Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying
it, and eventually they will believe it.
—ADOLF HITLER*
If you are like most people, meat, eggs, and dairy are staples of your diet. You probably eat these products multiple times a day. Think about the foods you've eaten over the past week. How many meals have you had that consisted of some form of chicken, beef, pork, or fish? Have you had eggs or yogurt for your breakfast? Turkey or tuna sandwiches for lunch? Rotisserie or fried chicken for dinner? How much meat, eggs, and dairy do you think you've eaten this week? This month? This year?
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that the average American consumes 92 pounds of chicken,12 16 pounds of turkey,13 57 pounds of beef,14 and 51 pounds of pork per year. Add to this a pound of veal and a pound of lamb, and each of us eats a total of 222 pounds15 of meat annually16—and that's not even counting the 16 pounds of fish,17 37 pounds of eggs, and 630 pounds of dairy products we consume. Given that the current population of the United States is 328 million, that's a lot of meat, eggs, and dairy—and a lot of animals. (And this level of carnistic consumption is not uniquely American. For example, in the EU, people eat an annual average of 115 kg of poultry, 110 kg of fish, 105 kg of dairy, 96 kg of pork products, 86 kg of beef and 13 kg of eggs;18 and numbers are similar elsewhere in the world.)
To be exact, US agribusinesses slaughter eleven billion animals per year19 (and that's not including the estimated 47 billion fish and other aquatic animals killed annually20). That's 23,234 animals per minute, or 387 animals per second. In the time it took you to read these three paragraphs, nearly 73,000 more animals were killed.
Just to give you some perspective, the eleven billion US farmed animal population is nearly double the size of the worldwide human population. It's 33 times larger than the population of New York City, and 2,750 times larger than the population of Los Angeles.
Another way to think about this number is that if we were to try to pack eleven billion people into a football field, it would take 121,000 football fields—an area about the size of Los Angeles—to hold them all. Or if eleven billion people stood in a line, the line would be 2.2 million miles long. That's long enough to reach to the moon and back, nearly five times. It's also long enough to wrap around the entire circumference of the earth 83 times. And we're only talking about the number of animals killed in a single year; consider how these numbers increase over five, ten, twenty years.
Obviously, it takes a lot of animals to produce the amount of meat, eggs, and dairy we, as a nation, buy, sell, and consume. Animal agriculture is big business. In fact, animal agriculture is very big business—US carnistic industries have combined annual revenues approaching $177 billion21 (a similar amount as that of the EU).22 Consider the countless grocery stores, restaurants, cafeterias, and homes across the country that are stocked with carnistic products. Meat, eggs, and dairy are literally everywhere we turn.
So where are all the animals?
Of the eleven billion animals who have been raised, transported, and slaughtered over the course of the past year, how many have you seen? If you live in a city, probably almost none. But let's assume you live in the country. How many cows do you see grazing on the hillsides? Perhaps fifty at a time, if that? And how about chickens or pigs or turkeys? Do you see any at all? How many times have you seen these animals on television, in magazines and newspapers, in the movies? Though we may eat them on a daily basis, most of us don't stop to consider how peculiar it is that we can go through our entire lives without ever encountering the animals who become our food. Where are they?
The vast majority of the animals we eat are not, as those in carnistic industry would have us believe, “contented cows” and “happy hens” lazing amid grassy fields and open barnyards. They are not sleeping in spacious stalls with fresh hay. From the moment they are born, these individuals are kept in intensive confinement where they may suffer from disease, exposure to extreme temperatures, severe overcrowding, violent handling, and even psychosis. Despite what the prevailing imagery of farmed animals suggests, small, family-run farms are largely a thing of the past; today the animals are in massive “confined animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs (sometimes called “factory farms”), where they reside until they are shipped to the slaughterhouse.*
As with any major production facility, CAFOs (and the slaughterhouses they supply) are designed with a singular intention: to manufacture their product at the lowest cost and for the highest profit possible. Quite simply, the more animals processed and killed per minute, the more money to be made. Toward this end, CAFOs may house up to a million animals at a time,23 animals who are viewed and treated as units of production and whose welfare is necessarily secondary to the profit their bodies will turn. From a business standpoint, animal welfare is a barrier to profit, as it costs less to mass-produce animals and discard those who die prematurely than it does to care for them adequately. In fact, it is estimated that upward of two billion animals destined to become food die before reaching the slaughterhouse,24 a factor that is built into the cost of production. It is these cost-cutting measures that make modern carnistic production one of the most violent practices in human history.
The most effective way to distort reality is to deny it; if we tell ourselves there isn't a problem, then we never have to worry about what to do about it. And the most effective way to deny a reality is to make it invisible. As we've discussed, invisibility is the bulwark of the carnistic system.
In chapter 2 we deconstructed the symbolic invisibility of the system. Symbolic invisibility is enabled by the defense mechanism avoidance, which is a form of denial. We avoid the truth when we avoid naming the system, which, in turn, prevents us from realizing that there even is a system. In this chapter, we will deconstruct the practical invisibility of carnism. This deconstruction is necessary in order to truly appreciate the mechanisms and dynamics of carnism. As long as we are uninformed or misinformed, we cannot understand the reality of carnistic production and move beyond carnistic defenses.
The establishments that produce the bulk of the meat, eggs, and dairy that make it to our dinner plates are, essentially, invisible. We don't see them. We don't see them because they are located in remote areas where most of us don't venture. We don't see them because we're not allowed access even if we do try to get in.25 We don't see them because their trucks are often sealed and unmarked. We don't see them because, as Erik Schlosser, investigative author of the bestselling Fast Food Nation, says, they have “no windows on the front and no architectural clues to what's happening inside.”26 We don't see them because we're not supposed to. As with any violent ideology, the populace must be shielded from direct exposure to the victims of the system, lest they begin questioning the system or their participation in it. This truth speaks for itself: why else would carnistic industry go to such lengths to keep its practices invisible?
ACCESS DENIED
In 2007,* journalist Daniel Zwerdling set out to write an article on the chicken industry for Gourmet magazine. Given the industry's response to his request for a tour of their plants, one would think Zwerdling was writing for Vegetarian Times rather than a renowned publication of carnistic cuisine. According to Zwerdling, whose article “A View to a Kill” was published in the June issue, “Spokesmen at the five biggest companies refused to show me the farms where their suppliers raise the chickens you eat, so that I could see firsthand how they treat them. They refused to show me the slaughterhouses, so I could see how the companies dispatch them. Executives even refused to talk to me about how they raise and kill chickens.” And Zwerdling's experience is not uncommon.
Not only is it difficult to obtain access to meatpacking plants, but in a number of states it's actually against the law to take photos or videos inside “animal enterprises,” such as laboratories, circuses, and slaughterhouses. Furthermore, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006—legislation that has been harshly criticized as unconstitutional—makes it illegal to engage in behavior that results in the economic disruption of an animal enterprise.27
Because the media is denied access to “animal enterprises,” most of the footage of CAFOs and slaughterhouses that reaches the public comes from undercover investigations. Such was the case with the 2008 Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) investigation that documented workers dragging sick dairy cows with chains and flipping them with forklifts—to be processed into meat destined for public school cafeterias—that led to the largest recall of beef in the nation's history.
As we discussed in chapter 2, pigs are intelligent, sensitive animals; piglets as young as three weeks old learn their names and respond when called. In fact, research from Pennsylvania State University revealed that pigs could be trained to play computer games; using their snouts to control joysticks, they were able to hit their targets with 80-percent accuracy.28 Pigs are also affectionate and sociable, enjoying the company of humans, which is why they can make excellent companion animals. Several years ago, I visited a shelter for rescued farmed animals, and the pigs couldn't get enough of my scratching their bellies and behind their ears.
In natural settings, pigs roam for up to thirty miles a day and can form close bonds with one another. They may be able to distinguish between as many as thirty different individual pigs in their group, and will greet and communicate with those with whom they are close. Expectant mothers are extremely conscientious; they may wander for six miles to find the perfect spot to build a birthing nest, and then spend up to ten hours building it before settling in to care for their newborns. Once the babies are old enough to rejoin the others, they play and explore their environment together for months.29
Most pigs, however—approximately 80 million30—spend their entire lives in intensive confinement and never see the outdoors until they are packed into trucks to be sent to slaughter. Shortly after piglets are born, they are typically castrated, and their tails are cut off, without anesthesia. Ranchers are told to remove (“dock”) their tails with blunt, side-cutting pliers because the crushing action helps to reduce bleeding.31 Tail docking is necessary because under extreme stress and when all their natural urges have been thwarted, pigs develop neurotic behaviors and can actually bite each others' tails off.32 This psychological reaction is one of the symptoms of what is referred to in the industry as porcine stress syndrome (PSS), a condition that is remarkably similar to what we call in humans post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Other symptoms include rigidity, panting, anxiety, blotchy skin, and sometimes sudden death.33 Like humans who have endured solitary confinement and other tortures in captivity, pigs have engaged in self-harm, and have been found repeating the same nonsensical behaviors over and over, sometimes thousands of times a day; the animals are literally driven insane.*
OF PIGS AND PEOPLE:
THE GENETICS OF TRAUMA
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and porcine stress syndrome (PSS) seem to share a genetic basis; both conditions are in part hereditary. A number of studies have revealed that a person's genetic predisposition, combined with a traumatic experience, increases the likelihood of developing PTSD; a large study of twin Vietnam veterans, for instance, led researchers to claim that there is “a significant genetic contribution to PTSD.” Similarly, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs reports that it is the combination of genetics and stress that leads to the development of PSS in pigs.34
Piglets born in confinement are allowed to suckle for just two to three weeks,35 and they do this through the bars of a crate that is separate from their mother's. A number of piglets die before being weaned, from maladies such as starvation or diarrhea.36 Sometimes if a piglet has managed to squeeze into their mother's crate to satisfy their instinctive need for warmth and closeness, the mother can accidentally crush them. Regardless of the cause, infant deaths are inevitable. There are simply too many animals for workers to care for adequately; a typical hog breeding plant employs four people to manage 3,200 sows.37
After weaning, for the next six months, the young pigs are crammed into what are often filthy pens or sheds in hog factories.38 These buildingscare filled with noxious gases from the pigs' excrement, and the air is dense with dust and dander. Both pigs and the humans who work in pig confinement buildings suffer from chronic respiratory illnesses, and a number of pigs die prematurely from lung disease.39
When the pigs are ready to be slaughtered, they are herded onto tractors bound for the slaughterhouse. To save money, as many pigs as possible are packed into a truck, and this overcrowding—coupled with the fact that the animals receive no food, water, or protection from extreme temperatures during transport, which can last upwards of twenty-eight hours40—results in high mortality rates; according to The National Hog Farmer, an industry publication, “The national recorded incidence for dead on arrival (DOA) pigs [in 2007] was 0.21%. Based on 22 commercial field trials, the rate of non-ambulatory pigs (classified as fatigued or injured) prior to reaching the weigh scale at the packing plant was about 0.37%. No national figures exist for non-ambulatory pigs.”41 Agricultural investigator Gail Eisnitz, who interviewed a number of slaughterhouse workers, was told of the transport process:
You're going to lose hogs in a semitrailer no matter what . . . .
During the time I worked in rendering, there was large piles of dead hogs every day. . . . When they come off the truck, they're solid as a block of ice. . . . I went to pick up some hogs one day for chainsawing from a pile of about thirty frozen hogs, and I found two [that were] frozen but still alive I could tell they were alive because they raised their heads up like, “Help me.” . . . I took my ax-chopper and chopped them to death.42
The pigs who do survive the journey are deposited into holding pens to await slaughter.43 When it is time, they are prodded onto a narrow walkway, or chute, on which they walk single file to the killing floor. The animals at the rear of the chute hear the screams of the pigs ahead, who have arrived at the slaughter line, as well as the shouts of men working on the noisy production line. Schlosser explains what he saw upon reaching this point in his tour: “The sounds get louder—factory sounds, the noise of power tools and machinery, bursts of compressed air . . . . We walk up a slippery metal stairway and reach a small platform, where the production line begins. A man turns and smiles at me. He wears safety goggles and a hard hat. His face is splattered with gray matter and blood.”44 Not surprisingly, many pigs are reluctant to move forward. As one slaughterhouse worker put it:
When the hogs smell blood, they don't want to go. I've seen hogs beaten, whipped, kicked in the head to get them up to the restrainer. One night I saw a driver get so angry at a hog he broke its back with a piece of a board. I've seen hog drivers take their prod and shove it up the hog's ass to get them to move. I didn't appreciate that because it made the hogs twice as wild by the time they got to me.45
Farmed animals are supposed to be stunned and rendered unconscious before they are actually killed.46 However, some pigs remain conscious when they are strung upside down by their legs in shackles, and they kick and struggle as they are moved along the conveyor belt to have their throats slit. Because of the speed at which the animals are supposed to be stunned and killed, and because slaughterhouse workers are often ineffectively trained, a number of pigs may also survive throat cutting and remain conscious when they arrive at the next station, where they are dropped into scalding water—a procedure done to remove their hair. Eisnitz describes how squealing hogs were left dangling by one leg while workers left to take their lunch breaks, and thousands of hogs were immersed in the scalding tank alive. And one worker she interviewed commented: “These hogs . . . hit the water and start screaming and kicking. Sometimes they thrash so much they kick water out of the tank. There's a rotating arm that pushes them under, no chance for them to get out. I'm not sure if they burn to death before they drown, but it takes them a couple of minutes to stop thrashing.”47
Eisnitz also found that the stress workers faced from spending hours at a single station where they had to kill (or stun) one hog every four seconds led to violent outbursts toward the pigs. One worker described such an incident:
Like, one day the live hogs were driving me nuts [when] an animal pisses you off [even though you] are going to kill it. . . . Only you don't just kill it, you go in hard, push hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own blood. Split its nose. A live hog would be running around the pit. It would just be looking up at me and I'd be sticking and I would just take my knife and cut its eye out while it was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream. One time I took my knife—it's sharp enough—and I sliced off the end of a hog's nose, just like a piece of bologna. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it just sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into its nose. Now that hog really went nuts, brushing its nose all over the place. I still had a bunch of salt left on my hand—I was wearing a rubber glove—and I stuck the salt right up the hog's ass. The poor hog didn't know whether to shit or go blind.48
Female pigs who are used as breeders eventually wind up at the slaughterhouse as well, but before that time they spend much of their lives in small metal cages and stalls that are referred to as gestation crates.*49 These crates are two feet wide, too small for the sows to even turn around, and their floors are covered in feces and urine. The animals suffer from a number of problems due to this confinement, but one of the most painful conditions they endure is urinary tract infections, which can be become so severe as to be fatal. Urinary tract infections occur because when the sows lie down, they are immersed in bacteria ridden waste that makes its way into their urinary tracts. A sow will be forcibly impregnated in rapid cycles of every five or six months, until she is no longer able to reproduce, at which time she is packed onto a truck headed for slaughter.50
“WHOEVER DEFINES THE ISSUE
CONTROLS THE DEBATE”
Timothy Cummings, a poultry veterinarian and clinical professor at Mississippi State University, explained to an audience of poultry producers that it's time to take on media-savvy animal rights advocates who understand the power of language. “Whoever defines the issue controls the debate,” he said.52 Cummings suggested that “debeaking” a chicken should instead be called “beak conditioning,” making the process seem more like a spa treatment than a disfiguration. The “backup killer” (the worker responsible for slaughtering birds who are still alive after passing the automatic killer) should be a “knife operator,” and the term “insanguinated” should replace “bled” to death.
Industry insiders have long been aware of the discomfort consumers feel when words paint too accurate a picture of how animals are turned into food. As far back as 1922, the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers' Association proposed replacing “goat meat” with “chevron,” arguing that: “People don't eat ground cow, pig chops, or leg of sheep . . . beef, pork, and mutton sound much more appetizing.”53 And the former National Cattlemen's Beef Association advised its members to substitute “process” or “harvest” for “slaughter,” since “people react negatively to the word ‘slaughtering.’”54
In the United Kingdom, too, one can find interesting examples of how carnistic industry uses language to camouflage the reality of its products. The Meat Trades Journal advises readers to use “meat plant” or “meat factory” in lieu of “slaughterhouse.”55 And Meat issued the following statement: “Traditional retailing centres around offering the public bits of animals and often identifies meat with livestock. But modern consumer attitudes shy away from this link. There is an urgent need for a new retailing philosophy. We are no longer in the business of selling pieces of carcase meat. We must make our customers think forward to what they will eat rather than backwards to the animal in the field.”56
Michael Pollan traced the life of a single steer, steer number 534, in order to write The Omnivore's Dilemma, his bestselling exposé on contemporary food-production practices. What Pollan found when he followed steer number 534 from birth to death represents the fate of the 35 million steers who are killed every year in the United States for beef. Pollan describes how he was surveying a herd of calves in a pen when “534 moseyed up to the railing and made eye contact. He had a wide stout frame and was brockle-faced. Here was my boy.”57
It isn't surprising that 534 so readily approached Pollan. Bovines are communicative, emotional, and social creatures. They have multiple vocalizations and gestures to communicate their feelings, and in a natural environment they will nurture ongoing friendships with one another. Bovines are naturally gentle and docile, spending most of their waking time eating grass and chewing cud. And babies frequently engage in a variety of forms of play with each other when they are not suckling from their mothers.
Bovines born into captivity are unable to satisfy many of these natural instincts. However, for a short time, at least some of their basic needs are met. Unlike the pork and poultry industries, the beef industry keeps its animals outdoors for the first six months of their lives (which, however, also means enduring extreme temperatures and weather),58 since it is cheaper to contract independent ranchers who own grazing land to manage this part of the process. Pollan reports: “Steer number 534 spent his first six months in these lush pastures alongside his mother, 9534. Apart from the trauma of the Saturday in April when he was branded and castrated, one could imagine 534 looking back on those six months as the good old days.”59
Steer 534 had been born in the birthing shed across the street from the pasture, and like all male calves, his castration, branding, and “de-horning” (to prevent his horns from getting stuck in fences or causing harm to other animals or humans) took place without anesthesia. Agriculturalists at the University of Tennessee explain the most efficient ways to perform some of the different methods of castrating calves.60 Stress from the procedures, they say, can be “minimized by performing the procedure when the calf is small and sexually immature.” One method involves using a knife to cut off the lower part of the scrotum: “After the testicles are exposed, they should be grasped and extended one at a time while pushing back the connective tissue surrounding the cord. In young calves, the testicle may be grasped and pulled until the cord breaks.” Or operators can place a rubber band on the scrotum above the testicles: “This cuts off the blood supply and the scrotum and testicles slough off in about three weeks.” However, they warn, “This is the least desirable of all the bloodless methods of castration because of the danger of tetanus. If this method is used, it should be used on calves less than one month of age.” Another bloodless method of castration involves the use of an emasculatome, an instrument with blunt blades that crush the spermatic cord and sever the blood supply: “The emasculatome is left in place for approximately one minute. It is strongly suggested that the emasculatome be applied twice on each cord. Repeat the procedure on the other side of the scrotum. . . . If the cord has been missed, repeat the procedure.” And finally, the agriculturalists advise that “[t]he best times to castrate are in the spring and fall when flies and maggots are less likely to increase irritation and infection of the wound.”
Given these castration practices, it is not surprising that Pollan believes 534 was traumatized. Pollan claims that 534 was traumatized a second time, as well, when he was weaned from his mother at six months of age: “Weaning is perhaps the most traumatic time on a ranch for animals and ranchers alike; cows separated from their calves will bellow for days, and the calves, stressed, are prone to getting sick.”61 Weaning is recognized as a major psychological stressor by agricultural veterinarians, who therefore recommend that the facilities that hold both mother and calf after they have been separated should be strong enough to prevent the two from being able to reunite.62
After weaning, 534 was sent off to spend the next couple of months in a “backgrounding” pen, where he was to get used to confinement, eating from a trough, and consuming unnatural foods—which were comprised of massive quantities of drug-ridden corn, and protein and fat supplements to bring him from 80 to 1,200 pounds in eleven months.63 The rest of his life would be spent in a feedlot, an overcrowded, filthy, factory farm with flooring largely comprised of manure, where he would be confined with thousands of other steers awaiting slaughter.64
When it comes time for slaughter, steers are no more eager to walk the chute to the kill floor than are pigs. They must be prodded along, a process that further stresses already frustrated animals and workers. Though under federal law it is illegal to use prods in excess of fifty volts, one employee Eisnitz interviewed commented:
You can get frustrated when you're trying to move cattle along. Sometimes you have to prod them a lot. But some of the drivers [people who prod cattle along the chute] burn the hell out of them. The five or six hotshots (electric prods) by the lead-up chutes are hooked directly to a 110-volt outlet. Run them along the floor's metal grates and they spit sparks like a welding machine. Some drivers would beat cattle with hotshots until they were so wild and panicky you couldn't do a thing with them, right up into the knocking box.65
Once at the assembly line, the steers are stunned, shackled, bled, disemboweled, and skinned. As with hogs, the lack of skilled workers and the dizzying speed of the conveyor belt prevent precision in stunning, and many steers end up being pulled along while conscious. Conscious steers on the line are particularly dangerous for workers, because, at 1,000 pounds, when they thrash and kick, they can sometimes break free from the shackles and fall headfirst onto employees from a height of fifteen feet. Even when the animal is directly stunned, sometimes it takes multiple times for the hit to render him unconscious. Another employee commented:
I remember one bull with really long horns. I knocked it twice. . . . Some solid white stuff came out—brains, I guess—and it went down, its face all bloody. I rolled it into the shackling area. That bull must have felt the shackle going on its leg, it got up like nothing ever happened to it, it didn't even wobble, and took off out the back door, started running down Route 17 and just wouldn't stop. They went out and shot it with a rifle, dragged it back with the tractor.66
Schlosser, too, witnessed the effects of inadequate stunning: “A steer slips from its chain, falls to the ground, and gets its head caught in a conveyor belt. The line stops as workers struggle to free the steer, stunned but alive, from the machinery. I've seen enough.”67
Pollan was not permitted entry to the kill floor, so he awaited the arrival of his steer at the final destination of his journey. There, 534 emerged as a box of steaks. No longer even a number, 534 had been reduced to a container of neatly packaged products destined for supermarket shelves.
THEY DIE PIECE BY PIECE
In 2001, the Washington Post printed an article by Joby Warrick entitled “They Die Piece by Piece.” Warrick explained how, though steers were supposed to be dead before reaching the cutting room, this was often not the reality. Ramon Moreno, a slaughterhouse worker who'd spent twenty years as a “second-legger”—cutting hocks off carcasses as they sped past at the rate of 309 per hour—described the process to Warrick: “‘They blink. They make noises,’ he said softly. ‘The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around.’ Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. ‘They die,’ said Moreno, ‘piece by piece.’”68
In chapter 2, I discussed some of the common assumptions we make about pigs and how these beliefs make it easier for us to eat them. Many of us feel even more removed from chickens and turkeys, at least in part because of our deep-rooted belief that they are stupid—perhaps too stupid to even know whether they are in pain. However, birds are actually quite smart; scientists now acknowledge that these animals are vastly more intelligent than they'd realized.69 Chickens and turkeys are also quite sociable, which may explain the growing trend of keeping them as pets. Those who keep pet chickens or turkeys describe birds who play with them, seek them out for affection, and even cavort with the family dog. There are also websites dedicated exclusively to living with companion birds. For instance, at mypetchicken.com, proud “bird owners” can post pictures of their favorite chickens for all to admire.
Nevertheless, in the United States we kill and consume approximately nine billion birds a year for their flesh or eggs.70 “Broiler” chickens and turkeys are raised for their meat, and though in natural conditions they live up to ten years, in CAFOs they have a life span of seven weeks or sixteen weeks, respectively—which means that, whenever we consume poultry, we are, in fact, eating baby birds. The birds' severely shortened life span is largely due to both selective breeding and their being fed a diet so full of growth-promoting drugs71 that they grow at double the speed they would naturally. For this reason, these birds suffer from numerous structural deformities. Their legs are unable to hold their weight and are often twisted and broken; they cannot move much due to chronic joint pain. And when it comes time to be shipped to slaughter, as they are grabbed and crammed into crates that are stacked on top of one another, they can suffer broken or dislocated wings, hips, and legs, as well as internal hemorrhages.72
Birds raised for meat spend their lives in barren sheds—or “broiler houses”—that typically hold 20,000 animals at a time, with more modern facilities holding even larger numbers of individuals,73 and which are so crowded it is difficult to see the floor. In these conditions, the birds are unable to carry out any of their natural behaviors, such as foraging and roosting, and they develop psychotic, stress-induced behaviors, such as feather pecking and cannibalism. Often, in order to prevent them from pecking each other to death, a hot blade is used to cut off the front part of their beaks, without anesthesia, at birth. This procedure, known as debeaking, can lead to infection, the growth of neurological tumors, or death if the bird doesn't have enough of a beak left to use for drinking or eating.74
The birds that survive the broiler house are then sent to slaughter. In poultry slaughterhouses, where production speeds are even faster than those for other animals (the average is 8,400 animals per hour),75 birds are thrown onto conveyors where they are grabbed, sometimes handfuls of them at a time, and hooked upside down on shackles. While the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires other animals to be rendered unconscious before being killed, birds are exempt and are slaughtered while fully conscious. Their throats are slit by either hand or machine, and they are then dumped into scalding water to loosen their feathers. A number of birds end up being boiled alive.
Josh Balk, an activist who had worked undercover at a Perdue chicken slaughter plant in 2004 before becoming a director at the Humane Society of the United States, spoke with me about his experience at the plant. He also videotaped and published his accounts of the experience, in particular the workers' ongoing aggression toward the birds. Balk kept a daily log,76 and following are excerpts:
Nearly every chicken responded with screams and violent physical reactions from the moment they were grabbed by workers and as they went through the line. The screaming of the birds and the frenzied flapping of their wings were so loud that you had to yell to the worker next to you, who was standing less than two feet away, just so he could hear you.
I saw an employee kick a chicken off the floor fan and routinely saw chickens being thrown around the room. . . . While one of the workers was talking about football, he “spiked” a chicken onto the conveyer belt, pretending he had scored a touchdown.
I saw about 50 birds being dumped from the transport crates onto the conveyer belt, a distance of approximately eight feet. The crate tipped them all at once, so they fell on top of each other. The screaming was intense during the whole process. I looked onto the conveyer belt and could clearly see chickens with broken legs and wings, limbs sticking out in unnatural angles.
I . . . noticed that our line leader seemed generally more hostile toward the birds today, even yelling profanities at them when he threw them. During one break, a worker repeatedly slapped a chicken in the face until the line started again.
There were so many dead birds on the floor of the hanging room that it was difficult to take a step without stepping on one.
As with other species destined for human consumption, the public is shielded from witnessing the lives and deaths of some nine billion chickens per year. As Balk explained, “Being there firsthand to hear the screams and to smell the stench of death in the air is something that most people would never . . . experience.”
CAN THEY SUFFER?
Calling for the humane treatment of animals, seventeenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued, “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but rather, ‘Can they suffer?’” The question of sentience—the ability to feel pleasure and pain—has been at the center of arguments surrounding both human and animal welfare.
Historically, members of vulnerable groups have been believed to have a higher tolerance for pain, an assumption often invoked to justify suffering. For instance, fifteenth-century scientists would nail dogs to boards by their paws in order to cut them open and experiment on them while fully conscious, and they dismissed the dogs' howling as simply a mechanical response—as little different from the noise of a clock whose springs have been struck. Similarly, until the early 1980s, American doctors performed major surgery on infants without using painkillers or any anesthetic; the babies' cries were explained as mere instinctive reactions.77And because African slaves were thought to feel less pain than white people, it was easier to justify the brutal experience of slavery.
Because the experience of pain is subjective, it is easy to argue against the suffering of another. In other words, since we aren't inside another's body, we can only assume what they may be feeling—and if we have a vested interested in assuming that they are not in pain, it is all too easy to believe this to be true. Our assumptions stem from our beliefs, and the very belief systems that enable us to inflict suffering on others actively work to keep themselves alive. So it is no wonder that we don't err on the side of caution—or reason—when it comes to carnistic practices that cause animals pain. Consider, for instance, the common assumption that it is nothing more than instinct that drives lobsters to scramble to escape the pot in which they are being boiled alive. Though we have no reason to believe that they are not in pain, though it is only logical to assume they are fleeing scalding water because it hurts, and though instinct and sentience can and do coexist (one does not preclude the other), most people choose to believe otherwise.
Objective research is one way to counter our subjective perception of others' experience. Researchers have, for instance, demonstrated that neural pathways in neonates are developed enough for infants to feel pain, and neonates are no longer denied anesthetics. Scientists have also presented sufficient evidence that crustaceans are indeed sentient; some municipalities have therefore made it illegal to boil lobsters alive,78 and Whole Foods Market, the world's leading organic and natural-food retailer, no longer sells live lobsters or soft-shell crabs on the grounds that their handling and sale is inhumane.79
And despite the poultry industry's claims that humans cannot truly know how chickens feel, there is now evidence that strongly suggests birds not only suffer, but actively seek to anesthetize their pain. Researchers took a group of 120 chickens, half of whom were lame, and offered them two types of feed: normal feed and feed that contained an anti-inflammatory painkiller. The lame chickens consumed up to 50 percent more drugged feed than did the nonlame birds and walked better as a result. A second, similar study found that the more severe a chicken's lameness, the more of the drugged feed the bird consumed. Researchers concluded that the birds were likely self-medicating and that they can, and do, suffer.80
It is ironic that so many of our “cute” pictures of animals—on cards, in posts, in calendars, and so forth—contain images of newly born chicks, when every year millions of these baby birds are treated in ways that most of us wouldn't imagine. Egg-laying hens, or birds used for egg production, are born in commercial hatcheries, in industrial incubators. The male chicks are of no economic value and are therefore discarded shortly after birth. They can be dumped into a massive grinder and ground up alive, gassed, or thrown in garbage bins where they die from suffocation or dehydration.81 About 80 percent of egg-laying factory-farmed hens are stuffed into battery cages, which are wire cages that hold an average of six birds and are about the size of a square filing cabinet.82
Hens spend their entire lives in battery cages,83 where they must eat, sleep, and defecate; and where they cannot even open their wings. The bottoms of the cages are made of wire so that the bird's droppings can fall through the openings, and the hens' limbs can easily become entangled in the mesh. The wires on the sides and top of the cages scrape off the birds' feathers and cause bruises, and some hens neurotically rub their chests against these wires until they are bald and bleeding. Battery cages are considered so cruel that they have been banned in a number of countries and some states, though they remain widely used throughout the US.84
Because the hens have been genetically manipulated to lay twenty to thirty times as many eggs as their ancestors,85 their brittle bones frequently break, as the calcium in their skeletons is disproportionately diverted to eggshell formation. Another consequence of this artificial selection to lay unnaturally large numbers of eggs is uterine prolapse. When an egg gets stuck against the uterine wall, it can pull the uterus out with it. Unless the uterus is pushed back into the hen's body, other hens will peck at it until she bleeds to death or dies of infection; in each case, it usually takes two days for the hen to die.86
When they can no longer produce eggs profitably, the hens are pulled out of their cages, sometimes several in a handful, and their limbs, which are weakened and ensnared in the wires, often tear. When she is just over one year old, the egg-laying hen is sent to slaughter.87
DEATH BY WOOD CHIPPER:
HUMANE, OR INSANE?
In 2003, the LA Times reported that workers at an egg ranch in San Diego fed “squirming birds by the bucket into [a wood chipper], then turn[ed] the mashed remains with dirt and heap[ed] the mixture into piles.” According to the Times, veterinarian Gregg Cutler, a member of the animal welfare committee of the American Veterinary Medical Association, authorized the procedure.88 Prior to the incident, Cutler had been in attendance at a meeting of poultry ranchers discussing how to deal with chickens during an outbreak of Newcastle disease, an avian viral infection. Cutler told the Times that “[n]o idea was too crazy. We were in desperation trying to deal with this disease.” But the 30,000 hens who were being tossed into the wood chipper in San Diego were not infected with Newcastle disease; they had simply stopped producing eggs. Still, according to one of the ranch owners, Cutler and other veterinarians approved the procedure and called it humane. Charges were not pressed against Cutler, and though the San Diego district attorney's office investigated the ranch to assess for animal cruelty, they concluded that there was no evidence of criminal intent on the part of the owners, who were “just following professional advice.”
Because most people believe it is possible to procure milk without harming the cow, they assume that dairy products are naturally cruelty free. “Naturally” is the operative word here since, like all contemporary carnistic products, milk production is anything but natural.
Many cows in the United States spend their lives in dairy factories, where they are either chained by the neck and confined within tiny stalls in sheds, or live outdoors in overcrowded, fenced-in feedlots. In the feedlots, the cows eat out of a conveyor belt along a fence, and the ground they stand and lie on is concrete, saturated with urine and feces.89
Cows raised for dairy are injected with genetically engineered growth hormones and are artificially impregnated every year, in order to maximize milk production.90 In most dairies in the United States, the cows are milked by machines for ten months of the year, which includes the nine-to-ten-month period during which they are pregnant.91 This process of continual impregnation and lactation stresses their bodies so much that many cows develop lameness and mastitis, an infection and sometimes-massive inflammation of the udder. The cow's system is so overworked that her normal metabolic process may be insufficient to keep up with her physical output, and so her natural, herbivorous diet of grazing pasture is supplemented with grain and high-protein, carnivorous feedstuffs made of animal derivatives such as blood products, gelatin, and tallow.92
Though the physical stress these cows endure is significant, it is quite possible that their greatest suffering comes from the emotional trauma they endure each year after giving birth. Their male offspring are used to produce veal,93 and the females are used for dairy production. As I mentioned earlier, cows are intimately bonded with their calves, whom they may nurse for up to a year. In dairy factories, however, the calf is removed usually within hours of birth so the cow's milk can be diverted for human consumption. Often the calf is dragged away from the mother, as the cow bellows hysterically. Other times, to prevent the cow from being provoked, she is taken to another part of the facility to be milked, and the calf is removed in her absence. Like human mothers, cows can become frenzied and desperate when they cannot find their offspring. They will bellow for days, frantically searching for their calves, and sometimes even turning violent., thrashing and kicking at workers. There are even instances of cows escaping and traveling for miles to find their calves on other farms.94
Though cows have a natural lifespan of approximately twenty years, after only four years in a dairy factory they are considered spent and are sent to slaughter.95 A significant proportion of US ground beef is made from cows who had been used for dairy.96
Many people have a soft spot for babies, bovines notwithstanding. Most of us are touched by the sight of a newborn calf entering the world, and sympathize with his or her innocence, fragility, and vulnerability. In fact, wobbly legged calves are often favorites of children's books. Imagine, then, the shock of many people when they learn of the plight of the approximately one million calves a year who are the unwanted by-products of the dairy industry. In fact, if it weren't for the dairy industry, the veal industry would likely not exist.97
Because the male calves who are born to cows used for dairy are of no use to dairy farmers, they are essentially disposed of. Days or even hours after birth, the calves are herded onto a truck—and some need to be dragged since they are not yet able to walk properly, a practice that is now considered inhumane by the USDA.98 These calves end up at auctions, where they may be sold for as little as $50 to veal producers,99 and since they are literally newborns, it is not unusual for calves in the auction ring to have hides still slick from the womb and the umbilical cord still dangling from their stomachs.100
For the duration of their short lives—though some are killed within days, most of these calves live for sixteen to eighteen weeks—they are chained or tethered at the neck and confined to stalls so tiny they can't even turn around or lie down normally.*101 And in order to produce the pale color that veal is known for, the animals are typically fed an unnatural diet lacking in iron, so that they are in a state of chronic borderline anemia. Calves raised for veal spend their lives immobilized and sickly, and not surprisingly, they have been observed to exhibit some of the same neurotic behaviors as other animals under intense stress: abnormal head tossing and scraping, kicking, scratching, and chewing.
The slaughter of calves is no different than the slaughter of other animals; they are meant to be stunned before being shackled,103 but again, this method is far from perfect. A worker that Eisnitz interviewed described a part of the process:
In the morning the big holdup was the calves. To get done with them faster, we'd put eight or nine of them in the knocking box at a time. As soon as they start going in, you start shooting, the calves are jumping, they're all piling up on top of each other. You don't know which ones got shot and which ones didn't get shot at all, and you forget to do the bottom ones. They're hung anyway, and down the line they go, wriggling and yelling. The baby ones—two, three weeks old—I felt bad killing them so I just let them walk past.104
There seems to be a point at which the violence of carnism is such that even the most powerful defenses of the system will falter.
Many of us feel so removed from fish and other commonly consumed animals from the sea* that we don't even think of their flesh as meat. For instance, when a meat eater** learns that someone is vegetarian, the meat eater will often respond by asking, “So, you only eat fish?” We tend not to perceive aquatic animals' flesh as meat because—though we know they're neither plants nor minerals—we often don't think of aquatic animals as animals. And by extension, we don't think of these beings as sentient, as having lives that matter to them. We thus relate to the animals of the sea as if they were anomalous plants, plucking them from the ocean as easily as we pluck an apple from a tree.
But are aquatic animals the mindless, insensate organisms many of us assume them to be? Not according to a number of neurobiologists, animal behaviorists, and other scientists around the world. There is a significant body of research demonstrating that fish and other animals from the sea possess both intelligence and the capacity to feel pain. Research on the intelligence of aquatic animals has, for example, yielded evidence that fish do not forget what they've experienced just moments before, but have a memory span of at least three months.105 Moreover, Oxford University scientist Dr. Theresa Burt de Perera determined that fish can develop “mental maps” of their surroundings that allow them to memorize and navigate changes in their environment—a task that is beyond the cognitive ability of hamsters. Because of such findings, it is now illegal in the city of Monza, Italy, to keep goldfish confined in small bowls.106 And lobsters, some of whom have a lifespan longer than that of humans, possess over 400 types of chemical receptors on their antennae, which, according to Dr. Jelle Atema of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, may enable them to detect the sex, species, and even mood of another animal.
I pointed out earlier in this chapter that scientists have demonstrated the sentience of some types of crustaceans such that legislation has been passed protecting these species. Similarly, evidence that other aquatic animals can feel pain is amassing; for instance, researchers have found that fish have a number of pain receptors in various parts of their bodies, and they emit neurotransmitters that act as pain killers much as human endorphins do.107 In one study, researchers from the Roslin Institute and the University of Edinburgh injected the lips of one group of fish with a painful, acidic substance and they injected the lips of another group with saline. The first group of fish exhibited a rocking motion “strikingly similar to the kind of motion seen in stressed . . . mammals.” Moreover, the animals were clearly suffering: they rubbed their lips on the gravel in their tank and against the tank walls, and didn't resume feeding for almost three times longer than the control group. (This study has spurred the debate about the ethics of recreational fishing, with animal advocates arguing that impaling fish in their mouths for fun is a form of animal cruelty.)
Other research has suggested that aquatic animals may actually experience a post-traumatic reaction to pain. In a landmark study, scientists from Purdue University and the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science attached foil heaters to two groups of fish, and administered morphine to one group. They raised the temperature of the foil to observe the reaction of the fish (no fish were permanently harmed in the experiment). The researchers assumed that the morphine would enable the fish to withstand more heat. As it turned out, both groups of fish wriggled at the same temperature, leading the researchers to conclude that the wriggling was a reflexive reaction and didn't indicate pain. However, after the fish had been returned to their tanks, those who hadn't been given morphine exhibited defensive behaviors, indicating anxiety or wariness. The researchers determined that the fish were having a post-traumatic response to the pain: “They turned that pain into fear like we do.”
Nevertheless, in the United States, 47 billion aquatic animals are slaughtered each year, many of whom are destined for human consumption.108 There are two ways that these animals are captured, raised, and killed: by commercial fishing and through aquatic farming.109 Each of these methods causes intensive suffering to the animals and extensive damage to the environment.
Commercial fishing is responsible not only for the depletion of 90 percent of the world's fish stocks, or subpopulations,110 but also for serious injury to other species of animals. One method used to catch fish is by dragging long nets beneath the surface of the ocean. These nets result in massive amounts of “bycatch”—captured animals other than those targeted.111 It is estimated that each year, over 63 million pounds, or 30 million tons, of sea animals, including birds, turtles, dolphins, and unwanted fish, are thrown back into the ocean, dead or dying; and nets left at sea continue to ensnare seabirds and other animals who unwittingly encounter them.112 In some places, fisheries use dynamite or cyanide in lieu of nets, but such methods can destroy entire ecosystems.113 Commercial fishing poses such a threat to marine biodiversity that it's been referred to as “underwater clear-cutting.”
Some people choose to eat farm-raised fish rather than commercially caught fish to help preserve the oceans' biodiversity. However, most of the feed used for farm-raised fish comes from the sea; it is estimated that for every pound of farmed salmon (the third-most-consumed fish in the US) produced, up to five pounds of marine life are used. Farmed fish are raised in aquafarms, which are CAFOs for sea animals and which produce 21 percent of the fish consumed in the US and 47 percent of the fish consumed globally.114 These facilities can be either land based, in controlled, indoor environments; or ocean based, situated close to the shoreline. Both types of aquafarms hold tens of thousands of fish or other aquatic animals packed into overcrowded pens that are rife with parasites and disease. To control for illness, accelerate growth, and modify reproductive behaviors, the animals are given antibiotics, pesticides, and hormones and some are genetically modified.115 The chemicals are absorbed by the animals and also leech out into the environment, ending up in our digestive systems and our ecosystem. It is not uncommon for fish to escape from ocean-based pens, and when they do, they may spread disease or reproduce and contaminate the gene pool.116
Fish may be slaughtered in a number of ways.117 Commercially caught fish are often left to suffocate to death after being landed. Farmed fish are typically removed from their pens by a pump, and dumped into a slaughter area. There, various slaughter methods may be applied, including electrocution, which leads to a lethal, epileptic-like seizure; percussive stunning, which is administering a blow to the head with a club; live chilling, in which the animal is left on ice and frozen alive; suffocation; or spiking, where a spike is inserted through the animal's brain.
Despite the violence inherent in the production of sea food, many people are undisturbed by the sight of at least some aspects of this process. So the primary defense of the carnistic system, invisibility, plays a lesser role when it comes to processing aquatic animals; most people can witness fish slaughter, for instance, without experiencing the trauma they might feel witnessing the slaughter of a pig. It would seem that, because aquatic animals appear so fundamentally different from humans, so alien, we feel sufficiently distanced from them so that their suffering remains invisible even when it's in plain sight.
In recent years, as awareness of the violence inherent in contemporary animal agriculture has risen, more and more people have chosen to withhold their support from an industry that they recognize runs counter to their core moral values of compassion and justice. So of course, carnistic industry has sought to counter this trend, in no small part by offering people the option of consuming animals who are supposedly happy to be eaten—by producing so-called humane meat, eggs, and dairy.
“Humanely” raised animals often suffer extensively. Even though they have more room to move around, they are often nevertheless still subjected to painful practices, such as castration without anesthesia (as with meat production) or having their offspring thrown into meat grinders (as with egg production) or removed hours after birth (as with dairy production). And almost all animals ultimately end up at essentially the same slaughterhouses.118 As such, the very notion of humane carnistic products is irrational.
It can be difficult to appreciate the absurdity of “compassionate carnism” unless we step outside the carnistic box. So consider this: most of us would find it cruel to slaughter a happy, healthy, golden retriever simply because people like the way her thighs taste—yet when the exact same thing is done to individuals of other species, we are expected to consider it humane. Humane meat, eggs, and dairy—compassionate carnism—is, indeed, a contradiction in terms.
“THIS OBSCENE . . . TORTURE HAS GOT TO
STOP, AND ONLY PEOPLE LIKE US CAN HELP.”
In South Korea, millions of dogs are killed for their meat every year. While the Korean dogmeat trade is not officially sanctioned by the government, neither is it reprehended.
In 2002, the British Telegraph published an article documenting the lives and deaths of the dogs raised for their meat:
The stench and the yelps of caged dogs may be stomach churning, but Lee Wha-jin happily slaps down dishes of dog-meat stew on the white plastic tabletops of his restaurant in the notorious Moran night market in Seoul.
At the rear of shop after shop, eight-month-old puppies—considered to be the prime age for eating—are packed into tiny cages welded together in rows three or four high.
Customers choose which of the live animals they want. The dog is then taken to the back of the shop where a flimsy curtain or a swinging door obscures the sight, but not the sound, of a hideous death. . . . .
Before arriving in the grim array of cages behind restaurants, most dogs have had to endure the misery of a Korean canine farm hidden in the hills of the countryside. It is not unusual for puppies to grow up 10 to a cage, covered in sores and lice. . . .
The dogs' deaths are as inhumane as their rearing. The majority are beaten to death, as it is thought to stimulate the production of adrenalin that South Korean men believe will bolster their virility.
Once dead, or nearly dead, the dogs are dropped into boiling water, skinned and hung by the jaw from a meat hook. Many cooks then use a blow torch to glaze the carcass.119
The South Korean dogmeat trade has been met with violent opposition from animal advocacy groups and foreigners—many of whom regularly consume the meat of pigs, chickens, and bovines. Lee Won-Bok, president of the Korea Association for Animal Protection, said, “It's horrible to imagine dog meat on display next to beef and ham at supermarkets.” And horrified bloggers on the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)'s website echoed his sentiment. Like Won-Bok, the bloggers have given voice to what many people feel when they become aware of animal cruelty:*
[D]ecent people can not bring themselves to confront this issue because of the sheer and utter horror food and fur dogs/cats etc. go through in the far east, millions of dogs and cats are skinned alive, boiled alive, some even skinned alive THEN boiled alive. [T]he far east is responsible for the worst, most obscene cruelty towards animals this planet has ever seen, and it's on a vast scale.
. . . [M]ost people only see and hear what they want to and that because this isn't taking place here in the USA that people will tend to ignore it but just because this is happening overseas it won't go away. People need to get their heads out of the sand and stand up for these animals.
For dogs that are eventually killed for consumption, if they even have a life, it is a life of sheer misery. . . . Dogs are neither wild animals nor live-stock. . . . Everyone all over the world must act now. Save dogs in Korea. We believe you can.
[I']ve seen cruelty from all around the world, but the far east is truly shocking in its attitude towards animals why is this? [M]y theory is cos [sic] they know the enlightened west generally give dogs/cats the respect they deserve, and their backward societys [sic] are unwilling to catch up.
[I] gather that many [people] are utterly ignorant of the situation in the Far East, and to be honest you can not really blame them, after all, how many decent people would even dream that animals could be subjected to such unnecessary alien cruelty.
[D]ecent people everywhere have to confront this issue, despite the fact it will give them nightmares. . . .
[T]his obscene satanic devlish [sic] torture has got to stop, and only people like us can help.
Sir Paul McCartney once claimed that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. He believed that if we knew the truth about meat production, we'd be unable to continue eating animals.
Yet on some level we do know the truth. We know that carnistic production is a messy business, but we choose not to know just how messy it is. We know that meat comes from animals, but we choose not to connect the dots. And often, we eat animals and choose not to know we're even making a choice. Violent ideologies are structured so that it is not only possible, but inevitable, that we are aware of an unpleasant truth on one level while being oblivious to it on another. Common to all violent ideologies is this phenomenon of knowing without knowing. And it is the essence of carnism.
Inherent in violent ideologies is an implicit contract between producer and consumer to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Sure, carnistic businesses go to great lengths to protect their secrets. But we make their job easy for them. They tell us not to look, and we turn away. They tell us the billions of animals who we never see live outdoors on peaceful farms, and as illogical as this is, we don't question it. We make their job easy because on some level most of us don't want to know the way things really are.
But at the same time, we also want and deserve the freedom to make informed decisions, to be free thinkers and active consumers. Such freedom is obviously impossible if we aren't even aware that we are making choices in the first place. When an invisible ideology guides our beliefs and behaviors, we become casualties of a system that has stolen our freedom to think for ourselves and to act accordingly.
When we understand the way things really are—when we recognize the inner workings of the system—then, and only then, are we in a position to make our choices freely. Naming carnism and demystifying the practices of carnistic production can help us begin to see through the façade of the system. Schlosser eloquently expresses this point, and it seems only fitting to end this chapter with the conclusion of his journey through the lives and deaths of the animals we eat:
As I walk along the fence, a group of cattle approaches me, looking me straight in the eye, like dogs hoping for a treat, and follow me, out of some mysterious impulse. I stop and try to absorb the whole scene: the cool breeze, the cattle and their gentle lowing, a cloudless sky, steam rising from the [meat] plant in the moonlight. And then I notice that the building does have one window, a small square of light on the second floor. It offers a glimpse of what's hidden behind this huge, blank façade. Through the little window you can see bright-red carcasses on hooks, going round and round.120
* attributed
* The general practices described in this book are similar around the world, even though legislation affecting specific procedures sometimes differs.
* I have retained some older sources that I used for the original edition of this book because the information they contain is still relevant.
* The technical term for repetitive behaviors is stereotypies. Stereotypies are a symptom of stress seen in a number of animal species (e.g., large cats pacing in a cage at the zoo), but they are not classified as a symptom of PSS.
* Gestation crates have been considered so inhumane that they've been banned in a number of states and nations. The European Union banned them in 2013, and both Smithfield Foods51 and Maple Leaf Foods, the largest pork producers in the United States and Canada, have wholly or partially banned (or said they would ban) their use as well.
* Veal crates are banned in some US states and in the EU102.
* Aquatic animals come from both salt- and freshwater bodies. However, at times I use the term “sea” in reference to aquatic animals because the vast majority of aquatic animals come from the ocean, and because I wish to avoid cumbersome language.
** As I mentioned in chapter 2, “meat eater” does not accurately represent the phenomenon of carnistic consumption. A more appropriate phrase would be “carnistic consumer.” However, so as not to bog the reader down with too much unfamiliar terminology, I have chosen to use “meat eater” throughout this book.
* The following statements are not my own; they are from online commenters who no doubt consume meat from cows, chickens, and pigs but nevertheless decry the production and consumption of meat from dogs. These comments are simply intended to highlight the fact that consumers of carnistic products typically fail to see the contradiction in their own beliefs and behaviors.