| U.S. society is
extremely naive about the nature of agricultural
production. [I]f the public knew more about the
way in which agricultural and animal production
infringes on animal welfare, the outcry would be
louder.
Bernard
E. Rollin, PhD, Farm Animal Welfare,
Iowa St U. Press, 2003
|
|
Many people believe that
animals raised for food must be treated well because sick
or dead animals would be of no use to agribusiness. This is
not true.
The competition to produce inexpensive meat, eggs, and dairy
products has led animal agribusiness to treat animals as objects
and commodities. The worldwide trend is to replace small family
farms with “factory farms”—large warehouses
where animals are confined in crowded cages or pens or in
restrictive stalls.1
Bernard Rollin, PhD, explains that it is “more economically
efficient to put a greater number of birds into each cage,
accepting lower productivity per bird but greater productivity
per cage…individual animals may ‘produce,’
for example gain weight, in part because they are immobile,
yet suffer because of the inability to move…Chickens
are cheap, cages are expensive.”2
In an article recommending space be reduced from 8 to 6 square
feet per pig, industry journal National Hog Farmer suggests
that “Crowding pigs pays.”3
Video.
Meet
Your Meat; order.
Birds
|
"In my opinion,
if most urban meat eaters were to visit an industrial
broiler house, to see how the birds are raised,
and could see the birds being “harvested”
and then being “processed” in a poultry
processing plant, they would not be impressed
and some, perhaps many of them would swear off
eating chicken and perhaps all meat."
Peter
Cheeke, PhD, Contemporary Issues in
Animal Agriculture, 2004 textbook
|
|
In the United States, virtually all birds raised for food
are factory farmed.4 Inside the densely populated buildings, where they are confined their entire lives, enormous amounts of waste accumulate. The resulting ammonia levels commonly cause painful burns to the birds' skin, eyes, and respiratory tracts.5
See also: "Enter
the Chicken Shed" (pdf). Ducks.
The
life of a broiler. Turkey
industry, 2006. Photos.
More
photos.
As reported in "Settling Doubts About Livestock Stress," published in the March 2005 issue of Agricultural Research magazine (USDA ARS),
"Farmers trim from a third to a half of the beaks
off chickens, turkeys, and ducks to cut losses from
poultry pecking each other." This causes severe
pain for several weeks.6a
Some, unable to eat after being debeaked, starve.2
Egg-Laying Hens
Packed in wire cages (the industry average is less than half a square foot of floor space per bird),6 hens can become immobilized and die of asphyxiation or dehydration. Decomposing corpses are found in cages with live birds. Tens of millions (approximately 14%) of egg-laying hens die during production each year.6,7
Those who survive are removed from the farms when deemed no longer economically viable. Some of these "spent hens" (the industry term for layers who have completed their egg production cycles) are sold for slaughter; the rest are rendered, composted, or destroyed by other means (e.g., on two California farms, workers fed 30,000 live
hens into wood chippers). By the time spent hens are removed for low production, their skeletons are so fragile that many suffer broken bones during catching, transport, or shackling.36
Male chicks, of no economic value to the egg industry, are typically gassed2 or macerated (ground up alive).9 Maceration is becoming a common method for disposing of male chicks.
Act
of God. Ban
Battery Cages. Egg
Industry . Search
for Humane Eggs. More
photos.
Pigs
| The Food Marketing
Institute’s (FMI) Animal Welfare Program guidelines
do not require that a sow (mother pig) have enough
room to walk or turn around, but rather that she
actually has enough room to fit in the cage without
being forced against the bars.31
Some in the pig industry believe that these regulations
that don't allow for walking or turning are something
to be proud of: “Hog
producers should toot own horn.” |
|
In the September 1976 issue of the industry journal Hog
Farm Management, John Byrnes advised: “Forget the
pig is an animal. Treat him just like a machine in a factory.”
Today’s pig farmers have done just that. As Morley
Safer related on 60
Minutes: “This [motion picture Babe] is the way Americans want to think of pigs. Real-life ‘Babes’ see no sun in their limited lives, with no hay to lie on, no mud to roll in. The sows live in tiny cages, so narrow they can’t even turn around. They live over metal grates, and their waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits.” When
Pigs Cry. Investigation.
More
photos.
Dairy Cows
From 1940 to 2004, average per-cow milk production rose from 2.3 to 9.5 tons per year;7
some cows have surpassed 30 tons.8 High milk production often causes udder breakdown, leading to early slaughter.1
It is unprofitable to keep cows alive once their milk production
declines. They are usually killed at 5–6 years of age,10
though their normal life span exceeds 20. More
info.
Dairy cows are rarely allowed to nurse their young.1
Many male calves are slaughtered immediately, while
others are raised for “special-fed veal”—kept
in individual stalls and chained by the neck on a
2–3 foot tether for 18–20 weeks before
being slaughtered.9
More
photos. Tour
a Dairy Farm.
A growing number of people are
looking to "free-range"
products as an alternative to factory
farmed animal products. Eggs (and
poultry) may be labeled as "free-range"
if they have USDA-certified access
to the outdoors. No other criteria,
such as environmental quality, size
of the outside area, number of birds,
or space per bird, are included
in this term. Typically, free-range
hens are debeaked at the hatchery,
have only 1 to 2 square feet of
floor space per bird, and -- if
the hens can go outside --
must compete with many other hens
for access to a small exit from
the shed, leading to a muddy strip
saturated with droppings. Although
chickens can live up to 12 years,
free-range hens are hauled to slaughter
the same as battery-caged hens,
after a year or two. Free-range
male chicks are trashed at birth,
just as they are in factory farms.
Although free-range conditions may
be an improvement over factory-farm
conditions, they are by no means
free of suffering.
The Associated Press reported on March 11, 1998:
Free-range chickens conjure up in some consumers
minds pictures of contented fowl strolling around
the barnyard, but the truth is, all a chicken grower
needs to do is give the birds some access to the
outdoorswhether the chickens decide to take a gambol
or stay inside with hundreds or thousands of other
birds, under government rules growers are free to
label them free-range.
As all free-range animals are still viewed as objects
to be killed for food, they are subject to abusive
handling, transport, and slaughter. Free-range animals,
like all animals used for their milk and eggs, are
still slaughtered at a fraction of their normal
life expectancy.
For more information, see this
page and visit Compassion
Over Killing
| To visit a modern
CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that,
for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according
to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling
pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more,
industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief
on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert
your eyes on the part of everyone else. From everything
I’ve read, egg and hog operations are the worst. Beef cattle
in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep
in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick.
And broiler chickens…at least don’t spend their
eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing.
 That
fate is reserved for the American laying
hen, who passes her brief span piled together
with a half-dozen other hens in a wire
cage whose floor a single page of this
[New York Times] magazine could carpet.
Every natural instinct of this animal
is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral
“vices” that can include cannibalizing
her cagemates and rubbing her body against
the wire mesh until it is featherless
and bleeding.… [T]he 10 percent
or so of hens that can’t bear it
and simply die is built into the cost
of production. And when the output of
the others begins to ebb, the hens will
be “force-molted”—starved
of food and water and light for several
days in order to stimulate a final bout
of egg laying before their life’s
work is done.…
Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers
10 days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they
gain weight faster on their hormone- and antibiotic-fortified feed.
This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to
suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the
tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off
his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring.
“Learned helplessness” is the psychological term,
and it’s not uncommon in confinement operations, where tens
of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of sunshine
or earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon metal
slats suspended over a manure pit. So it’s not surprising
that an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a pig would get depressed,
and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point
of infection.
Sick pigs, being underperforming “production units,”
are clubbed to death on the spot. The USDA’s recommended solution
to the problem is called “tail docking.” Using a pair
of pliers (and no anesthetic), most but not all of the tail is snipped
off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise
is not to remove the object of tail-biting so much as to render
it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even
the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.…
More than any other institution, the American industrial animal
farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like
in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these
places life itself is redefined—as protein production—and
with it suffering. That venerable word becomes “stress,”
an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like
tail-docking or beak-clipping or, in the industry’s latest
plan, by simply engineering the “stress gene” out of
pigs and chickens. Our own worst nightmare such a place may well
be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough
to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief,
pitiless life of a “production unit” in the days before
the suffering gene was found.
Michael
Pollan,“An Animal’s Place”
New York Times Magazine, 11/10/02
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|
Transport
& Stockyards  |
Chickens
raised for "meat." Click for larger
image.
Laying
hens in battery cages. Click for larger
image.
Piglet
biting his cage. 
Veal
calf. Click for larger image.
Many
breeding sows spend their whole
adult lives in gestation and farrowing
stalls where they cannot turn around.