Ok, wait. . . I'm confused as usual.
"Stimulating" a hen with his finger is "abuse" - but killing that hen and eating her is "farming?"
Now, I'm not much into killing chickens (vegetarian, for the most part) nor do I have a physical relationship with domestic fowl (canines and equines, but no birds and no cloven-hooved critters thanks!
). However, this whole fanatical obsession with branding any sort of sexual contact - of any sort - between species as "abuse" is childish and silly. Of course there IS abuse of other species that takes a sexual form, or at least claims to - the examples of 1970s "animal porn" where someone penetrates a hen, causing injury if not death. However, to say that ALL such contacts are abuse is a simple categorical error.
It gets to the point where collecting semen from a stallion, to ship elsewhere for fresh cooled breeding, is entirely acceptable - but if one does the exact same collection from the exact same stallion just "for fun" (for the collector and the stallion himself) it becomes "abuse." That's silly, and it trivializes the real abuse that should rightly be denounced.
Anyway, old-school farmers often thought of their critters not merely as "furkids" but also as adult, sexual beings. It doesn't mean they always
respected them as such, but in terms of worldview they would never consider calling a cow an "it" or mistaking a mare for a stallion. To them, sexuality was part of their menagerie - good or bad. Nowadays, we've Disney-fied nonhumans to where they are imagined as asexual. That gets weird when it becomes abuse to touch them wrong - but quite acceptable to kill them.
As Dan Savage remarked, upon doing his about-face and accepting zooish relationships as potentially respectful, "I'd rather be screwed than stewed." Not exactly poetic, but he has a point.
Regards,
Fausty