Factory farming: A moral issue
By Peter Singer
For low meat prices, the animals, the environment & rural neighborhoods pay
steeply.
There is a growing consensus that factory farming of animals — also known as
CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations — is morally wrong. The
American animal rights movement, which in its early years focused largely on
the use of animals in research, now has come to see that factory farming
represents by far the greater abuse of animals. The numbers speak for
themselves. In the United States somewhere between 20 million and 40 million
birds and mammals are killed for research every year. That might seem like a
lot — and it far exceeds the number of animals killed for their fur, let
alone the relatively tiny number used in circuses — but 40 million
represents less than two days’ toll in America’s slaughterhouses, which kill
about 10 billion animals each year.
The overwhelming majority of these animals have spent their entire lives
confined inside sheds, never going outdoors for a single hour. Their
suffering isn’t just for a few hours or days, but for all their lives. Sows
and veal calves are confined in crates too narrow for them even to turn
around, let alone walk a few steps. Egg-laying hens are unable to stretch
their wings because their cages are too small and too crowded. With nothing
to do all day, they become frustrated and attack each other. To prevent
losses, producers sear off their beaks with a hot knife, cutting through
sensitive nerves.
Chickens, reared in sheds that hold 20,000 birds, now are bred to grow so
fast that most of them develop leg problems because their immature bones
cannot bear the weight of their bodies. Professor John Webster of the
University of Bristol’s School of Veterinary Science said: “Broilers are the
only livestock that are in chronic pain for the last 20 percent of their
lives. They don’t move around, not because they are overstocked, but because
it hurts their joints so much.”
Sometimes their legs collapse under them, causing them to starve to death
because they cannot reach their food. Of course, the producers then cannot
sell these birds, but economically, they are still better off with the
freakishly fast-growing breeds they use. As an article in an industry
journal noted, “simple calculations” lead to the conclusion that often “it
is better to get the weight and ignore the mortality.” Another consequence
of the genetics of these birds is that the breeding birds — the parents of
the ones sold in supermarkets — constantly are hungry, because, unlike their
offspring that are slaughtered at just 45 days old, they have to live long
enough to reach sexual maturity. If fed as much as they are programmed to
eat, they soon would be grotesquely obese and die or be unable to mate. So
they are kept on strict rations that leave them always looking in vain for
food.
Opposition to factory farming, once associated mostly with animal rights
activists, now is shared by many conservatives, among them Matthew Scully, a
former speech writer in President George W. Bush’s White House and the
author of “Dominion: The Power of Man, The Suffering of Animals, and the
Call to Mercy.” In Scully’s view, even though God has given us “dominion”
over the animals, we should exercise that dominion with mercy — and factory
farming fails to do so. Scully’s writings have found support from other
conservatives, like Pat Buchanan, editor of The American Conservative, which
gave cover-story prominence to Scully’s essay “Fear Factories: The Case for
Compassionate Conservatism — for Animals,” and George F. Will, who used his
Newsweek column to recommend Scully’s book.
No less a religious authority than Pope Benedict XVI has stated that human
“dominion” over animals does not justify factory farming. While head of the
Roman Catholic Church’s Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
the future pope condemned the “industrial use of creatures, so that geese
are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens
live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds.” This
“degrading of living creatures to a commodity” seemed to him “to contradict
the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.”
Some people think that factory farming is necessary to feed the growing
population of our planet. The truth, however, is the opposite. No matter how
efficient intensive pork, beef, chicken, egg and milk production becomes, in
the narrow sense of producing more meat, eggs or milk for each pound of
grain we feed the animals, raising animals on grain remains wasteful. Far
from increasing the total amount of food available for human consumption, it
reduces it.
A concentrated animal feeding operation is, as the name implies, an
operation in which we concentrate the animals and feed them. Unlike cattle
or sheep on pasture, they don’t feed themselves. There lies the fundamental
environmental flaw: Every CAFO relies on cropland, on which the food the
animals eat is grown. Because the animals, even when confined, use much of
the nutritional value of their food to move, keep warm and form bone and
other inedible parts of their bodies, the entire operation is an inefficient
way of feeding humans. It places greater demands on the environment in terms
of land, energy and water than other forms of farming. It would be more
efficient to use the cropland to grow food for humans to eat.
Factory farming, overwhelmingly dominated by huge corporations like Tyson,
Smithfield, ConAgra and Seaboard, has contributed to rural depopulation and
the decline of the family farm. It has nothing going for it except that it
produces food that is, at the point of sale, cheap. But for that low price,
the animals, the environment and rural neighborhoods have to pay steeply.
Fortunately there are alternatives, including eating a vegan diet, or buying
animal products only from producers who allow their animals to go outside
and live a minimally decent life. It is time for a shift in our values.
While our society focuses on issues like gay marriage and the use of embryos
for research, we are overlooking one of the big moral issues of our day. We
should see the purchase and consumption of factory-farm products, whether by
an individual or by an institution like a university, as a violation of the
most basic ethical standards of how we should treat animals and the
environment.
Peter Singer is a philosopher and professor of bioethics at Princeton
University and laureate professor at the University of
Melbourne.
