THE REAL FACE OF INDUSTRIAL ANIMAL BREEDING
So what is so shameful that it must be hidden behind the walls of slaughterhouses and in the hangars where industrial breeding takes place? What we have to reveal in this chapter is shocking. Should we provide a warning, saying that sensitive people should read no further? You might be tempted to pass over the following pages and move on to the next chapter. But if we wish to be concerned for the fate of others and, to the extent possible, take action to alleviate their suffering, don’t we at least have to see animal breeding as it is? History has shown that looking in the other direction has always left the way open for the worst atrocities and has delayed taking measures for putting an end to them. What is the point of looking at reality with rose-colored glasses? Isn’t it better to look at it and let seeing it clearly become the grounds for the courage of our compassion?1
Let us listen to the words of the great primatologist, Jane Goodall:
What shocks me the most is that people seem to become almost schizophrenic the moment you bring up the terrible conditions that prevail in intensive breeding operations, the cruel heaping up of sentient beings in tiny spaces—conditions so horrible that you have to constantly give them antibiotics to keep them alive, otherwise they’ll just let themselves die. I often describe the nightmare of transport. If they fall during transport, they are yanked up by one leg, which breaks. And the slaughterhouses, where so many of the animals are not even rendered unconscious before being skinned alive or plunged into boiling water. It’s obviously excruciatingly painful. When I start talking to people about all that, they often reply: “Oh please, don’t talk to me about that. I’m too sensitive and I adore animals.” And I say to myself, “Has this person lost it altogether?”2
Some people will say, “Yes, it’s horrible, but they’ve made those places much more humane.” Humane? When human beings treat their fellows like that, we do not speak of humanity but of inhumanity and barbarism. Some of the descriptions that follow—particularly those by Upton Sinclair, who was the first to describe the fate of the animals in the Chicago stockyards in his novel The Jungle—go back a century. Others are contemporary and show how, a few minor improvements aside, the mass killing continues and increases and gets worse every day, every year—whether we look the other way or not. So for once, let’s not look away:
Along one side of the room ran a narrow gallery, a few feet from the floor; into which gallery the cattle were driven by men with goads which gave them electric shocks. Once crowded in here, the creatures were prisoned, each in a separate pen, by gates that shut, leaving them no room to turn around; and while they stood bellowing and plunging, over the top of the pen there leaned one of the “knockers,” armed with a sledge hammer, and watching for a chance to deal a blow. The room echoed with the thuds in quick succession, and the stamping and kicking of the steers. The instant the animal had fallen, the “knocker” passed on to another; while a second man raised a lever, and the side of the pen was raised, and the animal, still kicking and struggling, slid out to the “killing bed.” Here a man put shackles about one leg, and pressed another lever, and the body was jerked up into the air. . . . The manner in which they did this was something to be seen and never forgotten . . . . First there came the “butcher,” to bleed them; this meant one swift stroke, so swift that you could not see it—only the flash of the knife; and before you could realize it, the man had darted on to the next line, and a stream of bright red was pouring out upon the floor. This floor was half an inch deep with blood, in spite of the best efforts of men who kept shoveling it through holes. . . .3
In 1906 when The Jungle appeared, it caused quite an uproar. But since then the only thing that has really changed is that now we kill a lot more animals: 60 billion land animals per year according the statistics of the FAO. Other sources estimate as many as 100 billion.4
Melanie Joy has calculated that if 100 million people, a number that corresponds to the number of land animals slaughtered each year in the United States, were to line up single file, the line would reach around the world eighty times.5
When a society takes for granted the pure and simple exploitation of other sentient beings for its own purposes, without giving the least heed to the fate of the creatures it turns into mere utilitarian objects in this fashion, that society’s moral principles must come under serious scrutiny.
The devaluation of human beings often leads to viewing them as animals and to treating them with the brutality with which animals are often treated. The exploitation of animals is accompanied by a further level of devaluation: they are reduced to the status of infinitely reproducible objects for consumption—meat-producing machines, living toys whose suffering entertains or fascinates the crowds. Their quality of sentient beings is deliberately ignored so as to reduce them to the status of objects.
This point of view was given blunt expression in the nineteenth century by Émile Baudement, holder of the first chair of zootechnology at the Institut Agronomique of Versailles: “Animals are living machines, not in the figurative sense but in the most rigorous literal sense of the word, such as it is used in the world of mechanics and industry. . . . They provide milk, meat, or power. They are machines that produce a certain yield at a certain cost.”6
The recent remarks of the director of Wall’s, a British meat-products company, were even more cynical. He stated: “The breeding sow should be thought of, and treated as, a valuable piece of machinery whose function is to pump out baby pigs like a sausage machine.”7
The outlook of the system is summed up by Fred C. Haley, the director of a U.S. egg-producing company with 225,000 laying hens: “The object of producing eggs is to make money. When we forget this objective, we have forgotten what it is all about.”8
In the systems of industrial breeding, the life span of an animal is a fraction of what it would be in natural conditions: about one-fourth for a bovine and about one-sixtieth for a fowl. In the latter case, it is as if the life span of a Frenchman were only a year and four months.9 The animals are confined in boxes in which they cannot even turn around. They are castrated. The offspring are separated at birth from their mothers. Conscious animals who have momentarily survived the process that was supposed to have killed them are cut into pieces. Some are crushed alive in an endless screw mechanism (this is the fate that awaits hundreds of millions of male chicks every year).
In other circumstances, animals are made to suffer for our entertainment (bullfights, dog fights, cockfights). They are caught in traps that crush their limbs in steel jaws, or they are skinned alive. In a word, we decide where and how they are going to die without giving the least consideration to what they feel.
The Extent of the Suffering We Inflict on Animals
Humans have always exploited animals, first by hunting them and then by domesticating them. But it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that animal exploitation began to take on colossal proportions. At the same time, it gradually began to disappear from our daily lives, since it was deliberately carried out in places where it would not be seen. In the rich countries, depending on the species, 80 to 95 percent of the animals we eat are “produced” in industrial breeding operations where their short lives are an uninterrupted continuity of pain. All of that becomes possible the moment we begin to regard other living beings as objects for consumption or reserves of meat that we can deal with however we please. Upton Sinclair continues his account:
There were groups of cattle being driven to the chutes, which were roadways about fifteen feet wide, raised high above the pens. In these chutes the stream of animals was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them, pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious, a very river of death. Our friends were not poetical, and . . . they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it all. . . . “They don’t waste anything here,” said the guide, and then he laughed and added a witticism, which he was pleased that his unsophisticated friends should take to be his own: “They use everything about the hog except the squeal.”. . . It was a long, narrow room. . . . At the head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in circumference, with rings here and there along its edge. Upon both sides of this wheel there was a narrow space, into which came the hogs at the end of their journey. . . . It began slowly to revolve, and then the men upon each side of it sprang to work. They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft. . . . Once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy—and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous to the eardrums; . . . there would come a momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up to a deafening climax. . . . One by one they hooked up the hogs, and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water. . . . This slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.10
Above All, the Bottom Line
At the present time, in the United States alone, more animals are killed in a single day than in a whole year in the slaughterhouses of Upton Sinclair’s day. According to David Cantor, founder of a study group dedicated to establishing a responsible policy toward animals, it is “a cruel, expedient system, very tightly run, based entirely on profit, in which animals are scarcely regarded as living beings and their suffering and death does not count.”11
Slaughterhouses have decreased in number, but they have gotten much bigger, each now having the capacity to kill several million animals per year. In the countries of the European Union, there are new regulations intended to somewhat reduce the level of suffering in industrial breeding operations. In the United States, however, recent testimonies such as that of the writer Jonathan Safran Foer12 indicate that the difference between earlier and now is that now more animals are killed faster, more efficiently, and more cheaply.
Since it is more trouble to care for or even euthanize weak or sick animals who have collapsed and are unable to get up again to follow the others, in the majority of the U.S. states it is legal to let them die from hunger and thirst over a period of days or to throw them alive into garbage bins. That happens every day.
The workers are under constant pressure to keep the slaughtering process moving at full speed. “They don’t stop the chain for anything or anybody,” says Gail Eisnitz, a researcher for the Humane Farming Association. “As long as that chain is running, they don’t give a shit what you have to do to get that hog on the line. You got to get a hog on each hook or you got a foreman on your ass. . . . All the drivers use pipes to kill hogs that can’t go through the chutes. Or if you get a hog that refuses to go in the chutes and is stopping production, you beat him to death. Then push him off to the side and hang him up later.”13
Economic competition forces each slaughterhouse to do everything it can to kill more animals per hour than their competitors. The speed of the drivers in the slaughterhouses makes it possible to “treat” 1,100 animals per hour, which means that a worker has to kill one animal every three seconds. Mistakes are commonplace.14
In England, Dr. Alan Long has described what happens in the slaughterhouses, which he has to visit frequently as a researcher, as “relentless, pitiless, and remorseless” enterprises. Some workers confided to him that the hardest thing they had to do was kill lambs and calves, since “they’re just babies.” “It’s a poignant moment,” says Dr. Long, when a little crazed calf that has just been pulled away from its mother begins to suckle on the butcher’s fingers in the hope of getting some milk from them—and all it gets is human cruelty.”15
The Hypocrisy of “Care”
In 2008 a statement of the European Council for Research (CER) recommended “taking into account the wellbeing of animals” and stressed the need to “do the maximum to spare pain, distress, or suffering to animals intended for slaughter.” But in spite of a few minor advances, we are still far from that goal. If professionals from time to time advise the breeders to avoid such-and-such cruel practice, it is purely on account of the negative effect of that practice on the ability of the animal to gain weight. If they urge that animals on their way to slaughter be treated less harshly, it is because bruises cause the carcasses to lose value. What is being missed is that mistreatment of animals should be avoided because it is immoral in and of itself. The only precautions that are taken are those that keep the animals from dying before they have yielded a profit. Once they have served this purpose, they are destroyed like cumbersome objects and then thrown away like garbage.
As for veterinarians employed by the industry, their principal role is to contribute to the maximization of profit. Medicines are used not to cure disease but as substitutes for ruined immune systems. The breeders do not attempt to raise healthy animals but just to keep their animals from dying too soon. They must stay alive until they are killed. As we have already mentioned, the animals are filled full of antibiotics and growth hormones. Eighty percent of the antibiotics used in the United States are used in industrial breeding operations. As noted by Élisabeth Fontenay, “The worst is hidden behind the monumental hypocrisy that consists in devising and putting into practice a pretended ethics of wellbeing as though it were a set of limits imposed out of respect for the animals faced with the requirements of industrial breeding, when in fact it is obliged to serve the efficient functioning and profitability of the enterprise.”16
Do Not Enter
During the 1990s, the painter Sue Coe employed a variety of ingenious means to gain entry to the slaughter facilities of different countries, mainly in the United States. She constantly had to deal with outright hostility, from warnings such as “You have no business being here!” all the way to death threats if she published the name of a particular slaughterhouse she had visited. She was never permitted to use a camera. At best she was allowed to make sketches. “Slaughter facilities, particularly the biggest ones, are guarded like military installations. I was generally able to get into them because I knew somebody who had business dealings with the factory or slaughterhouse.”17 During his fifteen years of investigation of slaughter facilities, Jean-Luc Daub was sometimes treated roughly and even struck: “There were numerous attempts at intimidation, and death threats as well. I only remember that once at an animal market, they threatened to hang me from the rafters if I didn’t leave the place.”18
In her book Dead Meat, Sue described her visit to a slaughter facility in Pennsylvania in this way: “The floor was very slippery and the walls and everything else were covered with blood. Dried blood had formed a crust on the chains. I surely didn’t want to fall down in all that blood and guts. The workers wore non-slip boots, yellow aprons, and helmets. It was a scene of controlled, mechanized chaos.”19
As in most slaughter facilities, “the place is dirty—filthy even—with flies swarming everywhere.” According to another account, the refrigerator rooms are full of rats, and at night they run all over the meat and gnaw on it.”20
When lunchtime comes, the workers depart. Sue stays there alone with six decapitated corpses that are oozing blood. The walls are splattered with blood and she has drops of it on her notebook. She feels something moving on her right and goes closer to a slaughter stall to get a better look. Inside is a cow. It is not unconscious; it has slipped in the blood and has fallen. The men went to lunch and left it there. The minutes go by. From time to time, the animal struggles, banging its hooves against the enclosure walls. For a moment, it manages to get to its feet enough to look over them. Then it falls back down. You can hear the blood dripping. Music is playing from the loudspeakers.
Sue starts sketching. . . .
A man, Danny, comes back from lunch. He gives the injured cow three or four violent kicks to make it get up, but it can’t. He leans over into the metallic box and tries to knock it out with his air pistol. Then he fires a bullet into its head from a few inches away. Danny fastens a chain around one of the rear legs of the cow and raises it up. But the cow is not dead. It struggles. Its legs flail while it is being lifted, head down. Sue notices that some of the cows are not completely unconscious, and there are others that are not knocked out at all. “They flail about like crazy while he is cutting their throats.” Danny talks to the ones that are still conscious: “Come on, girl, be nice!” Sue watches the blood spurting out. “It was as though all living beings were nothing but soft containers, just waiting to be pierced.”
Danny goes to the door and makes the next cows move in using his electric goad. The terrified cows resist and kick with their hooves. As he is forcing them into the enclosure where they are going to be knocked out, Danny repeats over and over in a singsong tone, “Come on, girl!”
Sue next visits a slaughter facility for horses in Texas. The horses awaiting slaughter are in terrible condition. One of them has a broken jaw. Whiplashes rain down on them with a cracking sound and there is a smell of burning. The horses try to escape from the kill zone, but the men hit them on the head until they make a half turn. Sue’s companion sees a white mare in the midst of giving birth to a foal right in front of the enclosure. Two workers whip her to force her to move faster into the kill zone and throw the foal into a vat used for entrails. On a ramp above them, the boss, wearing a cowboy hat, observes the scene nonchalantly.
Coming out of another factory, which reminded her of one of Dante’s hells, Sue Coe sees a cow with a broken leg lying in the hot sun. She approaches it, but the security personnel stop her and make her leave. “The Shoah keeps coming to my mind, which upsets me tremendously,” Sue writes.21
A Global Enterprise
The fate of other industrially bred animals is hardly better. In the United States each year 150 times more chickens are killed than 80 years ago, thanks to the development of battery breeding. Tyson Foods, the biggest chicken-processing company in the world, slaughters 10 million of them per week. Fifty billion fowl are killed annually in the world.
Each chicken, during its short life, occupies a space the size of a sheet of letter paper. The air it breathes is full of ammonia, dust, and bacteria.22 This crowding is the cause of numerous abnormal behaviors: pulling out feathers, aggressive pecking, and cannibalism. “The battery becomes a madhouse for gallinaceans,” remarks the Texan naturalist Roy Bedichek.23 The artificially accelerated growth of chickens can be compared to a child reaching the weight of more than 330 pounds by the age of ten.
To reduce the aberrant behaviors, which are a considerable expense, the breeders keep the chickens in partial darkness, and to keep them from killing each other, they snip their beaks. In the 1940s, the beaks were burned off with blowtorches. Today the breeders use little guillotines equipped with hot blades. The stumps left over from this efficient form of amputation often form neuromas that are extremely painful.24
In a U.S. firm where two million laying hens are crowded into hangars that contain 90,000 hens each, one executive explained to journalists from National Geographic that “when the production [of eggs] goes down below the level of profitability, the 90,000 hens are sold in bulk to a processor who makes liver paté or chicken soup from them.”25 And then they start again from zero.
Transport is another source of long suffering. In the United States, it is estimated that 10 to 15 percent of chickens transported die during the trip. Of those who arrive at the slaughter facilities, a third present recent fractures resulting from the way in which they were manipulated and transported.
The slaughter facilities are supposed to render the chickens unconscious in an electrified bath. But in order to save money, they use too weak a voltage (about one-tenth of the dose required to bring about sedation). As a result many chickens arrive at the scalding vats still conscious.26
The male chicks of laying hens are destroyed—50 million in France, 250 million in the United States, every year. “Destroyed? That seems like a word worth knowing more about,” says Jonathan Safran Foer. He goes on:
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). . . . Cruel? Depends on your definition of cruelty?27
As for pigs, in order to prevent them from biting each others’ tails, producers cut the tails off with an instrument that crushes the stump at the same time to minimize bleeding. In France, the ministerial decree of January 16, 2003, authorizes live grinding down of the canine milk teeth of piglets less than a week old. The sows are confined in metal boxes hardly bigger than their bodies, where they are bound for two or three months by a neck strap that keeps them from turning or taking more than one forward or backward step. When the sow is ready to be killed, it is placed in a device called a “steel virgin,” a metal frame that prevents any freedom of movement. The males are castrated without anaesthesia. The skin of their scrota are cut open with a knife, the testicles are laid bare, and then a worker yanks them until the cord that holds them is broken.28 The sows of 300 kilograms (over 600 pounds), which have moved very little in their short lives, are hung up on a hook by a hind leg. They then have their throats slit and die as their blood runs out of them, flailing about desperately. According to Jocelyne Porcher, in charge of research at the INRA, “This whole system is an immense fabric of suffering.”29
Foer recounts: “Piglets that don’t grow fast enough—the runts—are a drain on resources and so have no place on the farm. Picked up by their hind legs, they are swung and then bashed headfirst onto the concrete floor. This common practice is called ‘thumping.’ ‘We’ve thumped as many as 120 in one day,’ said a worker from a Missouri farm.”30
Calves suffer from being separated from their mothers and then are closed up in boxes that prevent them from taking their natural sleeping position, with the head resting on the flank. The boxes are also too narrow to allow the calf to turn or to lick itself. The calves are deliberately given feed with low iron content, because consumers prefer “pale” meat. In this case the color is due to the fact that the animals have intentionally been kept anemic.31 This is also the reason their boxes are made from wood—to keep anything with iron in it out of their reach.32
Every Day, Every Year
In the case of cattle, most often an air gun fires a steel pin into the animal’s skull, which is supposed either to kill it or knock it unconscious. But a good number of the animals remain conscious or wake up when workers begin cutting them into pieces. Here again, Jonathan Safran Foer:
Let’s say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned, and dismembered while conscious. It happens all the time, and the industry and the government know it. Several plants cited for bleeding or skinning or dismembering live animals have defended their actions as common in the industry. . . . When Temple Grandin conducted an industrywide audit in 1996, her studies revealed that the vast majority of cattle slaughterhouses were unable to regularly render cattle unconscious with a single blow. . . . The combination of line speeds that have increased as much as 800 percent in the past hundred years and poorly trained workers laboring under nightmarish conditions guarantees mistakes.
Foer continues:
Sometimes animals are not knocked out at all. At one plant, a secret video was made by workers (not animal activists) and given to the Washington Post. According to the Post, “More than twenty workers signed affidavits alleging that the violations shown on the tape are commonplace and that supervisors are aware of them.” In one affidavit, a worker explained, “I’ve seen thousands and thousands of cows go through the slaughter process alive. . . . The cows can get seven minutes down the line and still be alive. I’ve been in the side puller where they’re still alive. All the hide is stripped out down the neck there.” And when workers who complain are listened to at all, they often get fired.33
One worker recounted:
A three-year-old heifer was walking up through the kill alley. And she was having a calf right there, it was half in and half out. I knew she was going to die, so I pulled the calf out. Wow, did my boss get mad. . . . They call these calves “slunks.” They use the blood for cancer research. And he wanted that calf. . . . It’s nothing to have a cow hanging up in front of you and see the calf inside kicking, trying to get out. . . . See, I’m an ex-Marine. The blood and guts don’t bother me. It’s the inhumane treatment. There’s just so much of it. . . .
After the head-skinner, the carcass (or cow) proceeds to the “leggers,” who cut off the lower portions of the animal’s legs. “As far as the ones that come back to life,” says a line worker, “it looks like they’re trying to climb the walls. . . . And when they get to the leggers, well, the leggers don’t want to wait to start working on the cow until somebody gets down there to reknock it. So they just cut off the bottom part of the leg with the clippers. When they do that, the cattle go wild, just kicking in every direction.”34
The case is similar with chicken slaughter. The electric current utilized to kill the chickens in the sedation vats is not always effective and is often set at too low a voltage. The result of this, according to the Compassion in World Farming Trust (CIWF), is that “In the European Union, 39.6 million chickens may have their throats slit without having been suitably sedated.”35 Virgil Butler, a former employee of a “small” slaughter facility belonging to the Tyson Foods chain, which supplied the fast-food chain KFC in 2002, the time referred to in this account, tells us the following:
You see, the killing machine can never slit the throat of every bird that goes by, especially those that the stunner does not stun properly. So, you have what is known as a “killer” whose job it is to catch those birds so that they are not scalded alive in the tank. (Of course he can’t catch all of them . . . .)
Picture this: You are told by your supervisor that it is your night in the kill room. You think, “Sh*t, it’s gonna be a rough night tonight.” No matter what the weather is like outside, this room is hot, between 90–100F. The scalders also keep the humidity at about 100%. You can see the steam in the air as a kind of haze. You put on your plastic apron to cover your whole body from the sprays of blood and the hot water that keeps the killing machine’s blade clean and washes the floor. You put on the steel glove and pick up the knife. . . .
You can hear the squawking from the chickens being hung in the next room as well as the metal shackles rattling. You can hear the motors that drive the chickens down the line. It is so loud you could scream and not hear yourself. (I’ve done it just to see.) You have to communicate with hand signals to anyone who might come in. Although, no one wants to. They only come in if they have to. . . .
Here come the birds through the stunner into the killing machine. . . . Remember, they come at you 182–186 per minute. There is blood everywhere, . . . on your face, your neck, your arms, all down your apron. You are covered in it. . . .
You can’t catch them all, but you try. Every time you miss one you “hear” the awful squawk it’s making when you see it flopping around in the scalder, beating itself against the sides. Damn, another “redibird.” You know that for every one you see suffer like this, there have been as many as 10 you didn’t see. You just know it happens.
The sheer amount of killing and blood can really get to you after awhile, especially if you can’t just shut down all emotion completely and turn into a robot zombie of death. You feel like part of a big death machine. Pretty much treated that way as well. . . . You are murdering helpless birds by the thousands (75,000 to 90,000 a night). You are a killer.
You can’t really talk to anyone about this. The guys at work will think you are soft. Family and friends don’t want to know about this. It makes them uncomfortable and unsure of what to say or how to act. They can even look at you a little weird. Some don’t want much else to do with you when they know what you do for a living. You are a killer. . . .
You begin to feel a sense of disgust at yourself at what you have done and continue to do. You are ashamed to tell others what you do at night while they are asleep in their beds. You are a killer. . . .
You shut down all emotions eventually. . . . You have bills to pay. You have to eat. But, you don’t want chicken. You have to be really hungry to eat that. You know what goes into every bite. . . .
You feel isolated from society, not a part of it. Alone. You know you are different from most people. They don’t have visions of horrible death in their heads. They have not seen what you have seen. And they don’t want to. They don’t even want to hear about it. If they did, how could they eat that next piece of chicken?
Welcome to the nightmare I escaped. I’m better now. I play well with others, at least most of the time. . . .36
Working in a slaughterhouse is one of the most trying occupations there is, physically and emotionally. An elevated rate of work accidents has been observed, as well as of psychological difficulties related to stress and to the effort involved in overcoming the natural aversion to killing that is present in most humans.37 Considerable numbers of former employees and investigators in killing facilities suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Whose fault is this? Who can we blame? According to the student veterinarian Christiane M. Haupt, who tells us of her experience as an intern in a slaughter facility, it is the consumers who maintain this system, and thus ultimately they are the ones who are responsible for it all:
It occurs to me that, with a few exceptions, the people who work here are not behaving inhumanely, they have simply become indifferent, as I have myself with time. It’s a kind of self-protection. No, the really inhumane ones are the ones who order these daily mass murders, and who because of their fierce appetite for meat, condemn these animals to a miserable life and a very sad end, and force other human beings to carry out this degrading work that turns them into gross beings. Myself, I have gradually become a little cog in this monstrous automaton of death.38
One hundred million animals are also killed every year for their fur. In a documentary made with a hidden camera by a Swiss team of investigators,39 one sees the Chinese breeders who are knocking out minks by spinning them around holding them by the rear legs and then banging their heads against the ground. Then they skin them alive, and once the entire skin with the fur on it has been removed, they throw the animals, whose skin is entirely bare and raw, on a heap along with their already processed fellows. The look in the eyes of the minks, as they die slowly, silent and immobile, is intolerable to any onlooker who has even an ounce of pity. The impression is all the more shocking because of the contrast provided by the casual conversation of the breeders, chatting with each other completely nonchalantly, with cigarettes in their mouths, as they continue to “peel” these animals like zucchinis.
The descriptions we read, and still more the scenes we see in documentaries depicting this sad reality, are perhaps intolerable for many of us, but it would be good to ask ourselves why they disturb us so much. Isn’t it because we do tolerate all this in the end? Or is it because we are afraid of being submerged in empathic pain if we allow our emotions to enter too intimately into these sufferings?
Unfortunately, we are not dealing here with just a few horror scenes that have been caught in the spotlight. These figures defy the imagination. Every year, more than a billion land animals are killed in France, 10 billion in the United States, and approximately 60 billion in the world. More recently China, India, and a number of other countries with emerging economies have intensified industrial breeding. In France, 95 percent of pigs consumed are products of industrial breeding. This is also the case for 80 percent of laying hens and cooking chickens and 90 percent of calves. Forty million rabbits are killed each year, and they are almost all raised in cages.40 In Ces Bêtes qu’on Abat (These Animals That We Slaughter), investigator Jean-Luc Daub writes: “To those who don’t know it, I want to reveal this fact: most of the animals raised in industrial systems see the light of day for the first time on their way to the slaughterhouse. Even, for many of them, this relocation is the first time they have a chance to take a step. This is what we are supporting when we buy a package of bacon or a chicken at the cheapest available price.”41
In many countries, notably in the European Union, new laws are being passed that are meant to put an end to the worst of these treatments, but they are still being practiced in many systems of animal production elsewhere in the world.
Jean-Luc Daub found again and again that, although there are some slaughter facilities that follow the rules, there are others that pay no attention to them whatsoever. Thus he is led to doubt the efficacy of the actions of the public authorities in this area (in this particular case, public veterinary services). Reading certain passages in his book, one might well ask oneself, as he does, “if the people who commit the acts I have described have lost their minds, since what they do is really unthinkable.”42
A Thousand Billion Sea Creatures
As for fish, shellfish, and “seafood,” one study using data provided by several international organizations regarding annual catches (a study that divides the tonnage of the catches by an estimated average weight of the individuals of each species caught) has come to the astronomically large figure of about a thousand billion fish and other sea creatures killed per year.43 The overwhelming majority of the catch is accounted for not by populations who traditionally practice fishing in order to supply their basic needs but rather by industrial fishing operations.
This estimate includes neither the very large number of catches that are not officially registered, which amounts to at least double the official number, nor the immense number of marine species that suffer serious negative effects from industrial fishing. In France, the number of fish and shellfish killed each year is around two billion.
As Foer tells us, “No fish gets a good death. Not a single one. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did.”44
They sometimes suffer agonies of death for hours at a time, caught on the hooks of fishing lines several miles long. Once out of the water, they die of suffocation or from the bursting of internal organs that results from the rapid decompression they undergo as they are pulled up from the depths in nets. It is not rare for them to be gutted alive. The fins of sharks and the fleshy sides of tuna are cut off, and then the mutilated animals are thrown back in the sea, condemned to mortal sufferings that can last for some time. As part of the vicious cycle of suffering, a quarter of all fish taken in world fishing operations are then used to feed the animals in industrial breeding facilities.
Traditional Breeding versus Organic Breeding—A Lesser Evil?
Farmers who practice breeding in natural surroundings offer animals conditions of life that are incomparably better than what prevails in systems of industrial production, and the animals suffer far less. Nevertheless, the situation is far from rosy. The animals continue to be considered products for consumption, and the quest for profit and financial viability continues on at their expense.
Traditional breeders, as Jocelyne Porcher tells us, maintain much more humane relations with their animals. They know them each individually, and their whole operation is not organized around an obsessive effort to maximize profit. The animal is thus not reduced to a “thing” that is exploited without mercy.45 But a “lesser evil” is not morally sufficient, since one cannot demonstrate that it is necessary to kill these animals (unless it is the only option for survival). Nevertheless, as the philosopher Thomas Lepeltier points out, “Behind the very idealized image of a relationship of trust based on a kind of unspoken contract, there is often a much harsher reality. . . . Traditional breeding remains an activity that is based on the exploitation of animals, which inevitably brings about cruelty.”46
In particular, one birth after the other, traditional breeders always forcibly separate from the cows, the goats, and the sheep their little calves, kids, and lambs, so that they (the breeders) can take their milk. The newborns that are not set aside to become future mothers or sires are quickly sent to a slaughter facility. As for the adult animals, they undergo the same fate as soon as it is no longer economical to exploit them. The fact that they temporarily enjoy better conditions does not save the animals from the traumas of transport to the place where they will be killed. During transport they undergo the same painful treatment as their fellow animals in the industrial breeding systems. Thus the assertion that traditional breeders do not practice breeding in order to make money from their animals but so they can live with them is questionable, since one way or the other breeding remains a business based on programmed killing.47
Moreover, the labels used to attract well-intentioned consumers are often deceptive. The label “organic” used for chickens does not mean at all that the fowl were raised in nature, but simply that they were fed organic grains. Even chickens designated as “raised in the open air” in reality live in sordid hangars where 9 to 12 birds are crowded into every square meter. From time to time they are allowed to move around in a corridor enclosed in wire mesh or are let outside for a short time so they can walk around a little. We are still far away from the “happy chickens” that the ads boast of. As for the “free range” designation, it presumes access to a large and open land area, covered in part by vegetation. However, even in these much more livable conditions, the animals endure all kinds of abuse: castration with or without anaesthesia, separations of mothers and offspring, elimination of male chicks at birth, “reform” (that is, killing) of hens with reduced egg output in order not to have to maintain them any longer, and so on.
During a forum organized by Ecolo-Ethik in the senate at the Luxembourg Palace, I quoted George Bernard Shaw, who said: “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends.” An organic breeder who was participating at the roundtable and who had proudly shown me a photo of a calf that had been born that very morning at his farm, made the following statement in his presentation: “I am not my animals’ friend. I raise them to kill them.”
Such a statement, clear and candid as it is, makes us question directly the value of a breeding operation whose final result is the death of the animals. Would it make any sense to propose instead a nonviolent kind of breeding operation that only keeps cows for their milk, sheep for their wool, and hens for their eggs, while protecting the lives of all of them? Until something better comes along, that kind of a proposal might at least help to reconcile the welfarists, who aim through reforms to improve the conditions for animals used by humans without, however, challenging the whole system, and the abolitionists, who advocate doing away with all forms of instrumentalization of animals. To give an example from history of the two approaches, welfarists used to talk about making the slave trade more “humane.” The abolitionists, who at that time were regarded as extremists or crackpots, did not want to make improvements in the slave trade but purely and simply to abolish it. They were the ones, fortunately, who won out in the end.
Killing Humanely?
It cannot be denied that here and there some improvements have been made. In the United States, where for a long time industrial breeding had been exempt from all animal protection laws, the situation has been improved a little bit thanks to the work of Temple Grandin, who redrew plans of slaughter facilities in such a way that the animals are less thrown into panic on the way to death. The ramp that leads the animals in single file toward the place where the killing occurs is now called “the stairway to paradise.” A pity the animals don’t know how to read. . . . Though it is undeniably desirable to reduce the sufferings of animals in whatever way possible, the attitude that makes ourselves feel better by saying that, from now on, 100 billion animals will be “killed humanely” every year remains a terrible one.
Jurist and author David Chauvet had this to say on this point: “For most people, killing animals is not a problem as long as they are killed painlessly. This is known as ‘killing humanely.’ Of course none of us would accept being ‘killed humanely’ unless it was somehow in our own interest, for example, if it meant cutting our own suffering short. But it is certainly not in the interest of animals to be killed so they can end up in little pieces on the shelves of the supermarkets.”48
This point has not escaped certain defenders of animal rights, who point out that considering it sufficient merely to make the conditions of life and death of animals more “humane” is no more than a means to salve our consciences while we carry on with massacring animals. What has to be done is just to end it, since killing a sentient being without necessity is no more acceptable in open fields than in meat plants.
Most of the suffering we inflict on others has nothing unavoidable about it. Only the conception we have of others makes it possible. If we identify an ethnic group as vermin, we will have no scruple about trying to exterminate it. From the moment when we consider other sentient beings as inferior beings whose fate doesn’t matter, we will not hesitate to use them as instruments to bring about our own well-being.
Some people might say, “But when you come right down to it, that’s life. Why such a flood of sentimentality about the way we have always behaved? The animals themselves have always eaten each other. These are the laws of nature. What’s the point of trying to change them?” We can answer that right away by pointing out that we are supposed to have evolved since our barbarous days. We are supposed to have become more peaceful and more humane. If that is not the case, how can we justify extolling the advance of civilization? Is it not still the case today that people who systematically exercise brutality and violence are called “barbarians”?
It is probably enough for most of us just to be better informed and to made aware of what goes on every day in industrial breeding operations and slaughter facilities for us to change our opinions quite naturally and even be willing to change our lifestyle. With very few exceptions, the media hardly inform the public; in any case, it is pretty much impossible for them to investigate the slaughterhouses freely. Nonetheless, particularly on the Internet, we do encounter reports that pull no punches in showing us the reality of the places where the meat we eat comes from.49
According to a study cofinanced by the French ministry of agriculture based on a representative sample of the population, only 14 percent of French people disagree with the proposition: “It is normal for humans to raise animals for their meat.” On the other hand, 65 percent answer yes to the question, “Would you find it unpleasant to watch animals being slaughtered?”50 The conclusion we can draw seems to be that it’s fine for animals to be slaughtered as long as we don’t have to see it. Out of sight, out of mind.
Standing up for the right thing might be painful, but that pain can, and should be, transmuted into determination and courage—the courage of compassion. As Elie Wiesel put it in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”51