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Find out more. Opposition to animal cruelty is a widely held value, but factory farming has not always been viewed through this lens. That is changing, as investigations over the years have revealed pregnant pigs languishing in agony in gestation crates so small that they cannot turn around, and hellish images of endless rows of cages crammed with egg-laying hens.
Animals on factory farms are treated as production units instead of the sentient creatures they are, and this suffering ripples outward into our society. Now, with the pandemic pushing our food system to its breaking point, even more evidence has emerged that factory farming is an ethical disaster. According to a recent poll commissioned by the ASPCA six months into the COVID crisis, 89 percent of people are troubled by the impacts of industrial animal agriculture, citing animal welfare, worker safety or public health risks as areas of concern.
Bringing COVID under control and preventing future pandemics will require urgent action to address the unsafe and inhumane way that billions of farm animals are raised and slaughtered. Though the COVID virus likely emerged from abusive conditions at a live animal market outside of the United States, factory farms are also a significant homegrown threat for future pandemics. Hallmarks of factory farming—crowding thousands of extremely stressed animals together in constant contact with their own waste and pumping them full of antibiotics to keep them alive—make these facilities hotspots for future public health crises.
Antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens and highly contagious zoonotic diseases have already emerged from industrial animal agriculture, outpacing our ability to create new antibiotics or control disease spread. Given these inhumane and unsanitary conditions, it is highly likely that a factory farm-bred disease will, at some point, become the source of another global health crisis.
After neglecting to provide adequate PPE or allow social distancing, more than 52, slaughter plant workers have tested positive for coronavirus since April, and at least have died from the virus. Alarmingly fast slaughter line speeds are one reason workers cannot maintain distance between themselves. These extreme line speeds —as fast as three birds slaughtered every second—also make it more difficult for plants to abide by humane handling regulations and laws, putting animals at serious risk of abusive handling and acute suffering, including conscious dismemberment.
In the case of animals, this means raising more in less space. An indoor farm for growing broiler chickens in the Ukraine. Intensive agriculture developed in earnest beginning in the 17th century in Britain, with developments such as more intensive crop rotation which allowed more animals to be fed and raised. Efficiency increased through the 18th and 19th centuries, which saw the rise of selective breeding in livestock for desirable traits such as longer wool in sheep. The current system of factory farming dominated U.
This process has made meat more affordable for the average American and increased efficiency. Since , milk production has doubled in the U. However, the profits from agriculture have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
Between and , the number of farms in the U. Today, more than 99 percent of U. Factory farms are the primary means of raising animals like cows, pigs, chicken and fish. In addition to meat, factory farms are also used to raise animals for milk, eggs and fur.
A medium-large factory farm in the U. Control of these farms are concentrated in very few hands. As of , the four largest companies in each sector controlled 85 percent of U. However, the companies do not typically handle the farming themselves, which is considered the least-lucrative part of the production process.
Instead, they contract the farming out to individuals who usually have to go into large amounts of debt to get started and can therefore get trapped in unfavorable contracts, risking bankruptcy if they quit.
This method was pioneered by Tyson Foods and first came to dominate chicken production. It is now widely used in pork production as well. Animals on factory farms are raised to be productive as quickly as possible. They spend their entire lives crowded together indoors, and are either physically mutilated or genetically modified to better accommodate human tastes and close quarters.
For example, chickens are debeaked to prevent them from pecking each other and broiler chickens are genetically modified to have larger breasts, since consumers prefer breast meat. Cows and pigs will have their tails removed, or be docked, to discourage biting and to make milking easier. Cows are grown without horns to make it easier to pack them closely together. Many consider the crowded conditions faced by animals in factory farms to be inherently inhumane.
In addition, this method of farming has consequences for human health and the environment in the form of biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, working conditions and disease risk. Animal abuse on factory farms can be divided into two types : systemic cruelty and egregious cruelty. Systemic cruelty refers to the business-as-usual conditions within factory farms, which animal welfare advocates consider to be inherently cruel.
Egregious cruelty refers to specific acts of abuse by farmworkers. While the first type of cruelty is more pervasive, only the second is often prosecuted by law. However, egregious cruelty can also be encouraged and enabled by systemic realities. Ag-gag laws, for example, penalize activists and whistleblowers for documenting incidences of animal cruelty at factory farms. Further, U.
Systemic abuses facing factory farmed animals vary slightly depending on the animal, but all suffer from spending lives confined in close quarters. Nearly ten times more birds are raised and killed for food in the U. Chickens raised for meat are referred to as broiler chickens. They are often crowded together in groups of 20, or more. Poor ventilation means the birds are at risk from ammonia exposure from their own waste, which irritates their eyes, throats and skin.
Egg-laying hens do not fare much better. They are kept in containers called battery cages, which have a smaller area than an eight-and-a-half-by sheet of paper. This is considered so cruel that it was actually banned by the European Union in Broiler chickens in China. Pigs are as smart as dogs and have a natural impulse to root and socialize.
However, they are often kept in indoor pens on slatted floors that do not allow these activities. The frustration leads pigs to bite each other's tails, and farmers deal with this by clipping off part of the pigs' tails or their teeth without anesthetics.
Pregnant sows in particular suffer in gestation crates , which cause them to lose bone strength and muscle mass because their movement is so restricted. This makes it more likely that they will fall and injure themselves.
A large white pig in a gestation crate with her piglets in Sarthe Valley, France. Beef cattle are the one farm animal that is still largely raised outdoors. However, they spend the last few months of their lives in feedlots, crowded together but without shelter. They can suffer from heat stress, respiratory problems from dust and digestive problems from being fed corn and other foods they have not evolved to digest. Milk cows, on the other hand, are kept indoors and often tethered. They are artificially inseminated once a year to keep the milk flowing, and then forcibly separated from their calves within a day of giving birth, which can be traumatic for both mother and child.
Male calves are then raised as veal, often in crates only 2. However, many states are beginning to ban veal crates and the industry is following with promises to phase out their use. Cows on a factory farm in France.
Fish farming is one of the fastest growing forms of agriculture, and about half of the most commonly eaten fish are now raised in farms. Fish are also kept in crowded conditions that encourage stress, injury and disease. Further, fish suffer from the misconception that they do not feel pain. They are killed without being stunned first — either by force, suffocation, freezing or being allowed to bleed out.
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