Marina Bolotnikova is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on factory farming and animal activism. She has previously contributed to Current Affairs and presently serves as an editor for Vox's Future Perfect.
Q: What are some of the stories you’ve covered that you think are the most important?
Bolotnikova: I’d point to a 2023 feature I wrote for Vox, “The bitter civil war dividing American veterinarians.” It’s about the veterinary profession’s support for factory farming, and a movement of insurgent veterinarians fighting to change that. Most people interact with vets to get medical care for their beloved cats and dogs, but there’s a whole other side to the profession that’s deeply captivating, surprising, and disturbing. Organized veterinary medicine is among the most important defenders and legitimizers of factory farm practices in the U.S., something that has deep roots in the profession’s history. The history of human relationships with animals is largely a story of violence and exploitation, so it’s of course unsurprising that veterinary medicine has evolved to facilitate that exploitation. As one veterinarian told me, “the official stance of the veterinary profession in the U.S. often serves to legitimize practices that cause extreme, prolonged pain and suffering on a massive scale. The veterinary profession helps shield such practices from questioning and criticism.”
That story connects to a series of pieces I wrote in 2022-2023 on the rapid rise of “ventilation shutdown”—a method that over the last few years has been used to mass exterminate tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on factory farms hit by bird flu by inducing heatstroke in them with industrial heaters. And those killings are fully paid for by public dollars. It’s among the most shocking recent innovations in an industry already replete with horrors, and the veterinary profession has been central in enabling its spread.
The last thing I’d add is that last year, we published “How Factory Farming Ends”, a big package of stories on the movement to end factory farming, with pieces from me and lots of fantastic writers in this space, contributing their best ideas on what it will take to solve this incredibly difficult, wicked problem.
Q: What are the ones you wish more people knew about?
Bolotnikova: Earlier this year I wrote a comic on the life of a dairy cow that I wish more people had read! It goes through a dairy cow’s life from birth to death, unpacking what makes the dairy industry so strange and disturbing and heartbreaking.
I’d also point to “What if AI treats humans the way we treat animals?", a think essay on what fears of AI destroying the world and killing us all really represent: our anxieties about the fragility and mistreatment of animality—our own, as well as that of nonhuman animals.
Finally, I recently wrote about an ascendant set of ideas in wonky future of food debates that I think of as “anti-anti-factory farming.” According to that school of thought, factory farming, while inhumane and not ideal, is the only way we can meet humanity’s growing demand for meat without destroying the planet. You see this argument in new books like Michael Grunwald’s We Are Eating the Earth, which is a book I really like on the whole and think is worth reading, except that I disagree with its defenses of factory farming. But I think the anti-anti-factory farming perspective is really important to understand and come to grips with, because there is some truth to it: Factory farms don’t exist merely to be evil, but because they produce animal products with as little land and resources as possible. By most measures, intensive animal agriculture is more sustainable than what people think of as humane, pastoral animal farms. And much as I’d rather we convince the world to simply eat less meat, it’s going to be really, really hard to do that.
This Q&A, along with dozens more, is published in the special "Animals Issue" of Current Affairs.
