Photo by law_keven/Flickr CC
Most people know NFL quarterback Michael Vick jeopardized his career and went to prison for violating animal cruelty laws. What they likely don't realize is that unlike dogs and other pets, farm animals are virtually unprotected against cruelty, no matter how extreme. While every state in the country has animal anti-cruelty statutes on the books, most explicitly exempt farm animals. We think that should change.
As just one example, consider the following. Today the shareholders of Smithfield Foods, the country's largest pork company, will gather for their annual meeting. Smithfield has been one of the most important players in hog farming's industrialization, controlling the lives and deaths of over 30 million pigs in the United States every year. This means the company also has tremendous capacity to improve the lives of animals raised for food.
All of the pigs raised for Smithfield's pork spend their entire lives in metal buildings. The vast majority of their breeding females are even more severely constrained, being kept in narrow metal cages that are only slightly larger than their bodies (called gestation crates), a practice that has been banned in the European Union because of the suffering it causes sows.
This illustrates the problem with voluntary measures to improve animal welfare. There's nothing to prevent companies from abandoning them when they become inconvenient.Recognizing a growing unease about the conditions in industrialized farms in the United States, Smithfield announced with fanfare in 2007 that it would be phasing out the use of gestation crates for its sows. Shortly thereafter, Nicolette wrote an essay in the New York Times arguing that the company was not going far enough. But now it turns out that Smithfield won't even be getting rid of gestation crates.
In the Smithfield shareholder notice for its upcoming annual meeting, it included the following statement, indicating that it will not make good on its commitment to do away with gestation crates:
Due to recent significant operating losses incurred by our Hog Production segment, we have delayed capital expenditures for the program such that we no longer expect to complete the phase-out within ten years of the original announcement.This illustrates the problem with voluntary measures to improve animal welfare. There's nothing that deters agribusiness companies from abandoning them when they become inconvenient.
Agricultural trade associations have long asserted that animal welfare laws are a bad idea because farmers and ranchers know best how to take care of their animals. We heartily agree. In our experience, the people who work with farm animals every day have the best sense of what is needed to ensure their welfare and the knowledge of how welfare can be protected in practice. But good animal husbandry is literally impossible in industrial set-ups.
In addition to the ubiquitous use of gestation crates, pigs in confinement buildings are never given any bedding to lie down on. Straw or other bedding is impossible because it would gum up the works of the confinement building's sewage flushing system. Animals are forced to stand and lie on concrete or grated metal flooring for their entire lives. The same is true for egg-laying hens, who are typically confined to cages so small they cannot stretch their wings.
The benefit of laws is that they create a level playing field for all farmers and ranchers. If everyone must operate under the same rules, farmers who want to provide good conditions for their animals are not put at an economic disadvantage for doing it. That's the main advantage of mandates. In fact, when the feeding of antibiotics was outlawed in Sweden in 1986, it was at the behest of the meat industry itself for precisely this reason. Similarly, we've talked with cattle ranchers who've said they wish the government would ban growth hormones for cattle because then they could afford to stop using them. If no one is allowed to do it, no one gets an upper hand from the practice.
Recently, Nicolette spoke with David Favre, a professor at Michigan State University Law School who specializes in animal law. "Farm animals need enhanced legal protection as their life conditions--their welfare--are governed by the economic pressures of the marketplace, and neither the federal law nor the state anti-cruelty laws protect them from exploitation," Favre said. "Cheaper and more 'efficient' production means less and less concern for the animals' welfare. Because of the political power of the industrial agriculture lobby it is very difficult to obtain laws that simply respect their lives, lives that they will soon give up to become human food."
Although Nicolette is a lawyer with an accompanying affection for law, we both dislike the idea of burdening America's farmers with additional laws or regulations. The profession is hard enough as it is. But the complete absence of oversight of farm animal husbandry practices has led to some extreme practices becoming commonplace, like the continual caging of hens, crating of sows, and tethering of veal calves in such a way that they can literally barely move for their entire lives.
We strongly supported laws in Florida, Arizona, California, and Colorado that outlawed some of these practices. And we favor a national farm animal welfare law like the one introduced by former Congressman Christopher Shays in the 109th Congress. We hope someone in Congress will show the courage to pick up where he left off.
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OR, we could stop eating and using animals for our silly taste buds all together.
I'm certainly behind your efforts to "reform" "welfare" - hey whatever helps, but the end goal has to be allowing these sentient creatures one basic right, to live without our interference where ever possible.
Ultimately - this needs to be goal.
No doubt business is tough for farmers, but growing commodities instead of food, will get us right to where we are, and business is tough for all of us....
Animals have interests in things other than being on our plates.
I was a vegetarian for years and have gone back to an omnivorous diet, but a careful one. After all, I kept cats. I wasn't going to feed them tofu. And after a while I decided I too could eat meat in a way that largely accords with my desire not to fund animal torture: I buy from local small farmers when possible, switched to free range bison instead of beef, organic free range chicken when possible, etc., and of course pay a phenomenal amount for meat just to satisfy conscience and health. But individual choices, while they may make me personally feel better, cannot end factory farming. Cheap protein feeds poor families. Vegetarian virtue in the US is the province of prosperous people. This assertion might seem absurd at first glance because in places like China (where half my family is from), the mostly vegetarian diet is for the poor and meat is for the rich. But in the US, a healthy vegetarian diet takes time and money. There's a reason a family struggling to get by ends up feeding kids hot dogs and chips instead of sauteed kale and spicy bean stews: Mom's probably working two jobs and Dad's either not there or working two jobs too, or in the current economic state they're out looking for jobs. They're not going to worry about the well-being of the pigs when they're worrying about the well-being of the kids. The only real solution to the abuses of factory farming is government regulation, not vegetarian evangelism, which will only ever be a minority choice. This is a nation of enthusiastic omnivores, but though we're hungry we're not cruel. Ugly factory farming practices persist only because they're hidden. Now that we can no longer pretend to be unaware of what our dinner has gone through, the USDA should institute more humane, healthier standards. Lobby them instead of your neighbor.
Brooklyn,
ANY kind of farming, whether factory farmed or "free range", local, organic, or whatever, when it involves another feeling being is paying for animal torture, whether it happens throughout the keeping of the animal or once they reach "slaughter weight" when they're taken from those comfortable green acres, put onto trucks, and taken to the same horrible fate as their industrially-raised counterparts. There is NO SUCH THING as humane slaughter, esp when you have billions of individuals going in terrified and begging for their lives because they want, and have a RIGHT, to live just like we do.
Being vegan-I realize you say vegetarian but I want to reiterate the word VEGAN, as that is what we need to be moving toward if we're to return ALL farmed beings to the freedom they enjoyed many centuries ago before we became a herding culture and began exploiting them-is NOT expensive at all. Unless you're going to make the mock meats the centerpiece of your diet, which isn't the healthiest anyway, you can live QUITE inexpensively on a plant-based diet by accentuating the whole grains, fresh fruits & vegetables, legumes, and lentils in your meals.
PETA's Vegetarian Starter Kit is very easy to get, and it's free! There are a number of recipes in it to choose from for all 3 meals a day, or however many one happens to eat.
I hope you'll consider what I've said here and think about re-introducing yourself to the compassion and benefits of being plant-based-you did it once and you can do it again. Do it for the animals, for yourself, and the planet.
I'm sure you're a very good, well-meaning person who wouldn't intentionally hurt another living being-it just takes a little soul searching on one's part to see it isn't necessary to eat animals AT ALL, regardless of how they're raised; it's NOT right either way.
I have faith in you--I know you can do it! :)
So I guess no longer subsidizing the meat industry is ok by you, eh?
Well said, Steve! You took the words right out of my mouth--we need ABOLITION, not reform.
"it is very difficult to obtain laws that simply respect their lives, lives that they will soon give up to become human food."
Please, if this piece was intended to be realistic let's base it in fact not happy fiction. These animals don't "give up" their lives - Their lives are stolen from them by force. None wishes to die - we kill them.
And we kill them without any need at all. We can thrive on a compassionate plant based diet. Please stop fattening animals to feed humans - Grow healthy, real food instead. Choose kindness - Go Vegan
www.humanemyth.org
A wise human once said "compassion must be legislated." Laws are the only way these sentient beings will be protected...and those who want these much-needed laws will work tirelessly to obtain them.
Since the introduction and later amendments of the first animal welfare laws in the 60s - things have been getting worse and worse for animals. The speed in which consumption and breeding of sentient, emotional beings grows is much faster than any legislative, democratic measures could follow. For that reason - Foreign Policy called livestock animals modern slaves. We will not end their misery because we stop repressing and rationalizing our compassion and empathy - we will end their misery as we have always done - because it hurts us too much (no resources, no water, no fish, no ...). Free-range cows, pigs and chickens also waste land, water and farts.
By the way, many dedicated vegans I have met have turned away from needless slavery because of humane and free-range farms they have visited. Nobody who is not vegan or a farmer has every visited a factory farm. It is prohibited in the US. It is also not allowed to show factory farms in the media (interesting). The Atlantic has never shown a factory farm via a video. People cannot see the madness there - why care about welfare laws?
But they have visited humane farms where the livestock slaves are raised as House Negroes - like pets. It is almost more insane to needlessly kill your pet after you have looked after her or him for years than to kill a nameless animal in a factory. The vegetarian cause has not started with factory farms - it has started and will end with the family farm.
Please allow me to quote what Count Tolstoy wrote 100 years ago (from The First Step):
What Tolstoy has described here is the "original sin". That is why he called his essay The First Step. At the end Tolstoy argues that in case we wanted to live a "good live" - the first and not the last step should be..:
After having failed to help his poor fellow countrymen, having failed to do enough good to help all, he realized that the first step was for him to to stop doing bad. Tolstoy was also friends with Gandhi and convinced him to try a vegan life-style instead of the vegetarian. When Gandhi was asked why he was a vegetarian in the first place he replied: "I like to work at the root of problems."
Are more animal welfare laws working at the root of our problem? I am all for it but we have reached such a strange point in time and history, with more than 50 billion sentient beings not being able to move, that...
PS: Showing how most mammals who are currently alive on the planet have to spend their days would be, imho, the best way to open some minds for welfare laws. That we have an Animal Channel on TV is almost disgusting if the word propaganda means anything to you. On The Atlantic - 19 out of 20 articles about animal husbandry show and discuss some utopian ideal and not the realistic status quo. Without the pictures and sounds (we can't show smell) - there is no beginning of the end. Concentration camps are never where civilians are for a reason. Evil tries to hide in both minds and places.
I respect the vegan philosophy and approach to life. But the fact remains that an individual "going vegan" does nothing to help the billions of animals who are raised for food in this country every year. In fact, while the vegan idea has gained some currency in the U.S. in recent years, in both the US and the world, both the per capita consumption of animal flesh and the total amount consumed continues to INCREASE. Thus, the question for people who are concerned about animals is: what should be done for those animals. We believe that welfare laws are therefore urgently needed. Veganism cannot be the solution in the foreseeable future for addressing the suffering of the billions of animals who languish in American factory farms every day.
I follow posts in response to this op-ed and other articles of its type with a mixture of sadness and fear. I'm sad that a small group of folks with a narrow agenda (veganism) resort to scare tactics to bully and intimidate other citizens with respect to eating meat. Apparently public discourse in this country has disintegrated to the point where we can't hear each other's points and just say, "ok, I think this way, but I respect your right to believe something else...you go live your life and I will go live mine." Anytime we get to comparing modern farm animal production (even that espoused by the Nimans) to concentration camps violates the Hitler Rule: any reference to a living human being as Hitler should cause any conversation to cease.
I view such posts with dread because they're a mix of totally uninformed we-can-feed-the-world-with-subsistence-vegetable-gardens nonsense and Malthusian elitism. The simple fact is the world's population continues to grow to levels that will only be sustained by the consumption of nutrient-dense foods at levels previously only dreamed of. Meats, bean products, eggs, and milk...these are the foods along with grains, fruits, and vegetables that enable the millions to leave the farms, savannahs, and water holes of this world and engage in some non-agricultural pursuit. Subsistence farmers in Asia, Africa, and South America don't have the luxury of retiring to their artifically-lighted and cooled homes at day's end to turn on the Internet and bitch about how bad the world is. Grow up, folks...
I wrote "Malthusian" earlier because when one who is an otherwise enthusiastic adopter of technology (smart cars, computers, green this and green that) willingly turns their back on all technology in the ONLY indispensible industry--agriculture, an unbiased observer is left to wonder what the food-Luddite thinks of other, less-affluent folks. Is it "I got mine...it doesn't matter if food gets way too expensive for you to afford because I will be able to afford it."? This anti-technology bent with respect to agriculture shows a callous lack of care toward human beings simultaneous to a great outpouring of emotions to animals. Sentient, perhaps....caring, feeling, intelligent animals who will unlock the cure to cancer someday, certainly not. And it is nigh-on impossible to separate the anti-GMO crowd from the anti-meat crowd from the anti-fertilizer/herbicide/insecticide crowd.
This skein of argument shows a total lack of respect for the rights of others. If one is sold that his way is the best, he should demand products that meet his "way" in the marketplace. That, indeed has occurred. Mr. and Mrs. Niman's business is a case in point. I read Mrs. Niman's post above mine, however, and I am struck with a contrarian thought. They are purveyors of a niche market with an obscene profit potential. Niche markets are limited, by definition, by the size of the "conventional" market. The only way to escape a niche quicklyis to tear down the "conventional" product. Otherwise, it takes a great amount of time to gain market acceptance, sometimes generations. That's a long time to wait when you'd like to make more money now. Tearing down the foundations of your modern-production competitors is a good place to start. Not trying to impugn anyone's motives, but just a thought.
And Hugo, your notion that "nobody...has ever visited a factory farm" is bunk. Just bunk. Plenty of activists have "visited" farms and taken intentionally-seedy-looking video and even participated in behaviors toward animals that are criminal, all in an effort to promote their agenda. I respect all people's rights to their opinions, but like Mrs. Niman, I am beyond weary of people railing about animals' "natural behaviors" who have no education, training, background, or even simple observation of these animals.
Why do you think torturing and killing people for food is wrong, or do you think this? What makes people exempt (in your mind) from brutal treatment and slaughter for food? Your reasoning is impersonal, provincial, and all over the place. You could just as well make a case for harvesting trees to make matchsticks.
So you enjoy the taste of flesh. Don't try to say that animal protein is the answer to the world's hunger problem, because it is not. Read up on the cost of breeding billions of animals in terms of the environment.
I have to add my thoughts on animal cruelty - um, this is going to sound ugly but animals murder one another everyday in the wild and they contract & spread diseases. Compare the health and longevity of feral cats and domestic cats. Sadly, carnivorous and omnivorous animals sometimes even eat their own young and in some dire situations, some recorded in our history & probably more not recorded, people have eaten other people. Food is food and the desire to survive wins out over the emotions of bystanders.
I would rather eat meat I had raised myself but in lieu of that I trust the butcher to get wholesome meat for me to choose from. If it turns out that the butcher isn't good at his selection process, I shop elsewhere. Industrial farms are regulated by the same government most of you are trusting to regulate our healthcare in the future. So what is your real concern here? The public good or your pocketbook because you all seem to complain about how expensive your food choices are...
As far as European nations' 'more compassionate' farming practices, they don't have nearly the outcome of U.S. practices. When faced with mad cow disease, how many people died in Europe before they got a handle on the situation versus how many died in the U.S.? The U.S. had one and she grew up in the UK eating products of their compassionate system, Europe had 150. The US system is far more compassionate as an industry - compassionate to the animals and the consumer.
Your sympathies for the cows, pigs, and other consumables is wasted effort. You cannot dictate what people eat nor how they think about what they eat. Beyond holiday traditions, there are holy & spiritual traditions that involve the killing or consumption of certain animals. Will you be telling people their spiritual practices are wrong because animals must die? I suggest you quit preaching for the masses and practice your beliefs quietly.
"If you have men who will exclude
any of God's creatures from the
shelter of compassion and pity,
you will have men who will deal likewise
with their fellow men..."
St. Francis of Assisi
.
I do not understand how human being do not have compassion for all animals. What makes it alright in anyone's mind to put a pig into a gestation crate and leave it their to give birth and never nuzzle of love the little pigletts that were born. Why do human beings thing it is ok to keep a dairy cow impregnated over and over for her short life only to have her calves ripped away from her. Who has that right? Who has the right to take a male calve and drag him off to live in a crate for a few tortures months being force fed some slop to make his flesh more tasty for selfish humans to consume. This poor little angels are never givin any water all so they can be kept longing to get their thirst quenched so they continue to suck down this slop. I have read many cases of how these innocent animals to weak to walk being kick and beaten and the whole time trying to suck on the killers fingers just to find a moment of comfort. I beleive that all animals should have protection under the law. I beleive that camera's should be placed in everyone of these miserable factory farms and be monitered by outside people to make sure the animals are being treated as humanly as possible under such disgusting conditions. I do not understand what makes humans being feel they are more important than other forms of life. I do not understand how the USDA get away with allowing animals to be kept in factories with no grass under their feet, no hay to roll around in. I read some of the most disturbing details of the miserable human beings on the planet which are the factory farms workers from the book Skinney Bitches. A worker tell how he cut off a pigs nose and the poor pig just looked at him like why did you do that so he rubbed salt into the cut and then as the poor pig ran away in pain and miserary he grabbed it by the tail and shoved his fist filled with more salt up this innocent animals butt. Then this uneducated poor excuse for a human said the poor pig didnt know whether to shit of go blind ( or something like that ) That is who is working with the most innocent animals on the planet. These animals are pure souls and in the end all animals go to heaven . I want to see this man ( term used lightly) to be held accountable for his torturous act to this pig. I will never stop fighting to see all animals have protection under the law. Humans can be evil when not watched and held in account of their actions.