We now know how animal farming damages our environment—the air we breathe, the oceans and waters, and all plant and animal life in the living world around us. Animal agriculture rivals the fossil fuel industry in contributions to the climate crisis, which now threatens all life on earth. Animal farming is damaging the physical world we live in—that much we already know.

I want to show how animal farming damages our culture, particularly our worldview—that is, our view of the living world and ourselves in it. The title says it all in these few words borrowed from the late biologist and deep ecologist Paul Shepard:

“A kind of madness arises from the prevailing nature-conquering, nature-hating, and self- and world-denial.”

We have virtually exterminated native animal life. We have decimated primal forests. We have converted fertile virgin soils into chemical-sodden fields of corn and soybeans—all to fatten cattle, pigs, and chickens in corporate-controlled factory farms, fenced off—like the concentration camps they are—from public view. These sentient beings—once wild and free in their native habitats—were wrestled into domestication, their natural sexual selection replaced by animal husbandry, and more recently made into clone-like bodies engineered into uniformity to fit the machinery of hidden slaughter plants that will kill and dismember them by the thousands per hour needing as few human hands as possible. All so we can have cheaper meat, milk, and eggs.

In doing so, we have mangled diversity in the natural world, mangled our model for existence, mangled our link with the living world around us. We are alienated from nature—the living world. And animal agriculture has been the prime mover for centuries. In this alienation, animal agriculture has required us to hold beliefs about animals and nature that are not only false, but not good for all of us. These beliefs have stifled our better instincts of empathy and compassion. They have destroyed our affinity and feelings of kinship with other life in our world. Kinship is the biological reality here on earth, yet animal agriculture has made us believe that we humans are superior to our animal cousins, set apart from them in the web of life. This puts us all alone—high above the living world, but not in it, not of it. It gives us a lonely station over what agrarian ideology regards as a chaos of fearsome beasts and loathsome wild nature.

No wonder our glorified technology is destroying the living world. No wonder our rampant capitalism has blundered us into this climate crisis. No wonder a feeling of malaise prevails because more and more people sense this. Sigmund Freud wrote about this in 1929—well before the Nuclear Age and the Cold War:

“Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness, and the mood of anxiety.” —‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ (originally published in 1930)

This malaise is reflected in our political turmoil. Fears of mass migrations have pushed democracies into reactionary populism and authoritarian regimes. America is gripped in a MAGA cult, which has twisted truth and reality for millions. Other millions are in denial of the obvious. We have billionaires spending their wealth on space colonization instead of healing the wounds on our planet caused by their technocratic mentors. Some of them produced the world’s nuclear arsenal, the size of which could, if unleashed, destroy all life on earth.

This is truly an age of madness—i.e., insanity, denial of reality, psychosis, mental disorder, dementia, etc. I submit that the madness started with domestication of animals and animal husbandry because they upended millennia of our ancestors’ regard for animals as admirable fellow beings. We enslaved animals, and in doing so we suppressed our better instincts for empathy and compassion; we destroyed a better sense of ourselves and a sense of belonging here.

I ought to know. I grew up on a family farm in the Missouri Ozarks. My own personal story of numbing, of desensitization—of growing into the madness—parallels the story of the making of today’s agrarian worldview.

I know that this story will infuriate people involved in farming animals and those who are attached to it. It will infuriate people who enjoy the products and benefits from animal agriculture. This is not about you, this is about the agrarian culture of which you and I are its victims. This culture has brought about prosperity (for some) and civilization with all its art, architecture, and artifacts. It has also brought about an attitude that has driven human success at the expense of just about all other living beings and their natural habitats. We are, as the late historian Alfred Crosby has written, “ecological imperialists.”

This is the story of how farm life and culture shaped me and damaged me, and eventually brought me to understand how we humans made this madness.