Meatonomics (10 page)

Notwithstanding that twenty-eight hours is a long time to go without basic comforts, another limitation of the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law is that it doesn't apply to chickens or turkeys—together accounting for 98 percent of all land animals killed for food in the United States. The law also contains loopholes big enough to drive a cattle truck through. The twenty-eight-hour travel limit applies only to interstate trips, so intrastate travel is exempt—even though animals might spend days traveling eight hundred miles or more in a big state like Texas or California. Additionally, the law can simply be ignored when necessary to overcome “unavoidable causes that could not have been anticipated or avoided when being careful.”
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The twenty-eight-hour limit can also be easily extended to thirty-six hours if the animals' owner makes such a request in writing to the carrier.
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Further, only those who “knowingly and willfully” violate the law are subject to penalties; those whose “mere negligence” results in death, pain, or suffering to animals don't violate the law.
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Then there's the maximum penalty for violations: $650. The threat of being forced to pay less than the value of one beef steer is unlikely to influence the behavior of a commercial animal transporter.

It should come as no surprise that a law as toothless as the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law is rarely enforced—after all, what's the point of wasting thousands of dollars of government resources to fine someone $650? In the last fifty years, a grand total of zero federal decisions show a government agency trying to enforce the law. And in 2009, a Freedom of Information Act Request to the USDA and the US Department of Justice revealed that neither organization had investigated or prosecuted anyone under the law in the previous
five decades.
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Given the law's applicability to only 2 percent of farm animals, its massive loopholes, its nominal penalty, and the fact that it is never enforced, we can dismiss the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law as purely symbolic.

The other federal law that purports to require humane treatment of farm animals is the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (HMSA). HMSA requires that all livestock be rendered “insensible to pain” before being butchered. However, as with the Twenty-Eight-Hour Law, HMSA's scope and relevance are extremely limited because the law is subject to massive exceptions and inconsistent enforcement. There are no fines or penalties for its violation. Chickens, turkeys, and fish are excluded from HMSA, although these animals constitute 99 percent of the animals slaughtered for food in this country. And HMSA applies only in the final instant of a farm animal's life—the moment of its slaughter. Except for the largely irrelevant Twenty-Eight-Hour Law, neither HMSA nor any other federal law protects farm animals from cruelty during their lives other than at the moment of their death.

As another exception, animals are not protected by HMSA if killed according to a religious method, such as
kashrut
, which produces kosher meat, or a similar method for
halal
meat. These methods require that the slaughtered animal be conscious at death, which calls for a knife cut to the neck, severing the carotid arteries and causing rapid loss of oxygen to the brain. Not surprisingly, this method of slaughter is controversial. Slaughterhouse designer Temple Grandin said of her first visit to a kosher slaughterhouse:

Each terrified animal was forced with an electric prod to run into a small stall which had a slick floor on a forty-five degree angle. This caused the animal to slip and fall so that workers could attach the chain to its rear leg in order to raise it into the air. As I watched this nightmare, I thought, “This should not be happening in a civilized society.” In my diary I wrote, “If hell exists, I am in it.”
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But by far the biggest problem in enforcing humane slaughter is that industrial killing methods, driven by considerations of profit rather than animal welfare, make it impractical or impossible for most slaughterhouses to comply with HMSA. Workers on fast-moving butchering lines must stun, kill, and dismember three hundred or more animals per hour or face discipline from their employers, and at that speed, it's impossible to stun or kill every animal properly. As a result, animals are routinely scalded, bled, skinned, dismembered, and/or eviscerated while awake and fully conscious. In 2000, workers at a slaughterhouse run by the nation's largest meat processor, IBP, Inc. (now Tyson Foods) provided numerous statements under oath about IBP's practices. One worker said in representative testimony:

Thirty percent of the cows are not properly knocked [stunned] and get to the first legger [worker who cuts off animals' feet] alive. . . . Cows have gone alive from the knocker to the sticker to the belly ripper (he cuts the hide down the center of the cow's abdomen) to the tail ripper (he opens the [rectum]) to the first legger (he skins a back leg and then cuts off the foot) to the first butter (he skins from the breast to the belly and a little bit on the back) to the worker who cuts off both front feet. . . . I can tell that these cows are alive because they're holding their heads up and a lot of times they make noise.
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The USDA is responsible for enforcing HMSA. The National Joint Council of Food Inspection, the union that represents the USDA's 7,500 meat inspectors, has repeatedly voiced its frustration with USDA policies that make it difficult for inspectors to perform their job duties. Meat inspectors want to do their jobs and monitor slaughterhouses' compliance with HMSA, but they often lack the access, or the support from the USDA, to do so. In 2001, the meat inspectors' union joined a number of other groups to present a petition to the USDA, citing systemic, nationwide problems in enforcing HMSA and demanding that the USDA do a better job of enforcing the law.

Specifically, the petition stated that slaughterhouses across the country were failing to stun animals properly and were dragging and
beating conscious animals, and that USDA inspectors were largely powerless to take any action. In other words, these inspectors were being sent into battle without weapons or support. Arthur Hughes, speaking for the meat inspectors' union, cited a lack of both training and access to slaughter areas as the chief problems facing union members. “We are the people who are charged by Congress with enforcing the HMSA, but most of our inspectors have little to no access to those areas of the plants where animals are being handled and slaughtered,” Hughes said. “The HMSA is not . . . a priority at all. And the USDA doesn't train us—many of the new inspectors don't even know the HMSA exists.”
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The following year, Congress also expressed its frustration with the USDA's failure to enforce HMSA. Congress stated in the 2002 farm bill: “It is the sense of the Congress that the Secretary of Agriculture should fully enforce [HMSA],” and “it is the policy of the United States that the slaughtering of livestock . . . shall be carried out only by humane methods, as provided in [HMSA].”
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The only reason for Congress to take this unusual step—restating the provisions of existing law—was to remind the USDA to enforce the law.

Despite petitions, Congress's admonition, and a regular stream of undercover investigations and newspaper articles documenting problems in the nation's slaughterhouses, the USDA's enforcement of HMSA continues to be grossly inadequate. In the fall of 2007, the Humane Society of the United States concluded a six-week undercover investigation at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company in Chino, California. The investigation found that although five USDA inspectors were regularly stationed at the plant, diseased and infected immobile “downer” cows were routinely slaughtered and illegally sold as meat for human consumption. Because the cows were unable or unwilling to walk to slaughter, various inhumane techniques were employed to move them. These techniques, all of which violated HMSA, included gouging their eyes with a baton, kicking and beating them, and shooting pressurized water into their nostrils and face. This investigation led to the USDA recalling 143 million pounds of tainted beef—the largest beef recall in history. Several employees
at the plant were charged with crimes, and the plant ultimately closed down. Where were the inspectors? Why didn't they report this illegal activity?

Stanley Painter, then head of the meat inspectors' union, was summoned to Congress in 2008 to answer these questions. He testified that a number of problems routinely hamper meat inspection efforts, including funding cuts, inspector shortages, increased workloads, and supervisors' practices of intimidating line inspectors and rewriting their reports to exonerate violators.
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USDA records indicated the department was short eight hundred inspectors, and a watchdog group found that from 1981 to 2007, the number of inspection personnel per pound of meat inspected dropped by 54 percent.
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When undercover footage emerges to show unsafe or inhumane conditions in meat plants, as it often does, the meat industry is quick to respond. After the massive 2008 beef recall, the American Meat Institute issued a statement which read in part:

The U.S. meat industry has operated under continuous federal inspection since 1906 when the Federal meat inspection system was created. . . . Such intense oversight is unique to our industry. No other industry in agriculture or in other industries, from health care to auto manufacturing, has inspectors on site at all times. . . . Claims that we are not regulated heavily enough or that inspection oversight is lacking are simply outrageous. . . . We will not let a video from what appears to have been a tragic anomaly stand as the poster child for our industry.
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It's accurate that the industry is heavily regulated with respect to the safety, packaging, and labeling of food. But in the area of humane treatment of animals, we've seen that the meat industry is essentially unregulated. There's little relevant state law, and the only relevant federal law, HMSA, is poorly enforced, covers only 1 percent of animals killed for meat, and doesn't apply to animals during any part of
their lives except the moment of their death. Thus, when meat producers claim “intense oversight” requires them to treat farm animals humanely, we should be as suspicious as when Richard Nixon told the world he had nothing to do with that little break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

What about the assertion that abusive and unsafe conditions in factory farms are merely a “tragic anomaly”? Nathan Runkle was a teenager when he founded Mercy for Animals (MFA), but with twenty undercover factory farm investigations under his belt in a decade, the battle-tested muckraker is now a veteran in his late twenties. I asked Runkle about the industry assertion that abusive conditions are anomalous. “Every investigation we have conducted has unearthed heart-wrenching cruelty to animals,” said Runkle, and “every single MFA undercover investigation, without exception, has been conducted at a facility selected completely at random.”

Four of MFA's investigations led to civil or criminal proceedings against animal abusers. Further, a number of the investigations uncovered conditions that are unhealthy for people. In an email to me, Runkle wrote:

While our investigators are inside these factory farms and slaughterhouses, they often uncover practices that raise serious human health and food safety concerns. On factory farms, for example, it's common to find dead hens left to rot and decompose in cages with birds still laying eggs for human consumption. During our investigation at a poultry slaughterhouse, we found that many sick and injured birds—some with cantaloupe-sized tumors—were being snapped onto the slaughterhouse line for human consumption. In New York's largest dairy factory farm, we found that cows with pus-oozing wounds and infections—many also caked with manure—were still being hooked up for milking.
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Anomalies? Animal slaughter takes place in secret, carefully guarded, and locked-down facilities where the public is denied access, in many cases under threat of heightened prosecution pursuant to
ag-gag or ecoterrorism laws. Even when inspectors are present, their access to the killing floor is often restricted, and it's generally impossible for them to meaningfully observe the slaughter of three hundred or more animals per hour.
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Further, it's implausible to think that an overwhelmed slaughterhouse worker required to kill thousands of animals daily would concern himself with the concept of welfare while on the killing floor.

In December 2010, the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service announced a number of measures designed to improve the enforcement of humane slaughter under HMSA.
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Animal protection groups lauded the USDA's adoption of these measures, but so far, there is little evidence that the measures are having any effect. Accordingly, until evidence emerges to the contrary, we must continue to view HMSA as we do other federal and state laws that concern farm animals: as a toothless, largely irrelevant measure of limited scope and poor enforcement that provides little protection for the 30 million US farm animals slaughtered each day. Such laws do, however, protect the animal food industry's sales, and that explains why the industry pushes for them.

When animal food producers spend millions to influence lawmakers on laws they claim will help society, like food safety, it's important to read between the lines. In the real world, corporations exist solely for the benefit of their shareholders. Thus, by law, corporations act only to increase their own profitability,
not
to help society. Railroad tycoon William Vanderbilt expressed this principle with candor when he responded to a reporter's question about whether his railroad kept a particular line open to benefit the public. “The public be damned,” said Vanderbilt. “I don't take any stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody's good but our own, because we are not. When we make a move, we do it because it is in our interest to do so, and not because we expect to do somebody else good. . . . Railroads are not run on sentiment, but on business principles and to pay.”
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