This article explores the cultural and philosophical foundations of factory farming. Modes of capitalist production play a role: Marx’s analysis of the fourfold alienation of labor can be applied to animal-laborers. However, the harshness with which animals are treated exceeds the harshness directed toward human workers. At root is a cultural anthropocentrism that prohibits viewing animals as moral subjects, removing ethical restraints. Ultimately, the modernist ways in which animals are treated as both like and unlike human workers are related to the rise of Cartesian mechanism. The categories of “human” and “animal” are reconfigured by the image of the “machine.”

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Importance sampling in the setting of heavy tailed random variables has generally focused on models with additive noise terms. In this work we extend this concept by considering importance sampling for the estimation of rare events in Markov chains of the formwhere the B n 's and A n 's are independent sequences of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables and the B n 's are regularly varying and the A n 's are suitably light tailed relative to B n . We focus on efficient estimation of the rare event probability P(X n > b) as b ∞. In particular we present a strongly efficient importance sampling algorithm for estimating these probabilities, and present a numerical example showcasing the strong efficiency.

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