7
Hell on Earth
“Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.”
—Bradley Millar
The chickens, pigs, cows, and sheep of my youth appeared to have a pretty nice life—at least up until the last day of it. What happened to that picture? In short, the raising of those animals for our dinner tables has become a very big business.
In a free market system, all businesses exert a constant push to increase sales, lower costs, gain market share, and make more money. While millions of small farms around the country once provided local markets with meat and dairy products, now just a handful of gigantic corporations control our food supply. Those companies do not regard the animals we eat as living and breathing beings—they are units of production. They are raised in strict uniformity to produce the largest animal in the shortest amount of time. They are housed in an environment that has become known as the factory farm, technically called a contained animal feeding operation (CAFO). Many people have heard about them, but only a tiny percentage of the population has seen the inside of one. That’s exactly how the industry would like to keep it. As Paul McCartney has commented, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.”
Books and magazine articles have been written about the horrors of the modern-day factory farm, specials have aired on television, and videos are available on the internet. We all know vaguely what is going on, but most of us don’t wish to think about it. We’d prefer to keep rationalizing that we “need that protein,” and the more committed of us try to buy free-range chicken, grass-fed beef, or wild fish. At the same time, we find the Michael Vick dog-fighting saga utterly despicable. So do we really care about animals or not? Jonathan Foer describes our somewhat odd situation very well in Eating Animals: “When surveyed, 96 percent of Americans say that animals deserve legal protection, 76 percent say that animal welfare is more important to them than low meat prices, and nearly two-thirds advocate passing not only laws but ‘strict laws’ concerning the treatment of farmed animals. You’d be hard-pressed to find any other issue on which so many people see eye to eye.”[203]
Part of the reason many people turn a blind eye is that they are not fully aware how animals raised for food actually live. We imagine in our mind’s eye a rural idyll out of a Currier and Ives print. The reality is quite different. David Kirby in Animal Factory points out the contrast: “Structures that house poultry and livestock are sometimes called parlors or barns—though they bear no resemblance to the quaint red structures with haylofts that are so iconic to American country life. CAFO houses are usually massive, hangarlike structures made of concrete and aluminum or heavy canvas. In some megadairies, they are a quarter-mile long.”[204]
Occasionally, a newspaper will feature one of these operations, usually after what has become a recurring problem in our food supply: infection spread from animals to humans. Recently, after 1,500 cases of salmonella poisoning were reported, one of the most notorious factory farms in the United States had to recall a half billion eggs. “Barns infested with flies, maggots and scurrying rodents, and overflowing manure pits were among the widespread food safety problems that federal inspectors found at a group of Iowa egg farms at the heart of a nationwide recall and salmonella outbreak,” reported the New York Times in August 2010. Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for food for the FDA, declared that “in response to the outbreak and recall, F.D.A. inspectors would visit all of the 600 major egg-producing facilities in the country over the next 15 months. Those farms, with 50,000 or more hens each, represent about 80 percent of nationwide egg production.”[205]
Many other incidents of a similar nature have occurred, but rather than dwell on yesterday’s headlines, this chapter focuses on the animals that are the hosts of such diseases. John Robbins devoted entire chapters to each of these animals in his best-selling book Diet for a New America in 1987. Unfortunately, even though the big food producers would disagree, things have become worse for the animals since then. Why? In 1987, there were thousands of small farms producing a good portion of the meat, milk, and eggs in the United States and other Western countries. Today, only an estimated 1 percent of our animal-based foods are produced on farms where the farmer-owners still care about the quality of life for the animals involved. Let’s take a look at how our eggs, chicken, hamburgers, sausage, and shrimp are produced.
Chicken Feed
Sometimes as little children, we would get baby chickens in our Easter baskets. There is probably not a cuter, move loveable animal in the world than a baby chick. They strut around full of life, chirping, and simply enjoying their new world outside the egg. But whether female or male, over 99 percent of the newborn chicks of today are in for a life of misery followed by a horrible death.
Best-selling author and journalist Michael Pollan describes the lives of the female chickens in egg factories: “It is routine practice to cram laying hens into cages so small that the birds are sometimes driven to cannibalize their cagemates. The solution to this ‘vice’—as the industry and the Department of Agriculture call such counterproductive behaviors in livestock (talk about blaming the victims!)—is to snip the beaks off the hens with hot knives, without the use of anesthetic.”[206]
Although European authorities have taken more vigorous action to enforce anticruelty standards, Jane Goodall describes a similarly Dickensian picture in England:
Much of our poultry is raised in “battery farms,” buildings in which hundreds of cages are stacked one on top of the other. In battery farms with laying hens, a single shed may contain up to 70,000 caged birds. The hens are crammed four or even six together, into small wire cages, so close they cannot stretch their wings. Because they then tend to peck one another, their beaks are often “trimmed” in a painful de-beaking process. And because their claws frequently get caught in the wire mesh on the floor of their cages, they are sometimes trimmed by cutting off the end of the toes so that they cannot grow again.[207]
John Robbins offers a human analogy of the misery: “[P]icture yourself standing in a crowded elevator. The elevator is so crowded, in fact, that your body is in contact on all sides with other bodies. Even to turn around in place would be difficult. And one more thing to keep in mind—this is your life. It is not just a temporary bother, until you get to your floor. This is permanent. Your only release will be at the hands of the executioner.”[208]
In addition to these deplorable conditions, the laying hen must also endure food and light deprivation—a modern technique for generating more eggs per bird. “Factory farms commonly manipulate food and light to increase productivity, often at the expense of the animals’ welfare. Egg farmers do this to reboot birds’ internal clocks so they start laying valuable eggs faster and, crucially, at the same time.”[209] As one farmer explains in Eating Animals, common practice is to keep the hens in darkness for a while on almost a starvation diet and then turn on the lights almost full time to trick them into thinking it’s springtime, when their internal clock tells them it’s time to start laying again.[210]
MOVEABLE FEASTS
The suffering of animals does not end at the factory farm. Those animals that must be transported to slaughterhouses are subjected to a new form of compacting. The Humane Society of the United States reveals this part of the sad cycle: “Billions of farm animals endure the rigors of transport each year in the United States, with millions of pigs, cows, and ‘spent’ egg-laying hens traveling across the country. Overcrowded onto trucks that do not provide any protection from temperature extremes, animals travel long distances without food, water, or rest. The conditions are so stressful that in-transit death is considered common.”[211] As awful as the procedures on egg-laying factory farms are, chickens raised for human consumption face in some ways a worse fate. The first problem is how they are force-fed. The Humane Society of the United States has reported: “The chicken industry’s selective breeding for fast-growing animals and use of growth-promoting antibiotics have produced birds whose bodies struggle to function and are on the verge of structural collapse. To put this growth rate into perspective, the University of Arkansas reports that if humans grew as fast as today’s chickens, we’d weigh 349 pounds by our second birthday.”[212]
If you think the females in an egg factory have it bad, consider what happens to their brothers. Since they are not genetically designed to produce meat and obviously wouldn’t be able to cut it as a laying hen, they are simply destroyed. How many? Half of all the baby chicks born in egg factories each year—more than 250 million—are male, and that’s just in the United States.[213] How are they destroyed? “Most male layers are destroyed by being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified plate. Other layer chicks are destroyed in other ways, and it’s impossible to call those animals more or less fortunate. Some are tossed into large plastic containers. The weak are trampled to the bottom, where they suffocate slowly. The strong suffocate slowly at the top. Others are sent fully conscious through macerators (picture a wood chipper filled with chicks).”[214] All of this torture takes place at the hands of humans without the slightest acknowledgment that these are living, sentient beings.
As for the broiler chickens, when they are overstuffed enough, they endure an equally miserable end. “At the slaughter plant, birds are moved off trucks, dumped from transport crates onto conveyors, and hung upside down by their legs in shackles. Their heads pass through electrified baths of water, intended to immobilize them before their throats are slit. From beginning to end, the entire process is filled with pain and suffering.”[215]
The New York Times reported recently that several of the major producers of chickens destined for our white supermarket bins have invented a more humane treatment: “Two premium chicken producers, Bell & Evans in Pennsylvania and Mary’s Chickens in California, are preparing to switch to a system of killing their birds that they consider more humane. The new system uses carbon dioxide gas to gently render the birds unconscious before they are hung by their feet to have their throats slit.”[216] Perhaps it is an improvement, but it raises an interesting question: in what sort of world is the gas chamber a step up?
Happy Meals for the Kids
Even more so than “mom and apple pie,” these days the best short descriptor of the American way of life is “burger and fries.” From the time a child is old enough to talk, she is old enough for her first hamburger. And she may actually grow up thinking that hamburgers are one of the four major food groups—the others being chicken nuggets, grilled cheese, and fish and chips. (Anyone wondering why millions of kids are obese these days?) So let’s take a look at a day or two in the miserable life of a baby hamburger.
Some people who have been there report that life is better (ever so slightly) for cows than for the animals in the pig and chicken CAFOs of the world. Don’t try telling that to the newborn male calf. Shortly after being separated from his mother and her milk for life, he is castrated. According to an article on TheBeefSite.com, castration is recommended to reduce meat toughness and minimize aggressive behavior in the animals. The suggested age is shortly after birth.[217] Keep in mind that a baby calf, unlike a human newborn, is walking around and very much aware of his surroundings just hours after birth. Castration without the use of an anesthetic is an almost universal practice, even in the most humane of cattle farms. After that introduction to the world, do you think that calf would be surprised to know that he will someday become a Happy Meal?
While not quite as cramped and uncomfortable as the laying hen, the average beef cow spends his life in miserable confinement until he reaches the ripe old age of eighteen months, when he is ready for slaughter. Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation supplies some of the particulars:
The ConAgra Beef Company runs the nation’s biggest meatpacking complex . . . To supply the beef slaughterhouse, ConAgra operates a pair of enormous feedlots. Each of them can hold up to one hundred thousand head of cattle. At times the animals are crowded so closely together it looks like a sea of cattle, a mooing, moving mass of brown and white fur that goes on for acres. These cattle don’t eat blue grama and buffalo grass off the prairie. During the three months before slaughter, they eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs that resemble highway dividers. The grain fattens the cattle quickly, aided by the anabolic steroids implanted in their ear.[218]
The slaughter is a process that is closely shielded by the industry. As Michael Pollan describes, “[S]laughter [is the] one event in [my personally owned cow’s] life I was not allowed to witness or even learn anything about, save its likely date. This didn’t exactly surprise me: The meat industry understands that the more people know about what happens on the kill floor, the less meat they’re likely to eat.”[219] Jonathan Foer discovered the same guarded practices while spending three years researching for Eating Animals. “I couldn’t get near the inside of a large slaughter facility,” he reports. “Just about the only way for someone outside the industry to see industrial cattle slaughter is to go undercover, and that is not only a project that takes half a year or more, it can be life-threatening work.”[220]
Even though the industry would prefer that no one ever see the inside of a slaughterhouse, occasionally it happens. Somehow, back in 2000, the San Francisco–based Humane Farming Association managed to get some very revealing videotape on television. Aired first by an NBC affiliate in Seattle and in 2001 by Dateline NBC, the videos were difficult to watch, but they accurately portrayed what was going on behind the scenes. “The tapes showed struggling cows hoisted upside down and butchered while still alive. Fully conscious cows were shown being skinned alive, their legs cut off while struggling for freedom. Cows were shown being hit repeatedly with stunning devices that didn’t work. Other cows were tormented and repeatedly shocked with electric prods. And workers were shown shoving an electric prod into a cow’s mouth.”[221]
Such graphic scenes couldn’t be further from the American myth of the cowboy herding cattle on the plains. They are a sad statement that modern practices are hardly better than the atrocities Upton Sinclair reported about the Chicago stockyards in The Jungle, written over a hundred years ago. Those big dumb beasts chewing their cud deserve a more peaceful fate than becoming tomorrow night’s rib-eye steak.
Sausage on Your Pizza?
You’ve probably heard many people comment about not wanting to know all the ingredients that go into sausage. Well, you also don’t want to know about the suffering of today’s pigs during their part of the sausage-making process.
It should be pointed out first that pigs are fairly evolved animals, judged by scientists to have the intelligence of a three-year-old child. They are a much cleaner and more refined animal than their reputation would suggest. As John Robbins reports, “Pigs are highly social and active creatures, who will in a natural setting travel 30 miles a day grazing, rooting, and interacting with their environment. In the evening, groups of pigs will prepare a communal nest from branches and grass, in which they will spend the night together.”[222] It was not by accident that George Orwell chose pigs to run the uprising in his famous novel Animal Farm.
The pig’s life as a future pizza topping is not nearly as pleasant. David Kirby in Animal Factory describes their depressing life cycle:
[B]aby pigs are delivered from (usually) artificially inseminated sows that live much of their cramped lives in small “gestation crates” that afford them no room to stand up or turn around . . . After castration, the young boars are called barrows. These animals will never go outside, breathe fresh air, or feel natural sunlight. They will not get a chance to grub in dirt or wallow in mud, as pigs are meant to do . . . By the time the animals near market size, they are so large that they have to be packed into their small indoor pens. There is little room for them to move around. This often results in higher incidences of infectious diseases, bloody fights, and highly stressed animals with weakened immune systems. At about five months of age, the hogs are dispatched to the slaughterhouse.[223]
Jeff Tietz provides in his 2006 Rolling Stone article another vivid picture of a factory pig’s confinement: “Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth.”[224] He goes on to discuss the multitude of health hazards that pigs face while they are being fattened up for slaughter:
Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds—oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin—diseases would likely kill them.[225]
Shockingly, these barbaric practices are only the prelude to an ending that might make anybody swear off ever eating a holiday ham again. David Kirby followed these poor creatures all the way to their untimely demise. “In the slaughterhouse,” he writes, “the assembly-line nature of CAFOs was made more vivid. Live pigs were shoved onto sharp hooks and dangled from an elevated conveyor belt. Workers shot them in the head with a bolt bullet and then, after they died, sliced open their bellies in a rush of blood and entrails. The living pigs waiting on hooks witnessed all of this.”[226]
Catch of the Day
Many so-called vegetarians eat fish, at least once in a while. While the suffering of “real animals,” with legs and lungs like we have, is better known, we don’t hear a great deal about the suffering that humans have inflicted on the creatures with fins and gills. This takes place in two major areas: open-sea fishing and fish farms. It turns out that Charlie the Tuna is not quite as happy as StarKist wants us to believe.
Out on the open sea, the problems of overfishing have been known for a long time. The most famous example is the collapse of Atlantic cod fishing off the Grand Banks, but there are numerous other examples, such as the crash of anchovy fisheries off Peru or the near extinction of sole in the seas around Great Britain. China has now resorted to a total ban on fishing in the South China Sea for part of the year. As the world moves more toward eating fish as a substitute for meat, the problem has only grown worse.
An insidious by-product of ocean fishing is all the fish that are caught by accident, called bycatch. Bycatch is defined as sea creatures that are caught unintentionally while fishing for another species. The highest rates of bycatch are associated with shrimp trawlers. For every pound of shrimp that you find on that nicely arranged platter, roughly twenty-six pounds of other sea creatures were killed and thrown back into the ocean. Although it accounts for only 2 percent of the global seafood by weight, shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of the world’s bycatch. As Jonathan Foer explains, “Trawling, almost always for shrimp, is the marine equivalent of clear-cutting rain forest. Whatever they target, trawlers sweep up fish, sharks, rays, crabs, squid, scallops—typically about a hundred different fish and other species. Virtually all die.”[227]
Another method of catching healthy wild fish is to use the longline, a heavy fishing line that can be miles long and has many hooks at intervals. One study mentioned in Eating Animals found that “roughly 4.5 million sea animals are killed as bycatch in longline fishing every year, including roughly 3.3 million sharks, 1 million marlins, 60,000 sea turtles, 75,000 albatross, and 20,000 dolphins and whales.”[228]
The drastic decline in world fisheries has led to the practice of fish farming. While this practice does save some fish out in the open ocean, fish farms create severe environmental problems. One problem is all the wild fish that are consumed by farmed species like shrimp, salmon, trout, bass, and yellowtail tuna. The ratio for salmon, the most common farmed fish, is three pounds of eaten fish to every pound of salmon. This ratio reaches as high as five pounds of wild ocean fish to produce a single pound of other farmed fish.[229]
The most prominent of the hazards is the waste the fish emit within their confined area offshore. Barry Estabrook comments in the Atlantic, “A salmon farm is nothing more than a vast, floating feedlot, except feedlots, at least nominally, have to dispose of food waste, dead animals, and excrement in suitable containment areas. Salmon feedlots flush it all into the sea.”[230] According to an article in Time, this has led to serious contamination of coastal areas from Maine to Chile to Thailand, where “[l]ong strips of coastline south of Bangkok now look like powdery gray moonscapes.”[231]
The fish being farmed face equally grave hazards. John Robbins reports, “Fish farming is one of the most intensive forms of animal agriculture. As many as 40,000 fish may be crammed into a cage, with each fish given the equivalent of half a bathtub of water in which to spend its life . . . In 1990, only 6 percent of the salmon consumed in the world were the product of fish farms. But by 1998, the number had risen to 40 percent.”[232] Not surprisingly, conditions for the fish in fish farms aren’t too different from the disgusting conditions experienced by their land-based counterparts. Foer also cites several of the atrocities that farmed fish must endure, including “water so fouled that it makes it hard to breathe [and] crowding so intense that animals begin to cannibalize one another.”[233]
A Moral Dilemma for the Ages
Although the manner of killing animals for food has only lately reached its chilling industrial efficiency, some great thinkers have been talking about the need to end the practice of eating animals for centuries. Leonardo da Vinci spoke out about animals over 500 years ago, saying, “The time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.” Another highly respected citizen of his time, Thomas Alva Edison, also addressed our uncivilized treatment of animals. He said, “Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”
Like many of those great thinkers of history, the vast majority of people today despise the mistreatment of animals. Yet we have turned a blind eye to the modern methods of putting food on our plates. Fortunately, the awareness continues to grow as these atrocities are revealed by mainstream authors and reporters. The following is from an article by Maggie Jones that appeared in 2008 in the New York Times Magazine.
It was an animal rights advocate’s dream: Pacelle and his organization had shuttered this $100 million plant, the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company, with the help of an undercover investigator wearing a hidden video camera with a lens the size of the tip of a pen. Over six weeks last year, the investigator—a vegan who brought soy-riblet sandwiches for lunch—filmed workers using chains to drag cows too sick or too injured to stand. The workers jabbed cows with electrical prods and rolled them with a forklift to get them onto their feet and into the slaughter chute. In addition to being excessively cruel, it was a risk to human health: cows too sick or injured to walk are more vulnerable to E. coli, mad cow and other diseases.[234]
Michael Pollan addresses similar issues for other animals: “Mutilating pigs and chickens while they are alive is as routine in modern American agriculture as bacon and eggs for breakfast. These operations are performed every day on thousands of factory farms that are owned by, or under contract to, Fortune 500 corporations that supply hundreds of thousands of restaurants and supermarkets.” He says of animal suffering in general, “The lives of billions of animals on American feedlots and factory farms are horrible to contemplate, an affront to our image of ourselves as humane . . . To peer over the increasingly high walls of our industrial animal agriculture is not only to lose your appetite but to feel revulsion and shame.”[235] Jonathan Foer poses the really hard question that all of us must eventually answer: “Whether we’re talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that’s not the question. Is it more important than sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That’s the question.”[236]
If my father had written this book back when I was a child, he would not have included a chapter about the suffering of animals. Why not? Because in those days, farm animals just didn’t suffer as much—certainly not when compared to the horrible level of suffering that pervades over 95 percent of the industry today. They lived a pretty good life and, in most cases, were truly loved and respected by their owners. The farmer of old knew that his animals needed to remain happy and healthy for him to be able to make a living—they were partners, in a sense.
But now the CAFOs of the world are raising some 60 billion animals (not counting fish) a year for our dinner tables. We now know that all those billions of animals are suffering constantly—every minute that they are alive—and their numbers continue to grow. While demand has leveled off in many of the OECD countries, the animal-based Western diet is just now beginning to explode in developing countries such as China and India. The potential future numbers are staggering. Says Foer, “If the world followed America’s lead, it would consume over 165 billion chickens annually (even if the world population didn’t increase).”[237] Do we really want to kill three times as many animals as we are killing now?
We know from surveys that over 95 percent of the people in the U.S. care about the treatment of animals. Yet we continue to support the atrocities taking place with every dollar we spend on animal-based foods. The horrors are out of sight and out of mind. There are now almost 7 billion humans on Earth, but there are nine times as many living, breathing animals that spend their entire lives each year in a hell on Earth for one reason only—so that we can enjoy the pleasure of eating their flesh. By simply voting with our food choices, we can end that hell once and for all.
The prospect of ending the worldwide suffering of animals raised for our dinner tables is an excellent reason to begin an aggressive shift to a plant-based diet. And as awareness grows, the issue will resonate with hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. But if this isn’t enough reason, remember the other four compelling reasons to make the switch: human health and the unsustainable cost of health-care, the fragile environment, the looming energy crisis, and world hunger. We must take decisive steps before we leave Mother Nature no other choice but to do it herself.
“I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden