Life for Today's Farm Animals

Our image of farm animals is for the most part a pleasant one. "Old MacDonald had a farm," goes the children's rhyme, and it is followed by accounts of a moo-moo here, a moo-moo there, everywhere a moo-moo.

The children's rhyme does not mention that the animals are killed for food. But somehow we are left with the idea that except for being killed at the end, farm animals are well cared for. Farm animals (at least in our imagination) enjoy beautiful surroundings and lead natural lives that many humans would envy: cows grazing, chickens scratching on the ground, and pigs rooting in the field. It seems that farm animals don't live a bad life.

Or do they?

EVERYWHERE A MOO-MOO 

The idyllic image of farm animals living contented lives is something ingrained in our consciousness. Farm animals, we imagine, have a pleasant life; and this idea props up our willingness to accept foods based on animal confinement and slaughter. But how accurate is this picture? Sadly, image and reality do not always agree. Most farm animals do not live out their lives in the barnyard, but in huge, crowded confinement buildings--called "factory farms." "Factory farming" of animals means intense crowding in cages, barns, or stalls; systematic mutilation (dehorning, debeaking, etc.); complete disruption of "natural" behaviors; and intense discomfort during transportation of animals to the slaughterhouse. How do animals really fare on today's farms?

VEAL CALVES

During the 14 to 16 weeks of his brief life, the veal calf spends most of his time in complete darkness in a small crate, in which he cannot times (twice a day). Darkness keeps calves quiet and reduces the restlessness and boredom of standing in a bare wooden crate. (Calves, in the "wild," are normally active, playful, and sociable animals.)

In addition, veal calves are kept deliberately anemic so that their flesh will be pale and tender --the "gourmet veal" valued by the consuming public. Straw is not allowed in their crates because that might be eaten, providing iron. They are fed a liquid milk diet which is low in iron but promotes fast weight gain. By the time the calf is killed, he is often so anemic, sick, and weak that he is near death anyway.

DAIRY COWS

Dairy cows are kept under highly stressed conditions to produce maximum milk at minimum cost. This means a concrete stall or a slatted metal floor where each dairy cow remains for 10 months at a time. She is kept constantly pregnant and lactating. In the "wild," a cow would live 20-25 years; in our dairy-consuming culture, she will be lucky to live for four years. When her milk production drops, she is slaughtered for meat. She is separated from the calves she bears within a few hours after birth. Many observers have noted the strong attachment between the calf and mother, and this separation undoubtedly produces great anguish. Substantial savings in feed, labor, and barn space have been achieved as the result of a Swedish invention called a "UNICAR." These are cages on wheels, brought into a milking "parlor" two or three times a day where each cow is hosed, fed, and cleaned. The stress of being kept in these cages 10 months out of the year requires that she be given tranquilizers to calm her unexercised muscle and nervous systems.

CHICKENS

"BROILERS" AND "LAYERS"

laying hens confined to "battery cages," 4 to 5 chickens in a cage one foot square. This is so little space that the chickens cannot even spread their wings. And this is the condition they are kept in 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "Broilers" are not kept in cages but in huge sheds. At first they have some room but as they grow bigger there is less and less space per chicken, and in the end they have little more room than the "layers" which are kept in cages. For all chickens, the stress of the "factory farm" system is intense because of the crowding. Chickens are driven so berserk that they will attack and kill each other. To guard against this possibility, they are routinely de-beaked (have much of their beak cut off), without anaesthesia --a quite painful process. They are routinely dosed with large quantities of antibiotics. Under normal conditions, chickens would live about 15-20 years; but in factory farms, broilers live only two months, while layers live at most about two years. Death comes even earlier for male chicks born to laying hens: because males cannot lay eggs, they are separated from females shortly after hatching and tossed into bins where they usually suffocate underneath other male chicks piled on top of them.

PIGS

Pigs are also kept in intensely crowded conditions. In some ways, the situation in which pigs are kept is the saddest, because they are about 1/3 the size of a twin bed. There is no room to move, so calories are not burned up doing useless things like walking. Pigs in the wild are highly social and clean creatures, naturally friendly, loyal, and forgiving. The pig factory is diametrically the opposite: their stalls are built on slatted floors over large pits into which urine and feces fall, creating an overwhelming stench. The ammonia, methane, and hydrogen sulfide are a serious health problem for the pig's lungs. Also a serious health hazard for pigs is the complete lack of bedding or soft soil. 100% of factory-farmed pigs (who are cloven-hoofed) suffer infections from foot injuries as a result of constant standing on concrete or metal floors of their pens. Cannibalism is the reaction of many pigs under such stress, and tail-biting is a common problem. One common solution to this is tail-docking--removing the tail, again without anaesthetic.

Beef cattle are in some respects the best treated of all factory farm animals. Many cattle are kept in pasture when they are young or during the good weather season. However, "factory farming" techniques make it even into the realm of beef cattle. Before they are slaughtered, many cattle are confined for long periods of time to feedlots, where the same crowding, high doses of antibiotics, and mutilation occurs as with other factory farm animals. Castration of young males is a common procedure (almost invariably done without anaesthetic). In one procedure, a tight ring is placed around the calf's scrotum; the animal writhes in pain until after a half an hour or more the scrotum goes numb. (About a month later, his testicles fall off.) Another procedure is just to slit the scrotum and pull out the testicles. Branding of cattle is also a very painful procedure which seriously burns the skin. Dehorning is another painful procedure--horns just take up room in the feedlot, and allow for the dangerous possibility of the cattle attacking each other due to the crowded and frustrating conditions. Live tissue must be cut, and the bleeding often results in maggot infestation and infection.

Getting to the slaughterhouse is a traumatic ordeal for most farm animals. Animals are crowded together and given no food or water for hours or days. There is no protection against extremes of heat in summer or cold in winter, and some animals die during the process. Others suffer broken limbs or for other reasons simply cannot move under their own power by the time they reach the slaughterhouse. The act of slaughter itself does not have to be painful. The animals are supposed to be stunned before they have their throats slit. Nevertheless, the animals can clearly sense what is about to happen; they can smell the blood of those who have gone before, and are terror-stricken as they approach the moment of death. Horribly enough, effective stunning does not always take place; in the hurry of the slaughterhouse, some animals are either incompletely stunned or not stunned at all. In that case, the animal will bleed to death while fully conscious.

. . . AND THAT'S NOT ALL . . .

"Factory farming" of animals is also harmful to humans who eat them. The leading causes of death in this country are heart disease and certain cancers, linked to high consumption of saturated fat, cholesterol, excessive protein, and lack of fiber--the very ingredients of a meat-oriented diet. And this doesn't even touch the problem of all the hormones, antibiotics, and drugs which are pumped into factory farm animals. There are also serious environmental hazards. The leading cause of water pollution in the United States is livestock agriculture, which dumps billions of tons of manure into our water supply each year, many times the amount of human waste.

WHAT WE CAN DO

Animals on factory farms do not lead pleasant lives, nor do they die easy deaths. Far from a carefree life of ease, animals are treated in inhumane ways which make the slaughterhouse and the release of death practically a godsend. These animals do us no harm, and yet we inflict suffering and death upon millions and billions of them each year. Do we want to be part of a system which produces such pain, suffering, and death, day in and day out, in order to produce inexpensive meat, when meat consumption is quite detrimental even to our own health?

The factory farm system is barbarism, pure and simple. The way to remove it is equally simple: stop buying the products of the factory farm. "Conscientious omnivores" would only buy products from "free range animals," or at least reduce their meat consumption. However, for those who want to completely eliminate meat consumption, there is a broad range of delicious vegetarian foods which are not only tasty but more healthful for us, too. If people do not buy the products of the factory farm, there will be no more factory farms. Changing our diet is all it takes.
--Bernadette Sonefeld and Keith Akers

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One of the most common misconceptions about vegetarianism is that vegetarians eat chicken. Chicken has a reputation as a "health food" due to its low-fat content. So why shouldn't we eat chicken? To begin with, vegetarians never eat chicken. A vegetarian is one who does not eat any animal flesh, and chicken is just as much an animal as a cow or a pig. But definitions aside, it is unwise for those who care about health, the environment, or animals, to eat chicken.

FACTORY FARMED CHICKEN

Almost all chicken meat in the United States is produced through the "factory farming" system, in which animals are closely crowded together in filthy, disease-ridden conditions. Because of these unhealthy conditions, many chickens die even before they get to the slaughterhouse. For example, in an operation with 100,000 broiler chickens, approximately 250 birds die per day. Before being caught for the trip to the slaughterhouse, food and water are withdrawn; at the slaughterhouse, birds wait in trucks another 1 to 9 hours to be killed, sometimes in very hot or very cold weather.

Chicken is far worse than beef in terms of contamination and bacteria. The Atlanta Constitution reported in 1991: "Every week throughout the South, millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors or skin conditions are shipped to consumers." Salmonella is present in over one-third of all chickens, and many millions of Americans are infected each year. The symptoms of salmonella poisoning are very similar to the flu (though only occasionally fatal), and thus many who are infected may never even be aware of what they have. To prevent these problems, chickens are usually heavily dosed with antibiotics (more than half of all antibiotic use in the U. S. is on factory farms!), but this indiscriminate use of antibiotics in turn helps create resistant strains of salmonella and other disease-causing germs, decreasing the effectiveness of antibiotics to fight human infections.

HEART DISEASE, CANCER, AND MEDICAL COSTS

And even if bacterial contamination were eliminated, we still have the tremendous problems of heart disease and cancer, the leading causes of death in the United States. Repeated efforts to lower cholesterol levels through switching from beef to chicken have ended in failure. Chicken is somewhat lower in fat than beef, but it still contains quite a bit of fat and even more cholesterol per calorie than does beef or pork. Moreover, meat which is lower in fat is always higher in protein, and excess protein is damaging to health just as is excess fat. Chicken which has 29% of its calories as fat contains 71% of its calories as protein, while ground beef which has 49% of calories of fat has 51% of its calories as protein. In terms of excess protein consumption chicken is worse than beef or pork. Problems caused by or related to excess protein consumption include kidney stones, kidney disease, osteoporosis, bladder cancer, and lymphoma. Chicken meat also completely lacks fiber; lack of fiber is linked to a variety of digestive disorders ranging from constipation to colon cancer. The three basic problems with our American-style diet—too much fat, too much protein, and lack of fiber—are thus all made worse by chicken consumption. Those who switch from beef to chicken are at best trading one set of health hazards for a different set. Chicken has done little for the nation's health. In the past twenty-five years, we have seen a huge increase in poultry consumption; but health care expenditures during the same period showed phenomenal growth, now costing us hundreds of billions of dollars each year in the United States. The "switch" from beef to chicken has evidently had little, if any, effect on rising medical costs.

ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS

Raising chickens affects the environment as well. Feeding grain to chicken may be somewhat less inefficient than feeding grain to cattle, but it is still wasteful—you must feed at least three times the amount of protein, calories, and other nutrients to the chickens in the form of plant foods than you retrieve in animal flesh at the end. Each year millions of children die due to malnutrition or starvation, and yet the Western countries continue to waste this grain by creating more and more chicken flesh. Moreover, chicken production results in incredible quantities of manure; a one-million hen complex produces 125 tons of wet manure each day. Animal agriculture in the U. S. produces many times more waste products than humans do. In many areas of the country livestock manure causes dangerous contamination of the drinking water due to nitrates. Even when used as a plant fertilizer, chicken manure can cause difficulties, as in Texas several years ago when cantaloupe fertilized with chicken manure caused sickness in human beings. The fault lay not with the cantaloupe but with the disease-ridden chicken manure.

COMPASSION FOR ANIMALS

And what about the effect of the "factory farming" system on the animals themselves? Over 7.5 billion birds are killed each year in the United States. We would probably like to believe that these animals at least lived fairly comfortable lives until they were taken to the slaughterhouse, and would also like to believe that chickens are then quickly and painlessly killed. Unfortunately, this is not true. Chickens are crowded together in cramped, windowless sheds, and must breathe concentrated excretory ammonia fumes which damage their eyes and lungs. They are mutilated by "debeaking"—the practice of cutting off most of the chicken's beak when the chicken is young. The reason for "debeaking" is that without it, chickens in their cramped circumstances would peck each other and even attack and kill each other. Obviously, a chicken which needs to be "debeaked" in the first place is not a happy chicken; and the process of debeaking (akin to partial amputation of a human finger, without anesthesia) is quite painful in itself. Birds are deliberately bred to gain more weight than their legs and feet can support, leading to more pain. Turkey production is no better than chicken production. Turkeys, like chickens, are kept in intensely overcrowded quarters; they must be heavily dosed with antibiotics, are subject to many diseases, and have their beaks and their toes partially amputated (without anaesthetic, of course). Turkeys over the years have been bred to be fatter and fatter; today's turkey is so overweight that it cannot mate and must be bred through artificial insemination. "Humanely raised" poultry avoids some of the worst abuses, such as debeaking and overcrowding. But chickens and turkeys are still killed long before their natural lifespan has elapsed, and it still is not a healthful food, as meat from any chicken or turkey—no matter how "humanely" raised—is going to be high in fat or protein (or both), and completely lacking in fiber. Chickens do not die easy deaths, either. The "humane slaughter" laws do not cover chicken or any other poultry. Slaughterhouses are operated as mechanical "disassembly" lines with as little human intervention as possible. Stunning devices are not required by law, and even where used only 1/3 of the chickens are effectively stunned. Some chickens have their throats slit and bleed to death while fully conscious. Millions of unfortunate chickens also escape the automatic knives that slit their throats, and thus go into the next stage—the scalding tank—alive and fully conscious.

A HEALTHY AND COMPASSIONATE ALTERNATIVE

The process of "factory farming" poultry in crowded circumstances results in sick and highly stressed birds, and a food which makes millions of Americans sick each year, due to salmonella, heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, kidney stones, and many other of the "diseases of civilization" which are causing medical costs to soar year after year. But it is also a wasteful food and a cruel food. Nobody wants to know about, or hear about, the life and death of chickens. But (as Peter Singer points out in Animal Liberation) if it is unpleasant for us to think about, what can it be like for the chickens to experience it? Vegetarians, by contrast, suffer less from heart disease and cancer; and not only do they have to worry less about dying, nothing had to die for them. There are many problems in the world which we feel we can do nothing about; but the systematic cruelty to chickens, committed on a massive scale which defies comprehension, is not one of them. If we become vegetarians, we are not participating in this cruelty and we are the better for it as well.

 --Keith Akers and Kate Lawrence

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For some reason, fish is the last item to leave the menu of many would-be vegetarians. It appears to be the least objectionable item among the flesh foods. Let's look at the reasons why this is so and then examine the case against fish and the case for vegetarianism. Fish appears to be not so bad, or even good, from a health standpoint. Most of the well-publicized evils of meat come from its high-fat content; and fish is low in fat. Moreover, populations with a high-fish diet also have a decreased rate of heart disease. Recently, we have found that fish oil actually appears to have beneficial effects on heart disease. Fish, secondly, does not seem to be that bad from an environmental point of view either. Fishing does not cause soil erosion; it does not encourage groundwater depletion; no forests were cut down to allow fish to graze. So, what is wrong, from an environmental point of view, with eating fish? It does not even seem to be such a bad food from an ethical point of view either. Isn't the main ethical problem with animal products in general, that they involve putting animals in stifling conditions on "factory farms," where animals are mutilated, crowded, and kept in confined conditions for their entire lives? Fish, by contrast, live out their entire lives in complete freedom, being killed only at the end.

Let's take a look at these arguments, one by one.

Nutritional Hazards of Fish

The argument that fish is a low-fat food is correct but misses the point of the vegetarian objections to meat on nutritional grounds. There is more wrong with meat than just fat. Excessive protein, and lack of fiber, are equally great problems. Fish is low in fat, and that's good; but it is excessively high in protein, and has zero fiber--and that's bad. It's worth reviewing some of the evidence about high-protein diets. First of all, high-protein diets are overwhelmingly linked to osteoporosis and loss of calcium from the bones. Not only does calcium excretion increase as protein consumption increases, thus resulting in negative calcium balance; calcium excretion also increases as the kind of protein shifts from vegetable to animal protein. Eskimos, for example, take in 2500 milligrams of calcium each day in the form of fish bones, and suffer from rampant osteoporosis--worse than Americans suffer from. This is a consequence of their fish-centered high-protein diet.

Secondly, high-protein diets are strongly associated with kidney disease. They can do damage to the kidneys and reduce the ability of the kidneys to function by perhaps half over a lifetime of abuse. There is also a direct correlation between animal protein consumption and kidney stones.

Thirdly, high-protein diets are well correlated to several forms of cancer. High-protein diets are a leading dietary variable connected with the lymphomas, with kidney cancer, and even with colon cancer. Experimental evidence suggests that protein promotes cancerous growths of all kinds. Fish contains no fiber and thus eating it compounds all the various problems--from constipation to colon cancer--connected with lack of fiber. Finally, fish is high in cholesterol. In fact, in terms of calories consumed, fish has about twice the amount of cholesterol than does pork or beef. Some seafoods, such as crab, shrimp, and lobster, contain even more cholesterol. Studies in which persons switched from a beef / egg diet to a diet high in chicken and fish have repeatedly shown that there is no drop in serum cholesterol levels. The blood-thinning properties of fish oil (which are shared with aspirin, incidentally) have been widely trumpeted as a possible "magic bullet" against heart disease. But thinning the blood has other unpleasant properties. Eskimos, for example, who eat lots and lots of fish, are known to suffer from fatal nosebleeds; and they also have an increased risk of dying from strokes. Fish oil is high in cholesterol and fat and appears to promote gallbladder disease. And this does not even touch the problems of eating contaminated fish from polluted waters. So much for the health benefits of fish.

Fishing and the Environment

What about the environmental effects of fishing? It is true that fish do not consume the resources which most livestock agriculture does. However, the argument that fishing is environmentally friendly is on a par with the argument that hunting is environmentally friendly. In both cases, humans hunt naturally occurring species without growing crops to feed them. Ecologically speaking, this argument may be correct, but has an extremely limited application. Hunting was in fact the predominant form of meat production until about 10,000 years ago. At that time, hunting was replaced by agriculture because there were too few animals available to be hunted to sustain even the limited population of the day (some have estimated the total human population may have been 3 million at this time). Even with this limited population, hunting had resulted in the decimation of numerous species. So pervasive were the effects of this hunting that numerous species became extinct; not only species which were directly hunted, but many other species indirectly related to the hunted species as well. Even in prehistory, humans had a devastating and negative impact on the environment (albeit over tens of thousands of years) due to hunting. The same thing can be said of fishing today. The fishing habits of the world could not sustain the world's population at more than a small fraction of the per capita meat consumption of the U. S. and other developed countries. Yet even this limited yield is having a serious negative impact on the environment of the sea. The total fish catch has been declining for years now due to overfishing, making fishing an increasingly expensive and environmentally damaging hobby. Moreover, there is one resource we need which fishing does consume, and that is fossil fuel energy. Commercial fishing is very energy intensive; it may require as much as 20 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy from fish. This is a ratio which makes fish 50 to 100 times as energy-intensive as production of plant foods, even when those plant foods are produced under standard Western agricultural methods. At best, then, fish is merely less damaging than other forms of meat production. The truth is that fishing on any large scale just won't work. Fishing must either remain a very small and statistically insignificant form of food, or become environmentally damaging and draining in important ways when it is expanded to include any significant portion of the population.

The Ethics of Killing Fish

Finally, we come to the ethical arguments about fish. Killing fish is all right, we suppose, because the fish live natural lives before they die; and besides, fish eat other fish. I think that if we put these arguments in their proper perspective they would appear considerably different. Because fish are not kept on factory farms, and fish are carnivorous, then it is all right to kill fish? People are not kept on factory farms either, and people eat other animals. So is it all right to kill people, and then eat them? Actually, fish are being kept on "fish farms" in increasing numbers today, raising significant ethical and environmental issues. But even if all fish were caught in the wild, what difference would it make? Because an animal suffers less in one form of food production does not mean that it is all right to inflict suffering on that animal in order to eat that animal as food. We are vegetarians (those of us who are ethical vegetarians, anyway) because we think that the torture and slaughter of animals is wrong. So if someone says that a little torture and slaughter is O. K., then where do we put them? Or what if someone says that torture is wrong, but not slaughter? No. Suffering is suffering. If it is wrong to inflict suffering, and especially if there is a simple, easy, painless way to avoid inflicting suffering, then we ought not to inflict suffering. Stopping the killing of animals for food is a principled and easy way to avoid the infliction of suffering. Nor does the carnivorousness of most fish matter. The fact that suffering exists in the world does not give us an excuse or license to go out and create more suffering. No: we should instead stop inflicting suffering, and thereby decrease the amount of evil in the world by that small portion for which we are responsible. Incidentally, the suffering which fish endure in being caught is considerably greater than the suffering which they would endure by being eaten by a bigger fish (which is probably minimal). While fish may stop flopping around fairly quickly after being caught and hauled on board a shipping vessel, they can and do survive for an hour, or often several hours, before dying of suffocation. Imagine having your head held under water as you struggle for air. Now imagine that this continues until you finally, in desperation, gulp down water in your lungs, and pass out from asphyxiation. Now, finally, imagine that the period of time in which you are struggling for air lasts for an hour, or several hours. "Sport" fishing also involves the cruelty of hooking the fish in its mouth. As the fish struggles for its life, the hook tears into the flesh in the mouth. The mouth is a very sensitive area in most fish, so this causes intense pain. Does this qualify as "torture and slaughter" of an animal? I think it does. I do not think that this is an activity which compassionate people engage in when they have a simple and clear path to avoid such torturing and slaughtering. I further submit that we can easily avoid participating in such barbaric activities by the simple expedient of not spending our money on purchases of animals tortured and slaughtered in this way, and by refusing to participate in the eating of animals killed in this fashion. And if you object to killing of animals for food at all, vegetarianism is the logical solution. To summarize: fish is not a healthy food because it is high in protein, and high-protein foods have hazards just as real as high-fat foods. Fish is not an environmentally sound food, but rather an historical dead end which must have serious destructive effects if practiced on a large scale, just as hunting is likewise an historical dead end. Finally, killing fish for food is just as barbaric as killing any other animal for food. Indeed, in some ways the death of fish is even more horrifying, and certainly takes longer, than the slaughter of chickens or cows. Murder is murder, death is death, evil is evil. If we want to oppose evil the least we can do is to stop participating in it. This is the first step, and the greatest step, in our emergence from the barbarism of prehistory.

--Keith Akers

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