MH page 314

Often animals are taken to market and sold for food when they are so diseased that their owners fear to keep them longer. And some of the processes of fattening them for market produce disease. Shut away from the light and pure air, breathing the atmosphere of filthy stables, perhaps fattening on decaying food, the entire body soon becomes contaminated with foul matter.

Animals sold for food are frequently diseased due to poor living conditions and fattening practices, contaminating their bodies. The paragraph makes empirical claims regarding animal husbandry practices and food contamination.

Animals are often transported long distances and subjected to great suffering in reaching a market. Taken from the green pastures, and traveling for weary miles over the hot, dusty roads, or crowded into filthy cars, feverish and exhausted, often for many hours deprived of food and water, the poor creatures are driven to their death, that human beings may feast on the carcasses.

Long-distance transport of animals causes suffering, exhaustion, and feverish conditions before slaughter. The text asserts empirical conditions regarding animal transport and physiological state prior to slaughter.

In many places fish become so contaminated by the filth on which they feed as to be a cause of disease. This is especially the case where the fish come in contact with the sewage of large cities. The fish that are fed on the contents of the drains may pass into distant waters and may be caught where the water is pure and fresh. Thus when used as food they bring disease and death on those who do not suspect the danger.

Fish feeding on city sewage in one location can transmit disease when caught and consumed from distant pure waters. This is an empirical claim about aquatic ecology, sewage contamination, and the transmission of disease through fish consumption.