Published February 27, 2019 by Melissa White .

SPOILERS AHEAD! This blog post contains major spoilers and screenshots from the first four episodes of The Promised Neverland. If you haven’t watched them yet, stop reading this and go check them out—this is an anime show you won’t want to miss!

The anime TV series The Promised Neverland is currently airing, so you still have time to catch up if you haven’t seen it yet and want to start watching each week’s new episode. Now, for those of you who have seen it, we’re about to dive into some truly scary comparisons between the story and the use of animals in the meat and dairy industries.

The main characters of the show—kids Emma, Ray, and Norman—live on what’s called a “premium farm.” They eat gourmet meals, have “free time” outdoors, and play with all the toys they could ever desire (which is different from what animals used for food experience—they don’t get any of these things). Sounds like a pretty nice life, right? Well, once you learn what’s really going on at the farm, the reason why the anime is classified as “horror” becomes clear.

As the first episode begins, a few of the children are looking out past the boundaries of what they think is an orphanage. They wonder what lies beyond these limits, but they’re trapped, much like animals who are raised on farms—who feel pain, love, and fear, just as real children do.

The adults end up betraying the kids in the end, in much the same way farmers betray the animals under their care, who they see as moneymaking machines rather than unique living beings.

Right away, we notice that the children are tattooed with different numbers as a form of identification. They’re seen as products rather than individuals. Their individuality is taken away from them as they’re objectified and raised to become more “marketable.” Sound familiar? Animals on farms are similarly identified by numbers and treated like products.

When still very young, many cows are branded (burned with hot irons), dehorned (their horns are gouged out or cut or burned off), and castrated (male cows’ testicles are cut out of their scrotums)—all without painkillers.

But the children are depicted as leading happy lives, so everything must be OK, right? Very, very wrong. At the end of the first episode, a girl named Conny leaves the orphanage to be “adopted.” When she forgets her favorite stuffed toy, Norman and Emma chase after her in an attempt to return it to her. What they find is nothing like what they expected.

They discover their friend dead inside a truck. In slaughterhouses, animals—who are also sometimes depicted as looking happy in advertisements—often watch as their friends and family members are killed before they’re slaughtered themselves.

Regardless of how they were treated on the farm or what advertisements want you to believe, all animals experience terrifying deaths in the slaughterhouse. Their throats are slit, often while they’re still conscious. Many even remain conscious when they’re plunged into the scalding-hot water of the defeathering or hair-removal tanks or while their bodies are being skinned or hacked apart.

In a later episode of the series, one of the children gets lost in the forest. The caretaker is alerted, takes a quick look at her pocket watch, and is able to find the missing child immediately. The three smartest kids, Norman, Emma, and Ray, become skeptical of the pocket watch and realize that tracking devices have been implanted in each child’s ear.

While animals on farms may not be electronically tracked, they’re monitored using identification tags on their ears, which makes this aspect of the show scarily similar to what life is really like for animals who are used for food.

We later find out that the children in The Promised Neverland are being raised to be killed and sold off to demons who will then consume their flesh. When they’re killed is based on their test scores. The kids who score low are shipped off first to become “normal-quality” meat at as young as 6 years old, whereas the kids with higher scores are killed at age 12 for “high-quality” meat, as the demons think they taste better.

Comparatively, in real life, animals who are raised and killed for meat are also slaughtered at young ages. For example, pigs used for food are killed at around 6 months old, whereas their natural life expectancy is between 10 and 15 years. If you eat animals, you’re likely eating babies. These animals are killed before their lives have truly even begun.

As Emma, Ray, and Norman realize that they and the other children are being raised to become food for the demons, they start devising a plan to escape from the farm. Even though they know that doing so will be risky because they don’t know what’s waiting for them outside the boundaries, they’re fighting for their lives. This is no different from the countless stories of animals who’ve escaped from a slaughterhouse and gone running through busy streets. Just like the children in the story, animals value their lives and want to live.

The Promised Neverland adds a new perspective to the issues that animals who are raised for food face every day. What if there were a species that farmed humans and consumed our flesh and we had no choice but to be killed? Imagine knowing that your only purpose in life is to die and end up in someone else’s stomach.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You can go vegan and save nearly 200 animals every single year just by not using them for food—it’s super-easy!

To animals, we are the demons who kill babies for meat.