If aliens factory farmed humans, we’d call it hell

I keep thinking about factory farming and the more I think about it, the more disturbing it becomes.

Imagine aliens came to Earth and decided humans were just another kind of livestock.
They’d breed us for efficiency. Control when and how we reproduce. Keep us in huge facilities, separate us from our families, take away our freedom, and eventually kill us when we’re no longer useful.

And they’d probably justify it with things like:

“It’s just how our species survives.”
“Humans aren’t as emotionally intelligent as us.”
“It’s our tradition.”
“We’ve always done it this way.”
“They’re only animals.”

But imagine being a human trapped inside that system. None of those justifications would make the suffering any less real.

And this is where I think human consciousness becomes particularly uncomfortable.

We like to think that being more intelligent and more conscious makes us morally superior to other animals. But higher consciousness also gives us a much greater capacity to cause, organise and scale suffering.

A wolf can kill an animal. Humans can genetically manipulate animals to maximise production, selectively breed them, confine millions of them in industrial systems, transport them across countries, develop technologies to make the process more efficient, and create entire economic systems around their exploitation.

Our intelligence doesn’t just allow us to understand suffering. It allows us to become incredibly efficient at producing it. And that’s what makes the alien analogy so uncomfortable to me.

If a species far more intelligent and powerful than humans came here and did all of this to us, we’d probably see them as monsters.

We wouldn’t accept “you’re less intelligent than us” as a justification. We wouldn’t accept “it’s our culture”. We wouldn’t accept “this is how our species survives”. We’d experience it as oppression and hell.

So why does being the species with more power suddenly make it morally acceptable when we’re the ones doing it?

Maybe reaching a higher level of consciousness doesn’t automatically make a species kinder.
Maybe it gives that species a greater capacity for both compassion and cruelty.

And perhaps that’s one of the most disturbing things about humanity: we’ve become conscious enough to understand suffering, but also intelligent enough to industrialise it.

If another species did to humans what we do to farm animals, would we call it farming or would we call it hell?