Factory farming

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http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2006/03/21/67620

 

March 22, 2006 Rate this Article

 

 

Factory farming: A moral issue

For low meat prices, the animals, the environment and

rural neighborhoods pay steeply.

 

By Peter Singer

 

 

here is a growing consensus that factory farming of

animals — also known as CAFOs, or concentrated animal

feeding operations — is morally wrong. The American

animal rights movement, which in its early years

focused largely on the use of animals in research, now

has come to see that factory farming represents by far

the greater abuse of animals. The numbers speak for

themselves. In the United States somewhere between 20

million and 40 million birds and mammals are killed

for research every year. That might seem like a lot —

and it far exceeds the number of animals killed for

their fur, let alone the relatively tiny number used

in circuses — but 40 million represents less than two

daysÂ’ toll in AmericaÂ’s slaughterhouses, which kill

about 10 billion animals each year.

 

The overwhelming majority of these animals have spent

their entire lives confined inside sheds, never going

outdoors for a single hour. Their suffering isnÂ’t just

for a few hours or days, but for all their lives. Sows

and veal calves are confined in crates too narrow for

them even to turn around, let alone walk a few steps.

Egg-laying hens are unable to stretch their wings

because their cages are too small and too crowded.

With nothing to do all day, they become frustrated and

attack each other. To prevent losses, producers sear

off their beaks with a hot knife, cutting through

sensitive nerves.

 

Chickens, reared in sheds that hold 20,000 birds, now

are bred to grow so fast that most of them develop leg

problems because their immature bones cannot bear the

weight of their bodies. Professor John Webster of the

University of BristolÂ’s School of Veterinary Science

said: “Broilers are the only livestock that are in

chronic pain for the last 20 percent of their lives.

They donÂ’t move around, not because they are

overstocked, but because it hurts their joints so

much.”

 

Sometimes their legs collapse under them, causing them

to starve to death because they cannot reach their

food. Of course, the producers then cannot sell these

birds, but economically, they are still better off

with the freakishly fast-growing breeds they use. As

an article in an industry journal noted, “simple

calculations” lead to the conclusion that often “it is

better to get the weight and ignore the mortality.”

Another consequence of the genetics of these birds is

that the breeding birds — the parents of the ones sold

in supermarkets — constantly are hungry, because,

unlike their offspring that are slaughtered at just 45

days old, they have to live long enough to reach

sexual maturity. If fed as much as they are programmed

to eat, they soon would be grotesquely obese and die

or be unable to mate. So they are kept on strict

rations that leave them always looking in vain for

food.

 

Opposition to factory farming, once associated mostly

with animal rights activists, now is shared by many

conservatives, among them Matthew Scully, a former

speech writer in President George W. BushÂ’s White

House and the author of “Dominion: The Power of Man,

The Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.” In

Scully’s view, even though God has given us “dominion”

over the animals, we should exercise that dominion

with mercy — and factory farming fails to do so.

ScullyÂ’s writings have found support from other

conservatives, like Pat Buchanan, editor of The

American Conservative, which gave cover-story

prominence to Scully’s essay “Fear Factories: The Case

for Compassionate Conservatism — for Animals,” and

George F. Will, who used his Newsweek column to

recommend ScullyÂ’s book.

 

No less a religious authority than Pope Benedict XVI

has stated that human “dominion” over animals does not

justify factory farming. While head of the Roman

Catholic ChurchÂ’s Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine

of the Faith, the future pope condemned the

“industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in

such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible,

or hens live so packed together that they become just

caricatures of birds.” This “degrading of living

creatures to a commodity” seemed to him “to contradict

the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the

Bible.”

 

Some people think that factory farming is necessary to

feed the growing population of our planet. The truth,

however, is the opposite. No matter how efficient

intensive pork, beef, chicken, egg and milk production

becomes, in the narrow sense of producing more meat,

eggs or milk for each pound of grain we feed the

animals, raising animals on grain remains wasteful.

Far from increasing the total amount of food available

for human consumption, it reduces it.

 

A concentrated animal feeding operation is, as the

name implies, an operation in which we concentrate the

animals and feed them. Unlike cattle or sheep on

pasture, they donÂ’t feed themselves. There lies the

fundamental environmental flaw: Every CAFO relies on

cropland, on which the food the animals eat is grown.

Because the animals, even when confined, use much of

the nutritional value of their food to move, keep warm

and form bone and other inedible parts of their

bodies, the entire operation is an inefficient way of

feeding humans. It places greater demands on the

environment in terms of land, energy and water than

other forms of farming. It would be more efficient to

use the cropland to grow food for humans to eat.

 

Factory farming, overwhelmingly dominated by huge

corporations like Tyson, Smithfield, ConAgra and

Seaboard, has contributed to rural depopulation and

the decline of the family farm. It has nothing going

for it except that it produces food that is, at the

point of sale, cheap. But for that low price, the

animals, the environment and rural neighborhoods have

to pay steeply.

 

Fortunately there are alternatives, including eating a

vegan diet, or buying animal products only from

producers who allow their animals to go outside and

live a minimally decent life. It is time for a shift

in our values. While our society focuses on issues

like gay marriage and the use of embryos for research,

we are overlooking one of the big moral issues of our

day. We should see the purchase and consumption of

factory-farm products, whether by an individual or by

an institution like a university, as a violation of

the most basic ethical standards of how we should

treat animals and the environment.

 

I will be speaking at 7 p.m. Thursday at Ted Mann

Concert Hall.

 

 

Peter Singer is a philosopher and professor of

bioethics at Princeton University and laureate

professor at the University of Melbourne. Please send

comments to letters.

 

 

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