Let’s Face It: Industrial Farming Is a Scandal
In factory farms, animal mistreatment is rife.
Though I love his music, I don’t agree with Morrissey that ‘meat is murder’, and not just because murder has a specific legal definition. Though I was a vegetarian for two years as a teenager, I eat meat from time to time today, in part because I think it is one aspect of a healthy human diet, and in part because I reject the idea that raising and killing animals for food is invariably unpleasant for those animals. (They also happen to be delicious.) I am mindful, too, that, somewhat paradoxically, those farmers that raise animals for food have an incentive to protect the species to which those animals belong: if they didn’t, they would no longer have a job. But I do think it likely that in, say, twenty years, we will be appalled that we let industrial and battery farming go on for so long.
In factory farms, animal mistreatment is rife. Lameness, weak or broken bones, infections and organ failure are common health problems for factory-farmed animals. Male and unhealthy female chicks, often pumped so full of hormones that their legs cannot support their bodies, are habitually thrown into blenders. Piglets are mutilated and trapped in their own feedlots, cows are paralysed by the sheer stress they are under. Here, workers rarely last long because a job that involves such inhumanity towards humans as well as animals is a job no one wants. According to one Huffington Post article, ‘Workers in the meat industry make an average of $23,000 a year, work 10+ hours a day, are pushed so hard they often defecate in their pants to avoid slowing down, and suffer a repetitive motion injury rate 30 times the national average.’ Anyone who took such a job for reasons other than dire financial need would be the kind of person worth avoiding.
Male and unhealthy female chicks, often pumped so full of hormones that their legs cannot support their bodies, are habitually thrown into blenders.
We, the consumers, allow this barbarism to continue because we do not have to witness it. We are sufficiently cut off from the concrete reality of factory farming to feel little of the empathy for the animals and people that we would usually. We dutifully give our money to the RSPCA and pamper the animals we care for (my cats are little princesses, believe me) and then without any inner sense of contradiction feast on creatures tortured to death after a brief, miserable life. The existence of a factory-farmed animal is like a human in Hobbes’ state of nature: ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Thus we happily combine sentimentality towards animals (increasing each time a new Pixar film comes out) with an indifference to supreme brutality.
The existence of a factory-farmed animal is like a human in Hobbes’ state of nature: ‘nasty, brutish and short’.
You may say that we all keep two sets of books. Children in the Congo tear the rare-earth minerals that power our smartphones from the ground. Where are our tears for them? But two wrongs do not make a right. If we cannot do everything, it does not follow that we shouldn’t do anything. You may say that factory farming makes meat and dairy cheaper. But we pay a high price in respect of the degradation of the natural world, the health risks posed by processed meat and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and, of course, the welfare of animals. We pay a high price in respect of body and soul.
There is an alternative, in the form of smaller-scale, often regenerative, and more traditional farms, which have been squeezed to breaking point by a soulless industrial farming industry that is trashing the planet and our health. In my native United Kingdom, many farmers possess enormous skill and knowledge that has been passed down over generations—precisely the kind of know-how that protects the welfare of animals, the natural world and the quality of the food that finally finds its way onto your plate. No decent person can stand cruelty to animals, even if she is at peace with killing them for food. Given the myriad other costs of factory farming, it might be time for a change of tack.
