with meat-eating being the way it is and industrial farming dominating, we just have this incredible fracture in human-animal relationships. And what that means is, it's the norm in our daily lives that contributes to a kind of oppressive system, one that very directly causes animal suffering and then indirectly causes tremendous human suffering.”

“Factory farming has so many problematic aspects. Where most obviously, there's tremendous animal suffering, and then it doesn't take us too long to realize there's tremendous ecological damage. It's the largest contributor to climate change.”

“One of the kinds of facts that is now in the wide discussion because of coronavirus is that most of the new diseases that human beings are facing are what the scientists call zoonotic. So, the Centers for Disease Control in the United States estimates that three out of every four new and emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. And factory farming is the perfect recipe for increasing pandemic risk. And things can be much worse than the corona virus.” “It's deeply broken. And I think most of us know something is wrong, but we don't realize just how destructive the factory-farmed industry is.”

In 2017, Dr. Gross also founded the Better Food Foundation, a nonprofit organization that is solely focused on working for vegan diet change in individuals, institutions, and our culture.