Global
meat consumption is predicted to double by 2020. Yet in Europe and
North America, there is growing concern about the ethics of the way
meat and eggs are produced. The consumption of veal has fallen sharply
since it became widely known that to produce "white" -- actually pale
pink -- veal, newborn calves are separated from their mothers,
deliberately made anemic, denied roughage, and kept in stalls so narrow
that they cannot walk or turn around.
In Europe, mad cow
disease shocked many people, not only because it shattered beef's image
as a safe and healthy food, but also because they learned that the
disease was caused by feeding cattle the brains and nerve tissue of
sheep. People who naively believed that cows ate grass discovered that
beef cattle in feed lots may be fed anything from corn to fish meal,
chicken litter (complete with chicken droppings) and slaughterhouse
waste.
Concern about how we treat farm animals is far from
being limited to the small percentage of people who are vegetarians or
even vegans. Despite strong ethical arguments for vegetarianism, it is
not yet a mainstream position. More common is the view that we are
justified in eating meat, as long as the animals have a decent life
before they are killed.
The problem, as Jim Mason and I
describe in our recent book, "The Way We Eat," is that industrial
agriculture denies animals even a minimally decent life. Tens of
billions of chickens produced today never go outdoors. They are bred to
have voracious appetites and gain weight as fast as possible, then
reared in sheds that can hold more than 20,000 birds. The level of
ammonia in the air from their accumulated droppings stings the eye and
hurts the lungs. Slaughtered at only 45 days old, their immature bones
can hardly bear the weight of their bodies. Some collapse and, unable
to reach food or water, soon die, their fate irrelevant to the
economics of the enterprise as a whole.
Conditions are, if
anything, even worse for laying hens crammed into wire cages so small
that even if there were just one per cage, it would be unable to
stretch its wings. But there are usually at least four hens per cage,
and often more. Under such crowded conditions, the more dominant,
aggressive birds are likely to peck to death the weaker hens in the
cage. To prevent this, producers sear off all birds' beaks with a hot
blade. A hen's beak is full of nerve tissue -- it is, after all, her
principal means of relating to her environment -- but no anesthetic or
analgesic is used to relieve the pain.
Pigs may be the most
intelligent and sensitive of the animals that we commonly eat. When
foraging in a rural village, they can exercise that intelligence and
explore their varied environment. Before they give birth, sows use
straw or leaves and twigs to build a comfortable and safe nest in which
to nurse their litter.
But in today's factory farms,
pregnant sows are kept in crates so narrow that they cannot turn
around, or even walk more than a step forward or backward. They lie on
bare concrete without straw or any other form of bedding. The piglets
are taken from the sow as soon as possible, so that she can be made
pregnant again, but they never leave the shed until they are taken to
slaughter.
Defenders of these production methods argue that
they are a regrettable but necessary response to a growing population's
demand for food. On the contrary, when we confine animals in factory
farms, we have to grow food for them. The animals burn up most of that
food's energy just to breathe and keep their bodies warm, so we end up
with a small fraction -- usually no more than one-third and sometimes
as little as one-tenth -- of the food value that we feed them. By
contrast, cows grazing on pasture eat food that we cannot digest, which
means that they add to the amount of food available to us.
It
is tragic that countries like China and India, as they become more
prosperous, are copying Western methods and putting animals in huge
industrial farms to supply more meat and eggs for their growing middle
classes. If this continues, the result will be animal suffering on an
even greater scale than now exists in the West, as well as more
environmental damage and a rise in heart disease and cancers of the
digestive system. It will also be grossly inefficient. As consumers, we
have the power -- and the moral obligation -- to refuse to support
farming methods that are cruel to animals and bad for us.
Project Syndicate, June, 2006
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