Vegan Outreach on Factory Farms -Okay to Cross Post

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U.S. society is extremely naive about the nature of agricultural production. 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 farmsâ€â€”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.â€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.â€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

Chickens raised for "meat." Click for larger image.

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

Laying hens in battery cages. Click for larger image.

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

Piglet biting his cage. Click for larger image.

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.â€

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.â€

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

Veal calf. Click for larger image.

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 vealâ€â€”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.

What about Free-Range?

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 cruelty.

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-moltedâ€â€”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.…

Many breeding sows spend their whole adult lives in gestation and farrowing stalls where they cannot turn around.Click for larger image.

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

Transport & Stockyards

"Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight." ~Albert Schweitzer