WITH THE RISE OF INDUSTRIAL ANIMAL AGRICULTURE, the contract between humans and livestock has been broken. Agriculture as a way of life and as a practice of animal husbandry has been replaced by agriculture as an industry, driven by the goals of efficiency and productivity. Among the most profound changes has been a major departure from traditional farming and its core values.
A young man was working for a company that operated a large, total-confinement swine farm. One day he detected symptoms of a disease among some of the feeder pigs. As a teen, he had raised pigs himself and shown them in competition, so he knew how to treat the disease. But the company’s policy was to kill any diseased animals with a blow to the head—the profit margin was considered too low to allow for treatment of individual animals. So the employee decided to come in on his own time, with his own medicine, and cured the animals. The management’s response was to attempt to fire him on the spot for violating company policy. Soon the young man left agriculture for good: he was weary of the conflict between what he was told to do and how he believed he should be treating the animals.
Consider a sow that is being used to breed pigs for food. The overwhelming majority of today’s swine are raised in severe confinement. If the “farmer” follows the recommendations of the National Pork Producers, the sow will spend virtually all of her productive life (until she is killed) in a gestation crate 2½ feet wide (sometimes only 2 feet) by 7 feet long by 3 feet high. This concrete and barred cage is often too small for the 500- to 600-pound animal, which cannot lie down or turn around. Feet that are designed for soft loam are forced to carry hundreds of pounds of weight on slotted concrete. This causes severe foot and leg problems. Unable to perform any of her natural behaviors, the sow goes mad and exhibits compulsive, neurotic “stereotypical” behaviors such as bar biting and purposeless chewing. When she is ready to birth her piglets, she is moved into a farrowing crate that has a creep rail so that the piglets can crawl under it and avoid being crushed by the confined sow, whose maternal instinct has been lost through breeding for productivity.
Under more natural conditions, pigs reveal that they are highly intelligent and behaviorally complex animals. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh created a “pig park” that approximates the habitat of wild swine. Domestic pigs, usually raised in confinement, were let loose in this facility and their behavior observed. In this environment, the sows covered almost a mile a day in foraging, and, in keeping with their reputation as clean animals, they built carefully constructed nests on a hillside so that urine and feces ran downhill. They took turns minding each other’s piglets so that each sow could forage. All of this natural behavior is inexpressible in confinement.
Factory farming, or confinement-based industrialized agriculture, has been an established feature in North America and Europe since its introduction at the end of World War II, when agricultural scientists were concerned about supplying Americans with sufficient food. After the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, many people had left farming. Cities and suburbs were beginning to encroach on agricultural lands, and scientists saw that the amount of land available for food production would soon diminish significantly. Farmers who had left their farms for foreign countries and urban centers during the war were reluctant to go back. “How ’ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” a post-World War I song asked. Having experienced the specter of starvation during the Great Depression, the American consumer was afraid that there would not be enough food.
At the same time, a variety of technologies relevant to agriculture were emerging, and American society began to accept the idea of technologically based economies of scale. In a major departure from traditional agriculture and its core values, animal agriculture began to industrialize. Agriculture as a way of life and as a practice of husbandry were replaced by agriculture as an industry with values of efficiency and productivity. Thus the problems we see in confinement agriculture are not the result of cruelty or insensitivity, but rather the unanticipated by-product of changes in the nature of agriculture.
In the first place, the basic approach of confinement agriculture entails raising vast numbers of animals, limiting the space needed to raise these animals, moving them indoors into “controlled environments,” and replacing labor with capital—that is, replacing humans with mechanized systems. One can tell a priori that confinement agriculture is inimical to animal husbandry, for husbandry requires naturalistic environments, relatively few animals, extensive production, and good shepherds.
Confinement agriculture is responsible for generating animal suffering on at least three fronts that are not a significant part of husbandry agriculture:
1. Production diseases. Veterinarians acknowledge the existence of so-called production diseases—that is, diseases that would not be a problem or that, at worst, would be a minor problem if animals were raised traditionally. One example is liver abscesses in feedlot cattle. In confinement agriculture, beef cattle are typically raised on pastures and finished by being fed grain in feedlots, where a large number of animals are crowded into relatively small spaces for the last few months of their lives. That much grain is not a natural diet for cattle—it is too high in concentrate (calories) and too low in roughage. Although a certain percentage of feedlot cattle get sick and may die, the overall economic efficiency of feedlots is maximized by the provision of such a diet. The idea of using a method of production that creates diseases that are “acceptable” would be anathema to a husbandry agriculturalist.
Indeed, the issue of diet in confinement operations is related to other health problems as well. In husbandry agriculture, animals eat natural forage. In industrialized agriculture, the quest for “efficiency” has led to feeding cattle poultry waste, newspaper, cement dust, and, most egregiously, bone or meat meal, which is something herbivores would not normally eat. Mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE) arose as a health problem because cattle were fed animal proteins from infected cows or sheep (a practice now prohibited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Ruminant Feed Ban).
2. Lack of individual husbandry. The huge scale of industrialized agriculture operations—and the small profit margin per animal—militates against the sort of individual attention that typified much of traditional agriculture. In traditional dairies fifty years ago, one could make a living with a herd of 50 cows. Today, one needs literally thousands. In parts of the United States, dairies may have 15,000 cows. People run sow operations with thousands of pigs that employ only a handful of unskilled workers. A case that speaks to this point was sent to me by a veterinarian for commentary in the column that I write for the Canadian Veterinary Journal:
You (as a veterinarian) are called to a 5,000-sow farrow-to-finish swine operation to examine a problem with vaginal discharge in sows. There are three full-time employees and one manager overseeing approximately 5,000 animals. As you examine several sows in the created gestation unit, you notice one with a hind leg at an unusual angle and inquire about her status. You are told, “She broke her leg yesterday and she’s due to farrow next week. We’ll let her farrow in here and then we’ll shoot her and foster her pigs.” Is it ethically correct to leave the sow with a broken leg for one week while you await her farrowing?
Before commenting on this case, I spoke to the veterinarian who had experienced this incident, a swine practitioner. He explained that such operations run on tiny profit margins and minimal labor. Thus, even when he offered to splint the leg at no cost, he was told that the operation could not afford the manpower entailed by separating this sow and caring for her! At this point, he said, he realized that confinement agriculture had gone too far. He had been brought up on a family hog farm where the animals had names and were provided individual husbandry, and the injured animal would have been treated or, if not, euthanized immediately. “If it is not feasible to do this in a confinement operation,” he said, “there is something wrong with confinement operations!”
3. Physical and psychological deprivation. Another new source of suffering in industrialized agriculture is the physical and psychological deprivation experienced by animals in confinement: lack of space, lack of companionship for social animals, inability to move freely, boredom, austerity of environment, and so on. Since animals evolved for adaptation to extensive environments are now placed in truncated environments, such deprivation is inevitable. This was not a problem in traditional extensive agriculture.
From a public point of view, the unnatural confinement of animals is the most noticeable difference between traditional animal husbandry and modern industrial agriculture. Paul Thompson, a professor of ethics at Michigan State, has pointed out that the average American still sees farms as Old MacDonald’s farm. Cows, in the public mind, should be grazing in pastures, lambs gamboling in fields, pigs happily cooling themselves in a mud wallow. As one of my colleagues put it, “The worst thing that ever happened to my department is betokened by the name change from Animal Husbandry to Animal Science.” The practice of husbandry is the key loss in the shift from traditional to industrialized agriculture.
Farmers once put animals into an environment that the animals were biologically suited for and then augmented their natural ability to survive and thrive by providing protection from predators, food during famine, water during drought, help in birthing, protection from weather extremes, and the like. Any harm or suffering inflicted on the animal resulted in harm to the producer. An animal experiencing stress or pain, for example, is not as productive or as reproductively successful as a happy animal. Thus proper care and treatment of animals becomes both an ethical and a prudential requirement. The producer does well if and only if the animal does well. The result is good animal husbandry: a fair and mutually beneficial contract between humans and animals, with each better off because of the relationship.
In husbandry agriculture, individual animal productivity is a good indicator of animal well-being; in industrial agriculture, the link between productivity and well-being has been severed. When productivity as an economic metric is applied to the whole operation, the welfare of the individual animal is ignored. Husbandry agriculture “put square pegs in square holes and round pegs in round holes,” extending individualized care to create as little friction as possible. Industrial agriculture, on the other hand, forces square pegs into round holes by use of “technological sanders”—antibiotics (which keep down disease that would otherwise spread like wildfire in close surroundings), vaccines, bacterins, hormones, air-handling systems, and the rest of the armamentarium used to keep the animals from dying. Furthermore, when crowding creates unnatural conditions and elicits unnatural behaviors such as tail biting in pigs or acts of cannibalism in poultry, the solution is to cut off the tail of the pig (without anesthetics) or to debeak the chicken, which can cause lifelong pain.
A few years ago, while visiting with some Colorado ranchers, I observed the ethic of animal husbandry in action, in a situation that contrasted sharply with the killing of sick pigs described at the beginning of this essay. That year, the ranchers had seen many of their calves afflicted with scours, a diarrheal disease. Every rancher I met had spent more money on treating the disease than was economically justified by the calves’ market value. When I asked these men why they were being “economically irrational,” they were adamant in their responses: “It’s part of my bargain with the animal.” “It’s part of caring for them.” This same ethical outlook leads ranchers to sit up all night with sick, marginal calves, sometimes for days in a row. If they were strictly guided by economics, these people would hardly be valuing their time at fifty cents per hour—including their sleep time. Yet industrialized animal production thrives while western cattle ranchers, the last large group of practitioners of husbandry agriculture, are an endangered species.
Unlike industrialized animal agriculture, husbandry agriculture is by its very nature sustainable. When pigs (or cattle) are raised on pasture, manure becomes a benefit, since it fertilizes pasture, and pasture is of value in providing forage for animals. In industrial animal agriculture, there is little reason to maintain pasture. Instead, farmers till for grain production, thereby encouraging increased soil erosion. At the same time, manure becomes a problem, both in terms of disposal and because it leaches into the water table. Similarly, air quality in and around confinement operations is often a threat to both workers and animals, and animal odors drive down real property values for miles around these operations.
Another morally questionable aspect of confinement agriculture is the destruction of small farms and local communities. Because of industrialization and economy of scale, small husbandry-based producers cannot compete with animal factories. In the broiler industry, farmers who wish to survive become serfs to large operators because they cannot compete on their own. In large confinement swine operations, where the system rather than the labor force is primary, migratory or immigrant workers are hired because they are cheap, not because they possess knowledge of or concern for the animals. And those raised in a culture of husbandry, as our earlier stories revealed, find it intolerable to work in the industrialized operations.
The power of confinement agriculture to pollute the Earth, degrade community, and destroy small, independent farmers should convince us that this type of agriculture is incompatible with common decency. Furthermore, we should fear domination of the food supply by these corporate entities. As to the oft repeated claim that industrial animal agriculture provides cheap food, this food is only cheap at the cash register—significant costs such as cleaning up pollution and increased health care costs in CAFO areas are “externalized”—that is, passed on to the public as taxes.
It is not necessary to raise animals this way, as history reminds us. In 1988, Sweden banned high-confinement agriculture; Britain and the EU have banned sow confinement. If food is destined to cost more, so be it—Americans now spend an average of only 11 percent of their income on food, whereas at the turn of the century they spent more than 50 percent, and Europeans now spend 20 percent. We are wrong to ignore the hidden costs paid by animal welfare, food safety, the environment, rural communities, and independent farmers, and we must now add those costs to the price of our food.
Some years ago Tim Blackwell, the chief swine veterinarian for Ontario, invited me to give the keynote speech on ethics and animal welfare to the swine producers of Ontario. Though I had by then given over three hundred lectures to all kinds of audiences, I had never spoken to pig producers. The group I was about to address had converted to high-confinement, highly intensive, highly capitalized, and highly industrialized production methods that had replaced animal husbandry with industry, and traditional agricultural values with an emphasis on efficiency and productivity.
I began in my usual fashion, with a few jokes, a few anecdotes. People laughed in the right places. So far so good. I continued as planned, discussing the differences between social ethics, personal ethics, and professional ethics. Ultimately, I spoke of the ethical problems that stemmed from the supplanting of an agriculture of husbandry—the practice of reciprocity and symbiosis between animals and people—by an exploitative agriculture in which animals do not benefit from being domesticated by humans.
When finally my speech ended, at first there was no applause. Oh-oh, I thought. Silence—my perennial nightmare. But then the applause began, and grew. I still could not see their faces, but Tim moved toward me, grabbing my hand. “You’ve done it, you son of a bitch, you’ve done it.”
“Done what?” I asked.
“Touched their hearts! Can’t you see the tears in their eyes?” Stupidly, I replaced my glasses and saw that he was right. Suddenly, one man climbed atop a picnic table and began to speak. “This was it!” he shouted. “This was the straw that broke the camel’s back! I’ve been feeling lousy for fifteen years about how I raise these animals and so—in front of my peers, so I can’t back out later—I’m pledging to tear down my confinement barn and build a barn I don’t have to be ashamed of! I’m a good enough husbandman that I can do it right, make a living, and be able to look myself in the mirror!” This was Dave Linton, a leading hog farmer in the area. Tim whispered to me, “If Linton says it, he means it!”
A year and a half went by. Periodically I received progress reports from Tim, until eventually he took me to visit the new barn in person. With eyes dancing, Dave and his wife spoke of the new barn while serving us what is arguably the best strawberry-rhubarb pie in the universe. Finally, his wife said, “Enough talk, Dave—let the man see for himself.”
We walked to the barn and opened the door. We went in. Mirabile dictu! There was sunshine! “The roof is hydraulic,” Dave explained. “On nice days, we retract it so the animals are, in essence, outdoors. And look! No stalls, no crates!” Indeed, in place of the crates were huge pens, lavishly supplied with straw, with fifteen or so animals to each pen. The sows lay around on beds of straw, chewing it as a cowboy chews tobacco. “They look . . . they look . . .” I groped for words. “Non-neurotic. Happy! That’s it! Happy!”
Tim said, “I’ve been a pig vet for twenty years, and this is the first time I’ve seen sows smile.”
“And,” I marveled, “the air is sweet; at least as sweet as it could be!”
The three of us shook hands. Linton was effusive. “I’m a religious man,” he said, “and God has already paid me back for doing the right thing!”
“How so?” I asked.
“It’s my boy,” he said. “My son.” He went on to explain, “When we had the old barn, my son dropped out of school and did nothing but play video games. I couldn’t interest him in the business or even get him to set foot in the barn. Since I built this one, I can’t get him out!”
The key point is that there are alternatives to sow stalls. After all, we raised pigs for thousands of years without stalls! In fact, Tim Blackwell and I recently made a film entitled Alternative Housing for Gestating Sows. In it we portray a number of different loose-housing (i.e., noncrate) pen systems. What was notable was our discovery that not only do these systems work, but they also cost half as much to build as full-confinement systems, giving the producers a clear financial benefit.
Regardless of economic indicators, Dave Linton’s story reminds us that it is a radical mistake to treat animals merely as products, as objects with no intrinsic value. A demand for agriculture that practices the ancient and fair contract with domestic animals is not revolutionary but conservative. As Mahatma Gandhi said, a society must ultimately be morally judged by how it treats its weakest members. No members are more vulnerable and dependent than our society’s domestic animals.