Factory Farms
Byrnzie
Posts: 21,037
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ry-farming
The truth about factory farming
In this disturbing extract from Eating Animals, the novelist reveals the unpalatable truth about factory-farmed poultry
Jonathan Safran Foer - The Guardian, Monday 22 February 2010
Everyone has a mental image of a farm, and to most it probably includes fields, barns, tractors and animals, or at least one of the above. I doubt there's anyone on earth not involved in farming whose mind would conjure what I'm now looking at. And yet before me is the kind of farm that produces roughly 99% of the animals consumed in America.
This Californian turkey farm is surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and set up in a series of seven sheds, each about 50ft wide by 500ft long, each holding in the neighborhood of 25,000 birds. Adjacent to the sheds is a massive granary, which looks more like something out of Blade Runner than Little House on the Prairie. Metal pipes spiderweb the outsides of the buildings, massive fans protrude and clang, and floodlights project weirdly discrete pockets of day.
I am accompanied tonight by an animal activist, "C". She is short and wispy. She wears aviator glasses, flip-flops and braces.
With her astronaut's gloves, C spreads the harp of barbed wire far enough apart for me to squeeze through. My trousers snag and rip, but they are disposable, purchased for this occasion.
The surface is lunarlike. With each step, my feet sink into a compost of animal waste, dirt, and I-don't-yet-know-what-else that has been poured around the sheds. I have to curl my toes to keep my shoes from being left behind in the glutinous muck. We approach the first shed. Light spills from under its door. I wonder: Why would a shed full of animals be brightly lit in the middle of the night?
I can hear movement from inside: the hum of machines blends with what sounds a bit like a whispering audience or a chandelier shop in a mild earthquake. C wrestles with the door and then signals that we should move to the next shed.
We spend several minutes like this, looking for an unlocked door. Another why: Why would a farmer lock the doors of his turkey farm?
It can't be because he's afraid someone will steal his equipment or animals. There's no equipment to steal, and the animals aren't worth the herculean effort it would take to illicitly transport a significant number. A farmer doesn't lock his doors because he's afraid his animals will escape. Turkeys can't turn doorknobs. It isn't because of biosecurity, either. Barbed wire is enough to keep out the merely curious. So why? In the three years I will spend immersed in animal agriculture, nothing will unsettle me more than the locked doors.
As it turns out, locked doors are the least of it. I never heard back from any of the companies I wrote to. Even research organisations with paid staff find themselves consistently thwarted by industry secrecy.
The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.
This is a farm
It's hard to get one's head around the magnitude of 25,000 or 30,000 birds in one room. You don't have to see it for yourself to understand that things are packed pretty tight. In its Animal Welfare Guidelines, the US National Chicken Council indicates an appropriate stocking density to be eight-tenths of a square foot per bird. Try to picture it. Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 25,000 of these rectangles in a grid. Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.
Now to the farming. First, find a chicken that will grow big fast on as little feed as possible. The muscles and fat tissues of the newly engineered broiler birds – chickens that become meat, as opposed to layers, chickens that lay eggs – grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease. Somewhere between 1% and 4% of the birds will die writhing in convulsions from sudden-death syndrome, a condition virtually unknown outside of factory farms. Three out of four will have some degree of walking impairment, and common sense suggests they are in chronic pain.
For broilers, leave the lights on about 24 hours a day for the first week or so of the chicks' lives. This encourages them to eat more. Then turn the lights off a bit, giving them maybe four hours of darkness a day – just enough sleep for them to survive. Of course, chickens will go crazy if forced to live in such grossly unnatural conditions for long. At least broiler birds are typically slaughtered on the 42nd day of their lives (or increasingly the 39th), so they haven't yet established social hierarchies to fight over.
Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. Scientific studies and US government records suggest that virtually all chickens become infected with E coli (an indicator of faecal contamination) and between 39% and 75% of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8% of birds become infected with salmonella. Seventy to 90% are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter.
How good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? In practice, the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell and taste.
The farming done, it's now time for "processing". First, you'll need to find workers to gather the birds into crates and "hold the line" that will turn the living birds into plastic-wrapped parts. Illegal aliens are often preferred, but poor recent immigrants who do not speak English are also desirable employees. Pay your workers minimum wage, or near to it, to scoop up the birds – five in each hand – and jam them into transport crates.
If your operation is running at the proper speed – 105 chickens crated by a single worker in 3.5 minutes is the expected rate according to several catchers I interviewed – the workers will regularly feel the birds' bones snapping in their hands. (Approximately 30% of all live birds arriving at the slaughterhouse have freshly broken bones as a result of their Frankenstein genetics and rough treatment.)
Load the crates into trucks. Ignore weather extremes and don't feed or water the birds, even if the processing plant is hundreds of miles away. Upon arrival at the plant, have more workers sling the birds, upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, on to a moving conveyer system. More bones will be broken. Often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud that workers won't be able to hear the person next to them on the line. Often the birds will defecate in pain and terror.
The conveyer system drags the birds through an electrified water bath. This most likely paralyses them but doesn't render them insensible. Other countries, including the UK, require (legally, at least) that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding. In America, the voltage is kept low – about one-tenth of the level necessary to render the animals unconscious. After it has travelled through the bath, a paralysed bird's eyes might still move. Sometimes the birds will have enough control of their bodies to slowly open their beaks, as though attempting to scream.
The next stop on the line will be an automated throat slitter. Blood will slowly drain out of the bird, unless the relevant arteries are missed, which happens, according to another worker I spoke with, "all the time". So you'll need a few more workers to function as backup slaughterers – "kill men" – who will slit the throats of the birds that the machine misses. Unless they, too, miss the birds, which I was also told happens "all the time". According to the National Chicken Council – representatives of the industry – about 180 million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him, Richard L Lobb, the council's spokesman, sighed, "The process is over in a matter of minutes."
Faeces, and other 'blemishes'
I spoke to numerous catchers, live hangers, and kill men, who described birds going alive and conscious into the scalding tank, which helps open the bird's pores. Since faeces on skin and feathers end up in these tanks, the birds leave filled with pathogens that they have inhaled or absorbed through their skin.
After the birds' heads are pulled off and their feet removed, machines open them with a vertical incision and remove their guts. Contamination often occurs here, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing faeces into the birds' body cavities. Once upon a time, US Department of Agriculture (Usda) inspectors had to condemn any bird with such faecal contamination. But about 30 years ago, the poultry industry convinced the Usda to reclassify faeces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, faeces are now classified as a "cosmetic blemish".
Perhaps Lobb and the National Chicken Council would simply sigh and say, "People are done consuming the faeces in a matter of minutes."
Next the birds are inspected by a Usda official, whose ostensible function is to keep the consumer safe. The inspector has approximately two seconds to examine each bird inside and out, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities. He or she looks at about 25,000 birds a day. Journalist Scott Bronstein conducted interviews with nearly 100 Usda poultry inspectors from 37 plants. "Every week," he reports, "millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green faeces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumours or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers."
Next, the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. The Government Accountability Project, a US whistleblower protection organisation, has said that the "water in these tanks has been aptly named 'faecal soup' for all the filth and bacteria floating around".
While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99% of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems and fought lawsuits from both consumers and the beef industry to continue their use.
Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird's carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the "faecal soup"). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in sealed plastic bags during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination. But that would also eliminate an opportunity to turn waste-water into tens of millions of dollars' worth of additional weight in poultry products.
What I've described is not exceptional. It isn't the result of masochistic workers, defective machinery, or "bad apples". It is the rule. More than 99% of all chickens sold for meat in America live and die like this. For each food species, animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm – 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs and 78% of cattle.
Today six billion chickens are raised in roughly these conditions each year in the EU, over nine billion in America, and more than seven billion in China. All told, there are 50 billion factory-farmed birds worldwide. Every year 50 billion birds are made to live and die like this.
An act of mercy
Back at the turkey farm, men's voices drift over from the granary. Why are they working at 3.30 in the morning? Machines engage. What kinds of machines? It's the middle of the night and things are happening. What is happening?
"Found one," C whispers, finding an unlocked door. She slides it open, releasing a parallelogram of light, and enters. The first thing that catches my attention is the row of gas masks on the near wall. Why would there be gas masks in a farm shed?
We creep in. There are tens of thousands of turkey chicks. Fist-sized, with feathers the colour of sawdust, they're nearly invisible on the sawdust floor. At first the situation doesn't look too bad. It's crowded, but they seem happy enough. The exhilaration of seeing what I came to see, and confronting all of these baby animals, has me feeling pretty good.
I tiptoe around and explore, leaving vague bootie prints in the sawdust. The closer I look, the more I see. The ends of the beaks of the chicks are blackened, as are the ends of their toes. Some have red spots on the tops of their heads.
Because there are so many animals, it takes me several minutes before I take in just how many dead ones there are. Some are blood-matted; some are covered in sores. Some seem to have been pecked at; others are as desiccated and loosely gathered as small piles of dead leaves. Some are deformed. The dead are the exceptions, but there are few places to look without seeing at least one.
One chick is trembling on its side, legs splayed, eyes crusted over. Scabs protrude from bald patches. Its beak is slightly open, and its head is shaking back and forth. How old is it? A week? Two? Has it been like this for all of its life, or did something happen to it? What could have happened to it?
C will know what to do, I think. She opens her bag and removes a knife. Holding one hand over the chick's head – is she keeping it still or covering its eyes? – she slices its neck, rescuing it.
The UK meat industry 'A remarkably similar story'
Anyone who cares about the issues raised by factory farming should not find any peace in being British. While my research has focused on American agriculture, a remarkably similar story could be told about animal farming in the UK.
There are some important differences: sow stalls (gestation crates) and veal creates are banned in the UK, whereas they are the norm in America; poultry slaughter is almost certainly less cruel. But there are far more, and more important, similarities.
Approximately 800 million chickens, turkeys and pigs are factory farmed in the UK every year – more than 10 animals for every human. (If this number were to include cows and fish – which are, for different reasons, difficult to quantify – it would be dramatically larger.) Approximately 95% of poultry and 60% of pigs are raised on factory farms. The techniques and outcomes are often identical to those in the US.
The truth about factory farming
In this disturbing extract from Eating Animals, the novelist reveals the unpalatable truth about factory-farmed poultry
Jonathan Safran Foer - The Guardian, Monday 22 February 2010
Everyone has a mental image of a farm, and to most it probably includes fields, barns, tractors and animals, or at least one of the above. I doubt there's anyone on earth not involved in farming whose mind would conjure what I'm now looking at. And yet before me is the kind of farm that produces roughly 99% of the animals consumed in America.
This Californian turkey farm is surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and set up in a series of seven sheds, each about 50ft wide by 500ft long, each holding in the neighborhood of 25,000 birds. Adjacent to the sheds is a massive granary, which looks more like something out of Blade Runner than Little House on the Prairie. Metal pipes spiderweb the outsides of the buildings, massive fans protrude and clang, and floodlights project weirdly discrete pockets of day.
I am accompanied tonight by an animal activist, "C". She is short and wispy. She wears aviator glasses, flip-flops and braces.
With her astronaut's gloves, C spreads the harp of barbed wire far enough apart for me to squeeze through. My trousers snag and rip, but they are disposable, purchased for this occasion.
The surface is lunarlike. With each step, my feet sink into a compost of animal waste, dirt, and I-don't-yet-know-what-else that has been poured around the sheds. I have to curl my toes to keep my shoes from being left behind in the glutinous muck. We approach the first shed. Light spills from under its door. I wonder: Why would a shed full of animals be brightly lit in the middle of the night?
I can hear movement from inside: the hum of machines blends with what sounds a bit like a whispering audience or a chandelier shop in a mild earthquake. C wrestles with the door and then signals that we should move to the next shed.
We spend several minutes like this, looking for an unlocked door. Another why: Why would a farmer lock the doors of his turkey farm?
It can't be because he's afraid someone will steal his equipment or animals. There's no equipment to steal, and the animals aren't worth the herculean effort it would take to illicitly transport a significant number. A farmer doesn't lock his doors because he's afraid his animals will escape. Turkeys can't turn doorknobs. It isn't because of biosecurity, either. Barbed wire is enough to keep out the merely curious. So why? In the three years I will spend immersed in animal agriculture, nothing will unsettle me more than the locked doors.
As it turns out, locked doors are the least of it. I never heard back from any of the companies I wrote to. Even research organisations with paid staff find themselves consistently thwarted by industry secrecy.
The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.
This is a farm
It's hard to get one's head around the magnitude of 25,000 or 30,000 birds in one room. You don't have to see it for yourself to understand that things are packed pretty tight. In its Animal Welfare Guidelines, the US National Chicken Council indicates an appropriate stocking density to be eight-tenths of a square foot per bird. Try to picture it. Find a piece of printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 25,000 of these rectangles in a grid. Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm.
Now to the farming. First, find a chicken that will grow big fast on as little feed as possible. The muscles and fat tissues of the newly engineered broiler birds – chickens that become meat, as opposed to layers, chickens that lay eggs – grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease. Somewhere between 1% and 4% of the birds will die writhing in convulsions from sudden-death syndrome, a condition virtually unknown outside of factory farms. Three out of four will have some degree of walking impairment, and common sense suggests they are in chronic pain.
For broilers, leave the lights on about 24 hours a day for the first week or so of the chicks' lives. This encourages them to eat more. Then turn the lights off a bit, giving them maybe four hours of darkness a day – just enough sleep for them to survive. Of course, chickens will go crazy if forced to live in such grossly unnatural conditions for long. At least broiler birds are typically slaughtered on the 42nd day of their lives (or increasingly the 39th), so they haven't yet established social hierarchies to fight over.
Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms. Scientific studies and US government records suggest that virtually all chickens become infected with E coli (an indicator of faecal contamination) and between 39% and 75% of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8% of birds become infected with salmonella. Seventy to 90% are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter.
How good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? In practice, the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell and taste.
The farming done, it's now time for "processing". First, you'll need to find workers to gather the birds into crates and "hold the line" that will turn the living birds into plastic-wrapped parts. Illegal aliens are often preferred, but poor recent immigrants who do not speak English are also desirable employees. Pay your workers minimum wage, or near to it, to scoop up the birds – five in each hand – and jam them into transport crates.
If your operation is running at the proper speed – 105 chickens crated by a single worker in 3.5 minutes is the expected rate according to several catchers I interviewed – the workers will regularly feel the birds' bones snapping in their hands. (Approximately 30% of all live birds arriving at the slaughterhouse have freshly broken bones as a result of their Frankenstein genetics and rough treatment.)
Load the crates into trucks. Ignore weather extremes and don't feed or water the birds, even if the processing plant is hundreds of miles away. Upon arrival at the plant, have more workers sling the birds, upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, on to a moving conveyer system. More bones will be broken. Often the screaming of the birds and the flapping of their wings will be so loud that workers won't be able to hear the person next to them on the line. Often the birds will defecate in pain and terror.
The conveyer system drags the birds through an electrified water bath. This most likely paralyses them but doesn't render them insensible. Other countries, including the UK, require (legally, at least) that chickens be rendered unconscious or killed prior to bleeding and scalding. In America, the voltage is kept low – about one-tenth of the level necessary to render the animals unconscious. After it has travelled through the bath, a paralysed bird's eyes might still move. Sometimes the birds will have enough control of their bodies to slowly open their beaks, as though attempting to scream.
The next stop on the line will be an automated throat slitter. Blood will slowly drain out of the bird, unless the relevant arteries are missed, which happens, according to another worker I spoke with, "all the time". So you'll need a few more workers to function as backup slaughterers – "kill men" – who will slit the throats of the birds that the machine misses. Unless they, too, miss the birds, which I was also told happens "all the time". According to the National Chicken Council – representatives of the industry – about 180 million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him, Richard L Lobb, the council's spokesman, sighed, "The process is over in a matter of minutes."
Faeces, and other 'blemishes'
I spoke to numerous catchers, live hangers, and kill men, who described birds going alive and conscious into the scalding tank, which helps open the bird's pores. Since faeces on skin and feathers end up in these tanks, the birds leave filled with pathogens that they have inhaled or absorbed through their skin.
After the birds' heads are pulled off and their feet removed, machines open them with a vertical incision and remove their guts. Contamination often occurs here, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing faeces into the birds' body cavities. Once upon a time, US Department of Agriculture (Usda) inspectors had to condemn any bird with such faecal contamination. But about 30 years ago, the poultry industry convinced the Usda to reclassify faeces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, faeces are now classified as a "cosmetic blemish".
Perhaps Lobb and the National Chicken Council would simply sigh and say, "People are done consuming the faeces in a matter of minutes."
Next the birds are inspected by a Usda official, whose ostensible function is to keep the consumer safe. The inspector has approximately two seconds to examine each bird inside and out, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities. He or she looks at about 25,000 birds a day. Journalist Scott Bronstein conducted interviews with nearly 100 Usda poultry inspectors from 37 plants. "Every week," he reports, "millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green faeces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumours or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers."
Next, the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. The Government Accountability Project, a US whistleblower protection organisation, has said that the "water in these tanks has been aptly named 'faecal soup' for all the filth and bacteria floating around".
While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air-chilling systems, 99% of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems and fought lawsuits from both consumers and the beef industry to continue their use.
Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird's carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the "faecal soup"). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in sealed plastic bags during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination. But that would also eliminate an opportunity to turn waste-water into tens of millions of dollars' worth of additional weight in poultry products.
What I've described is not exceptional. It isn't the result of masochistic workers, defective machinery, or "bad apples". It is the rule. More than 99% of all chickens sold for meat in America live and die like this. For each food species, animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm – 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs and 78% of cattle.
Today six billion chickens are raised in roughly these conditions each year in the EU, over nine billion in America, and more than seven billion in China. All told, there are 50 billion factory-farmed birds worldwide. Every year 50 billion birds are made to live and die like this.
An act of mercy
Back at the turkey farm, men's voices drift over from the granary. Why are they working at 3.30 in the morning? Machines engage. What kinds of machines? It's the middle of the night and things are happening. What is happening?
"Found one," C whispers, finding an unlocked door. She slides it open, releasing a parallelogram of light, and enters. The first thing that catches my attention is the row of gas masks on the near wall. Why would there be gas masks in a farm shed?
We creep in. There are tens of thousands of turkey chicks. Fist-sized, with feathers the colour of sawdust, they're nearly invisible on the sawdust floor. At first the situation doesn't look too bad. It's crowded, but they seem happy enough. The exhilaration of seeing what I came to see, and confronting all of these baby animals, has me feeling pretty good.
I tiptoe around and explore, leaving vague bootie prints in the sawdust. The closer I look, the more I see. The ends of the beaks of the chicks are blackened, as are the ends of their toes. Some have red spots on the tops of their heads.
Because there are so many animals, it takes me several minutes before I take in just how many dead ones there are. Some are blood-matted; some are covered in sores. Some seem to have been pecked at; others are as desiccated and loosely gathered as small piles of dead leaves. Some are deformed. The dead are the exceptions, but there are few places to look without seeing at least one.
One chick is trembling on its side, legs splayed, eyes crusted over. Scabs protrude from bald patches. Its beak is slightly open, and its head is shaking back and forth. How old is it? A week? Two? Has it been like this for all of its life, or did something happen to it? What could have happened to it?
C will know what to do, I think. She opens her bag and removes a knife. Holding one hand over the chick's head – is she keeping it still or covering its eyes? – she slices its neck, rescuing it.
The UK meat industry 'A remarkably similar story'
Anyone who cares about the issues raised by factory farming should not find any peace in being British. While my research has focused on American agriculture, a remarkably similar story could be told about animal farming in the UK.
There are some important differences: sow stalls (gestation crates) and veal creates are banned in the UK, whereas they are the norm in America; poultry slaughter is almost certainly less cruel. But there are far more, and more important, similarities.
Approximately 800 million chickens, turkeys and pigs are factory farmed in the UK every year – more than 10 animals for every human. (If this number were to include cows and fish – which are, for different reasons, difficult to quantify – it would be dramatically larger.) Approximately 95% of poultry and 60% of pigs are raised on factory farms. The techniques and outcomes are often identical to those in the US.
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Officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which inspects meat facilities, suspended operations Monday at Central Valley Meat Co. in Hanford, Calif., which slaughters cows when they lose their value as milk producers.
The USDA received hours of videotape Friday from Compassion Over Killing, an animal welfare group, which said its undercover investigator was employed by the slaughterhouse and made the video over a two-week period in June.
"USDA considers inhumane treatment of animals at slaughter facilities to be unacceptable and is conducting a thorough investigation into these allegations," said Justin DeJong, spokesman for the Food Safety Inspection Service.
Four minutes of excerpts the animal welfare group provided to The Associated Press showed cows being prepared for slaughter. One worker appears to be suffocating a cow by standing on its muzzle after a gun that injects a bolt into the animal's head had failed to render it unconscious. In another clip, a cow is still conscious and flailing as a conveyor lifts it by one leg for transport to an area where the animals' throats are slit for blood draining.
"The horror caught on camera is sickening," said Erica Meier, executive director of Compassion Over Killing, based in Washington, D.C. "It's alarming that this is not only a USDA-inspected facility but a supplier to the USDA."
Online USDA records show the company has contracted to sell ground beef to USDA food programs.
Within hours of seeing the video, the USDA's Office of Inspector General sent investigators who found evidence of "egregious inhumane handling and treatment of livestock."
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... z24BgaEIPr
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odgldsDV ... ata_player
Anyone who cares about animals should watch this documentary.
www.earthlings.com
Propaganda says it isn't? SHeesh. :fp:
well honestly ... at this stage - it's up to you to decide what research you are going to believe ... there are tons of articles published that detail how these farming practices are unsustainable but if you are gonna dismiss it because it isn't funded by corporations or the corporately controlled usda then i got nothing for you ...
Factory farms will be unsustainable in the long term for several reasons but the short version is..
1. Environmental impact - the sheer amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides applied to crops have already leached into our groundwater supply especially in the Midwest where the vast majority of the country's factory farms are currently located. These chemicals have not only leached into groundwater but have polluted our rivers (especially the Mississippi where alot of people get their drinking water) and have created dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
2. Increased exposure to food borne illnesses for the people who consume it (think e.coli) and those who work directly in the factory farm (respiratory illnesses are especially prevalent, especially for chicken farmers)
3. Increased use of corn and soy to feed factory farmed animals. This continues to create a cycle of the farmer growing more to make more money which in turn reduces the price of the crop which also leads to our need to find something else to do with all this excess corn and soy - didn't someone post an article not too long ago about a tire made from soybeans? Of course, mono crop culture is another issue in regards to soil erosion and nutrient depletion.
Just to name a few issues of unsustainability.
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE
Excellent summary, Riotgrl.
Also, a world population of 7+ billion adds to the unsuitability of meat consumption of any kind, especially in developed countries. Besides considering becoming vegetarian, people who eat meat might consider smaller portions, fewer meals that include meat and purchasing- when ever possible- what meat they do consume from local sources that (well, other than killing them of course) treat animals with care.
Key Arena - Nov 05, 2000
Gorge Amphitheater - Sep 01, 2005, Jul 22,23, 2006
Key Arena - Sept 21,22, 2009
Alpine Valley - Sept 3, 4 2011
Just put more sauce on them, you'll be fine.
The footage was obtained on farms that supposedly meet the highest standards in the industry, but shows “dead and dying chickens packed into massive sheds; diseased pigs barely able to walk; crowded, filthy pens; and cows kept all-year-round in barren ‘zero-grazing’ units.”
“Many people want to believe that, as long as animals have a good life and a humane death, it is acceptable to eat their flesh, eggs and milk. But if the very ‘best farmers in the country’ are unable to meet this basic test, what hope is there for animals reared on the thousands of farms that don’t win prizes?” said Animal Aid Campaigner and report author Ben Martin.
The farms covered in the investigation include:
Twinwood Pig Unit, Bedfordshire. Finalist: Pig Farmer of the Year 2010 (Images).
F J Bosworth & Sons, Essex. Winner: Pig Farmer of the Year 2011, 2nd place: Overall Farmer of the Year 2011 (Images).
Steanbow Farms, Somerset. Finalist: Dairy Farmer of the Year 2012 (Images).
Sunny Hill Free Range Eggs, Northumberland. Finalist: Poultry Farmer of the Year 2011 (Images).
Rerrick Park Farm, Dumfries & Galloway. Finalist: Dairy Farmer of the Year 2011 (Images).
F J Bosworth & Sons supplies pigs to Cheale Meats, where two workers received prison time for sadistically abusing pigs in their care as a result of a previous undercover investigation by Animal Aid.
“Past Animal Aid on-farm investigations exposing high levels of squalor, neglect and disease have usually been dismissed by industry spokespeople as unrepresentative ‘bad-apples’. The same, clearly, cannot be said of the subjects of the new exposé. Following on from several years of investigations into a wide range of different animal farms, Animal Aid is convinced that these industry-commended establishments point to a ‘race to the bottom,’ with animal welfare counting for near zero against the drive for profits,” the organization said in a statement.
http://www.care2.com/causes/cruelty-exp ... farms.html
Just goes to show you that even the "best" farms out there are guilty of animal cruelty.
glad to see our fucking gov't protecting industry again ... :(
Godfather.
Attaining meat can not afford us the same measure of guilt-free shopping. We purchase from our local butchers instead of buying meats shipped from provinces over a 1000 miles away. But we are not so naive to think that the treatment of the animals at the farms we support is not in complete contrast to the ones described in previous passages.
I'm all for more humane farming practices- even if that meant a much higher purchase cost. But in the end... the future of those animals has been predetermined. There is no real life for food animals to really experience. We are here. We want meat. I'm not sure everybody taking their rifles and heading off into the woods to shoot deer and birds would be all that great- it wouldn't be too long at all before a whole other set of problems developed.
I think it's safe to say, given our exponentially expanding population and need to consume most of everything, that every species on this planet outside of household pets- not to mention the earth itself- would prefer us to go away.
This is 'Merica. Freedom, Freedom, Freedom
And yes, I am a vegetarian, and a proud supporter of local and organic farms.
Horrific abuse of Bettencourt Dairies cows witnessed in undercover video shot in August
Three workers have been charged with animal cruelty after beating and kicking cows at the Dry Creek Dairy in Hansen, Idaho
Bettencourt is an indirect supplier of Kraft Foods and Wendy's
Kraft Foods have said they are sticking by the dairy supplier
Wendy's have instructed one of their suppliers to cease their association with Bettencourt with immediate effect
Burger King launch an investigation into their own supply chain after they are linked to Bettencourt Dairies
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z28umAgxfN
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Unfortunately, in addition to the inherently inhumane conditions at factory farms and in slaughterhouses, outright sadistic abuse is all too common as well. I think that in order to cruelly confine or slaughter animals, people have to become callous to some degree if they are to last in that type of environment. Even those who eat meat, I would think, do not knowingly wish to support cruel and inhumane treatment of animals. What can we do? Reduce or eliminate meat from our diet or refuse to eat meat produced from animals in factory farms. The other part of the equation is supporting humane legislation. Because they do not want to change the treatment of the animals in their so-called "care", big agricultural corporations are pressuring legislators to make it illegal to obtain these undercover videos. And unfortunately, their money is influencing lawmakers. I would urge each of you to oppose this type of legislation, otherwise, how will abusers ever be accountable?
It's never ending.
Very true. I became a vegetarian after reading about the treatment of animals raised for food, and I have adopted a mostly plant based diet after realizing that dairy cows and laying hens also mostly have a pretty shitty life. If i buy eggs, i buy local "free range" only
http://www.peacefulprairie.org/freerange1.html
Free-Range: While the USDA has defined the meaning of "free-range" for some poultry products, there are no standards in "free-range" egg production. Typically, free-range hens are uncaged inside barns or warehouses and have some degree of outdoor access, but there are no requirements for the amount, duration or quality of outdoor access. Since they are not caged, they can engage in many natural behaviors such as nesting and foraging. There are no restrictions regarding what the birds can be fed. Beak cutting and forced molting through starvation are permitted. There is no third-party auditing.
http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/con ... abels.html
True. that's why Its best to buy from local producers that you can actually visit and see that the hens actually live outside primarily. Or raise your own.
I figure these would be numero uno on the PETA shit list.
the video clip was sad as shit
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
"Hear me, my chiefs!
I am tired; my heart is
sick and sad. From where
the sun stands I will fight
no more forever."
Chief Joseph - Nez Perce
I hear you if i do it i have to give it all up ...i was a vegan for like two yrs when i was in my 20's but now it seems like i love meat more than ever ...
^^^This. I only buy my chicken, beef, veal, lamb from a local farmer where I can visit his farm and check out the conditions for myself. While I have reduced the amount of meat that I eat because of sustainability issues, I do not need to give it up entireley! SUpport LOCAL!
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE
btw - the harvest is upon us and there was some great stuff at the farmers market saturday ... got me some nice heirloom tomatoes, squashes and ground cherries (i know it's a hipster fruit but they are sooo tasty!)
In an email sent to its members this morning, Animals Australia campaign director Lyn White said the biggest cause of cruelty to animals today was factory farming.
Ms White, who exposed the cruel slaughtering of Australian cattle in Indonesia last year that triggered a five-week ban on the live cattle trade, predicted the campaign would "lift the lid" on a powerful industry that had thrived because nobody knew what they were up to.
"We know that factory faming only exists because their secrets are secured behind high walls and closed doors - and that an informed community would not knowingly support such cruelty," Ms White's email said this morning.
http://youtu.be/fM6V6lq_p0o
"ANIMALS Australia will tomorrow launch its biggest campaign yet aimed at bringing an end to the intensive "factory farming" of pigs and chickens."
if that happens the price of beef ,chicken,egg's,pork
products and maybe even leather clothing (shoes,coats etc.) will sky rocket in price
and the big hit will be resturants...especially the the small mom and pop shops.
this is not a good idea.
Godfather.