The Animal Manifesto (14 page)

Even children in 4-H programs, who are learning about humane animal husbandry, don’t always appreciate that the “good life” their animals have with them still ends brutally at
the slaughterhouse door. The former mayor of Ojai, California, Suza Francina, has written that 4-H programs should include a trip to the slaughterhouse, so that students understand that, from an animal’s point of view, being sold at the annual county auction is not a happy ending.

Simply put, humans have developed a strong conceptual disconnect because of the distance — physical and emotional — from the slaughterhouse to their house. Sarah Bexell, a conservation and humane educator who has done wonderful work in China to help make children more empathetic, calls it “emotional dissonance.” The individual animal’s torturous journey of indignity is kept hidden and remains unacknowledged by everyone. While we can surely sanitize the animal’s trip for young children, there is no reason they shouldn’t be aware of what “meat” is. For adults, there is no reason they shouldn’t be completely aware of the entire process.

Awareness begins with language, as Crain points out: “We eat pork, not pigs; veal, not calves; meat, not flesh.” When humans rely on euphemisms to describe something, it often indicates moral discomfort, if not outright shame. If we can’t use honest language to describe our food, then we should change who we eat and/or how we care for food animals until we can.

The moral dilemma concerning who we eat is about making humane choices based on what we know about animals, not denying what we know so that we humans can feel less shame about how we treat them: Lobsters feel pain, and don’t like being dropped in boiling water. Fish feel pain, and don’t like hooks in their mouths. Cows and pigs are sentient, emotional animals; they know what happens to them and their loved ones in the slaughterhouse. If we would ask certain animals to give their lives for us, we should treat them with the respect such a request deserves.

It’s been estimated that about 95 percent of all animal use is in agriculture. Thus, the amount of cruelty, pain, suffering, and death that takes place in factory farms far surpasses the total amount of cruelty, pain, suffering, and death in all other venues combined. This is another reason why changing how we treat animals in agriculture is so urgent: it’s the single fastest way to improve the lives of the most animals.

How many animals are we talking about? Every five minutes more than 250,000 animals are slaughtered for food in the United States alone; annually, that amounts to millions of mammals and billions of birds, for an estimated total of approximately 27 billion cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other animals killed each year in the United States “in the name of food.” According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the total number of chickens reared for meat worldwide was nearly 47 billion in 2004, of which approximately 19 percent were produced in the United States, 15 percent in China, 13 percent in the European Union, and 11 percent in Brazil. In Australia 470 million chickens were slaughtered from 2006 to 2007 to feed a demand that has grown a staggering 600 percent in the past fifty years. Heather Moore, who works for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has calculated that an average American eats about 2,500 chickens if they live to age seventy-seven.

It almost goes without saying that the way humans raise these animals is done solely for economic gain and our convenience. The animals are nonconsenting victims of reprehensible torture. Indeed, so much has been published recently about the horrific conditions at factory farms that I won’t dwell on it here. Once in the slaughterhouse, it takes about thirty minutes to turn a
cow into a steak, during which time these sentient beings suffer immensely; in addition, as they wait to be killed, they also see, hear, and smell other cows on their way to becoming a burger. One slaughterhouse worker notes of food animals, “They die piece by piece.” Imagine what it would be like to be a cow hanging upside down in a slaughterhouse waiting to have your throat slashed or a bolt driven into your head. Or a turkey being stomped to death, as was documented in 2008 at the Aviagen Turkeys plant in Lewisburg, West Virginia.

The amount of cruelty that pervades slaughterhouses worldwide is incalculable, and it’s made worse because animals have awareness and feelings. Cows display strong emotions; they feel pain, fear, and anxiety, and studies have shown they worry about the future. They and other agricultural animals make and miss their friends. Veterinarian John Webster and his colleagues have shown how cows within a herd form smaller friendship groups of between two and four animals with whom they spend most of their time, often grooming and licking each other. They also dislike other cows and can bear grudges for months or years. There’s no doubt that cows and other farm animals are sentient beings who care very much about what happens to them. While some have suggested that one solution would be to genetically engineer “pain-free” animals — who wouldn’t suffer physical pain as they went through the grueling process of becoming a meal — the fact that these are still living beings with emotions, and feelings for others, warrants against using them in ways that result in their death.

This is also true for the billions of birds, fish, and invertebrates humans eat. We know fish feel pain and recent research at Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland, shows that lobsters also feel pain; both show a response to painful stimuli that resembles
that of humans. Intensively farmed fish suffer from a range of welfare problems, including physical injuries such as fin erosion, eye cataracts, skeletal deformities, soft tissue anomalies, increased susceptibility to disease, sea lice infestation, high mortality rates, and, in some countries, often inhumane slaughter methods.

Indeed, a natural result of the abusive living conditions on factory farms is that many agricultural animals suffer from disease and illness. Called “downers,” cows sometimes become too sick or weak to stand on their own, and until recently, these animals were still processed as food. The shocking abuse of “downer” cows occurs not just at slaughter plants but may be an everyday happening at livestock auctions and stockyards in the United States, according to an undercover investigation by the U.S. Humane Society. However, there has been some good news recently — in July 2008, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger strengthened the legal protections for downer cows in California, and in March 2009 the United States government banned the use of downer cows for food.

These protections, though laudable, are still less concerned for the animals than for the humans eating them. Raising animals in conditions that foster disease has led, not surprisingly, to a high prevalence of infectious disease in factory-farmed meat. This includes streptococcus, nipah virus, multidrugresistant bacteria, SARS, avian flu, and other diseases. There is also concern that the incredibly contagious H1N1 virus (or what used to be called “swine flu”) came from factory farms. There’s even evidence that workers who kill pigs suffer nerve damage. Physicians at the Austin Medical Center in Minnesota were mystified by three patients who had the same highly unusual symptoms, including fatigue, pain, weakness, numbness, and tingling in the legs and feet. But the patients had
something else in common — all worked at a local meatpacking plant.

Yet another concern is the rampant use of antibiotics with farm animals, which are considered necessary to fight the diseases factory farms make rampant. In the
New York Times,
Nicholas Kristof notes: “We continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.” In a recent study, five of ninety samples of retail pork tested positive for MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, in a store in Louisiana, and a new strain called ST398 is on the rise and appears to be prevalent in hog farms.

It is a biological imperative that we must eat to live, but is there a healthy link in this chain? The connection between alienation and illness couldn’t be clearer: our alienation from animals has led to an abusive agricultural industry that fosters disease, and humans are being made sick by what that industry produces.

“We don’t let hog or dairy farms spread their waste unregulated, and we wouldn’t let a town of 25,000 people dump human manure untreated on open lands. So why should we allow a farm with 150,000 chickens do it?”

— Gerald Winegrad, former Maryland state senator,
voicing concerns about chicken-farm pollution in Maryland

Industrial agriculture doesn’t work well for animals, and we have many reasons to believe it’s not very good for humans
either. Raising animals for food involves a host of extremely important ethical questions, in addition to our health concerns about the way the industry currently works. Last but not least, there are serious environmental concerns. For the moment, let’s put aside the welfare of our fellow animals. Instead, let’s consider to what degree industrial meat production is harming the planet, helping spur climate change, and degrading life for all species.

For example, it’s estimated that by 2025 about 64 percent of humanity will be living in areas of water shortage. The livestock sector is responsible for over 8 percent of global human water use, with 7 percent of global water being used for irrigating crops grown for animal feed. Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gases. In New Zealand, 34.2 million sheep, 9.7 million cattle, 1.4 million deer, and 155,000 goats emit almost 50 percent of that country’s greenhouse gases in the form of methane and nitrous oxide. People are now talking about a “carbon hoofprint” and calling livestock “living smokestacks,” as ways to characterize the large amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. For example, one Swedish study found that “producing a pound of beef creates 11 times as much greenhouse gas emission as a pound of chicken and 100 times more than a pound of carrots.”

According to a 2008 essay in the
New York Times,
titled “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler”:

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume
enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests. . . . The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050.

These are daunting and haunting figures that spell doom for much fertile habitat. Indeed, the article noted that over a five-month span in 2007, 1,250 square miles of Brazilian rain forest were cut down for agriculture and ranching, leading Brazil’s president to announce emergency measures to halt the destruction. In addition to all the resources factory farms consume, we have to cope with how their byproducts damage the environment: how to handle the enormous amounts of manure they generate is perhaps the most obvious concern. Another is that pharmaceutical medicines, pesticides, and chemicals used to treat and protect agricultural animals from sickness can run off directly into waterways and wetlands, harming water quality and other species.

If you’re an environmentalist, it’s impossible to justify eating factory-farmed meat. The facts don’t lie about the incredible and irreversible environmental destruction wrought by factory farms. Indeed, this was made “official” in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the United Nation’s Nobel Prize —winning scientific panel. As one article
summarized the report, “Don’t eat meat, ride a bike, and be a frugal shopper — that’s how you can help brake global warming.” The panel’s head, Rajendra Pachauri, even pleaded directly, saying, “Please eat less meat — meat is a very carbon intensive commodity.”

In fact, when comparing the relative environmental impact of being a vegetarian versus being a “locavore,” a 2008 study at Carnegie Mellon University found that “foregoing red meat and dairy just one day a week achieves more greenhouse gas reductions than eating an entire week’s worth of locally sourced foods. That’s because the carbon footprint of food miles is dwarfed by that of food production. In fact, 83 percent of the average U.S. household’s carbon footprint for food consumption comes from production; transportation represents only 11 percent; wholesaling and retailing account for 5 percent.” It’s been calculated that the carbon footprint of meateaters is almost twice that of vegetarians.

To help emphasize the urgency of this, it’s been calculated that, on average, the world’s 6.7 billion humans are now consuming all resources 30 percent faster than the sustainable rate of replenishment. In the United States, people are consuming resources nearly 90 percent faster than the Earth can replenish them.

By most definitions of “sustainable” — doing something in a way that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs — today’s commercial meat production clearly is not sustainable. If we expand our definition of
sustainable
to include animals — doing something that meets human needs without compromising the needs of other species — then there is no question: factory farms fail every moral and practical test.

I travel a lot and meet wonderful people and wonderful animals. I’ve noticed two trends: One is that most people don’t spend much time thinking about what they eat or wear or the many ways the lives of animals are intertwined with our everyday choices. The other is that, whenever people become aware of how certain choices lead to harm for animals, their compassion and concern naturally spring forth and can lead them to change.