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. 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.”Birds
In the United States, virtually all birds raised for food are factory farmed.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. 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.8 Some, unable to eat after being debeaked, starve.2 Professor John Webster, of the University of Bristol’s School of Veterinary Science, has said: “Broilers are the only livestock that are in chronic pain for the last 20% of their lives.
Egg-Laying Hens
Packed in wire cages (the industry average is less than half a square foot of floor space per bird),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.
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 . 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.
Pigs
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.”On September 17, 2008, the Associated Press reported on a cruelty investigation performed by PETA at a pig farm in Iowa. The report stated in part:
Dairy CowsThe video, shot by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, shows farm workers hitting sows with metal rods, slamming piglets on a concrete floor and bragging about jamming rods into sows’ hindquarters.…
At one point in the video, workers are shown slamming piglets on the ground, a practice designed to instantly kill those baby pigs that aren’t healthy enough. But on the video, the piglets are not killed instantly, and in a bloodied pile, some piglets can be seen wiggling vainly. The video also shows piglets being castrated, and having their tails cut off, without anesthesia.
From 1940 to 2004, average per-cow milk production rose from 2.3 to 9.5 tons per year; some cows have surpassed 30 tons. High milk production often causes udder breakdown, leading to early slaughter.
It is unprofitable to keep cows alive once their milk production declines. They are usually killed at 5 to 6 years of age, though their normal life span exceeds 20.
Dairy cows are rarely allowed to nurse their young. 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 to 20 weeks before being slaughtered.(II) Transport
Crammed together, animals must stand in their excrement while exposed to extreme temperatures in open trucks, sometimes freezing to the trailer. Approximately 200,000 pigs arrive dead at U.S. slaughter plants each year; many of these deaths are caused by a lack of ventilation on trucks in hot weather.
Workers shock the animals with electric prods, which increases the incidence of “downers”—animals too sick or injured to stand. Downers are hauled from the trucks with skid loaders and forklifts.
fig :-Animal Protection Institute photographed this sheep in 108-degree weather.Fish
Many fish are long-lived, have complicated nervous systems, and are capable of learning complicated tasks.Guyton & Hall’s Textbook of Medical Physiology (1996) states, “The lower regions of the brain [which all vertebrates have] appear to be important in the appreciation of the suffering types of pain because animals with their brains sectioned above the mesencephalon to block any pain signals reaching the cerebrum still evince undeniable evidence of suffering when any part of the body is traumatized.”
Wild Life
USDA APHIS Wildlife Services and livestock producers kill wildlife to protect farmed animals. Having eliminated native populations of wolves and grizzly bears,4 federal government hunters now kill about 100,000 coyotes, bobcats, feral hogs, bison, and mountain lions each year.15 They are shot, caught in steel-jaw leghold traps or neck nooses, or poisoned with cyanide(III) Slaughterhouses
If they survive the farms and transport, the animals—whether factory-farmed —are slaughtered.
Animals in slaughterhouses can smell, hear, and often see the slaughter of those before them.
As the animals struggle, the human workers, who are pressured to keep the lines moving quickly, often react with impatience towards the animals.
Federal law requires that mammals be stunned prior to slaughter (exempting kosher and halal). Common methods of stunning:
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Captive bolt stunning
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A “pistol” is set against the animal’s head and a metal rod is thrust into the brain.Shooting a struggling animal is difficult, and the rod often misses its mark.
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Electrical stunning
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Current produces a grand mal seizure; then the throat is cut. According to industry consultant Temple Grandin, PhD, “Insufficient amperage can cause an animal to be paralyzed without losing sensibility.”
For ritual slaughter, animals are fully conscious when their carotid arteries are cut. This is supposed to cause unconsciousness within seconds, but because of blood flow through the vertebral arteries in the back of the neck, some animals can remain conscious as they bleed for up to a minute. Additionally, Temple Grandin, PhD notes “Unfortunately, there are some plants which use cruel methods of restraint such as hanging live animals upside down.” This can cause broken bones as the heavy animal hangs by a chain attached to one leg.
An article in The Washington Post noted: “Hogs, unlike cattle, are dunked in tanks of hot water after they are stunned to soften the hides for skinning. As a result, a botched slaughter condemns some hogs to being scalded and drowned. Secret videotape from an Iowa pork plant shows hogs squealing and kicking as they are being lowered into the water.”
Resources and Contamination
The Hunger Report 1995 from the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program at Brown University illustrates that a vegetarian diet can feed significantly more people than a meat-centered diet:
| Populations Potentially Supported by 1993 Global Food Supply with Different Diets | ||
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World hunger is a complicated problem, and becoming vegetarian in the United States will not necessarily alleviate it in the short-term. However, being vegetarian is a positive step towards saving resources that can be used to feed people in the future.
According to Livestock & the Environment: Finding a Balance, a 1996 report coordinated in part by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:
The industrial [livestock] system is a poor converter of fossil energy. Fossil energy is a major input of intensive livestock production systems, mainly indirectly for the production of feed.
As Michael Pollan reports in “Power Steer” (New York Times Magazine, 3/31/02):
[I]f you follow the corn…back to the fields where it grows, you will find an 80-million-acre monoculture that consumes more chemical herbicide and fertilizer than any other crop. Keep going and you can trace the nitrogen runoff from that crop all the way down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created (if that is the right word) a 12,000-square-mile “dead zone.”
But you can go farther still, and follow the fertilizer needed to grow that corn all the way to the oil fields of the Persian Gulf.… Assuming [a steer] continues to eat 25 pounds of corn a day and reaches a weight of 1,250 pounds, he will have consumed in his lifetime roughly 284 gallons of oil. We have succeeded in industrializing the beef calf, transforming what was once a solar-powered ruminant into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.
Also from “Power Steer”:
Cows rarely live on feedlot diets for more than six months, which might be about as much as their digestive systems can tolerate.…
What keeps a feedlot animal healthy—or healthy enough—are antibiotics.… Most of the antibiotics sold in America end up in animal feed—a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged, leads directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”.…
Escherichia coli 0157 is a relatively new strain of a common intestinal bacteria…that is common in feedlot cattle, more than half of whom carry it in their guts. Ingesting as few as 10 of these microbes can cause a fatal infection.
Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids—and go on to kill us.
“Dioxins have been characterized by EPA as likely to be human carcinogens and are anticipated to increase the risk of cancer at background levels of exposure.…
“Most of us receive almost all of our dioxin exposure from the food we eat: specifically from the animal fats associated with eating beef, pork, poultry, fish, milk, dairy products.”
A vegan diet can be very healthful. In fact, many people initially stop eating animal products to benefit their health.
Photo courtesy of USDA ARS. “It is the position of the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada that appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.…
“Well-planned vegan [pure vegetarian] and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Vegetarian diets offer a number of nutritional benefits, including lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein as well as higher levels of carbohydrates, fiber, magnesium, potassium, folate, and antioxidants such as vitamins C and E and phytochemicals. Vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass indices than nonvegetarians, as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease; vegetarians also show lower blood cholesterol levels; lower blood pressure; and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.”
Simply avoiding animal products, however, will not ensure optimal health. Like everyone, vegans should eat a well-balanced diet. Protein, vitamins B12 and D, omega-3 fats, calcium, and iodine are important.
Fortunately, there are plenty of nutritious and convenient options for vegans today, including various high-protein meat substitutes and fortified dairy alternatives.
love,
santhu
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