Meatonomics (34 page)

In his wonderful nonfiction book
The Pig Who Sang to the Moon
, Jeffrey Masson reports the story of Lulu—a two-hundred-pound pig living at an animal sanctuary:

Joanne Altsmann was in her kitchen one afternoon, feeling unwell, when Lulu charged out of a doggie door made for a 20-pound dog, scraping her sides raw to the point of drawing blood. Running into the street, Lulu proceeded to draw attention by lying down in the middle of the road until a car
stopped. Then she led the driver to her owner's house, where Altsmann had suffered a heart attack. Altsmann was rushed to the hospital, and the ASPCA awarded Lulu a gold medal for her heroism. Altsmann knows in her bones that Lulu's sixth sense saved her life.
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Pigs, Masson says, are sensitive, loyal, and intelligent. They're capable of forming complex social relationships, and they wag their tails like dogs when they're happy.

But in factory farms, where virtually all pigs in the United States are raised, hyper-confinement means that these and other animals lack the space or outdoor access to engage in instinctive behaviors. How do the animals like living in these conditions? Matthew Scully, former speech writer for George W. Bush and author of the book
Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy
, sought a firsthand answer to that question. Through Scully, we learn from North Carolina pig farmer F. J. “Sonny” Faison how pigs feel about spending their lives in what Faison calls “state-of-the-art confinement facilities.” According to Faison, the animals “love it. . . . They don't mind at all. . . . The conditions . . . are much more humane than when they were out in the field.”
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Another North Carolina pig farmer, Jerry Godwin, also extolled his plant's modern methods to Scully: “If you want to look at an animal in one of our systems, at the way it is housed, you look at that and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that's terrible.’ Well, the fact is that to that animal it may not be so bad. That animal seems to live longer, to prosper, to do well. Its comfort is there.”
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But Scully's impressions while touring a hog farm didn't support pig farmers' claims that innovation in porcine agriculture benefits the animals. At a supposedly state-of-the-art hog factory in North Carolina, Scully saw “sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other ‘vices,’ as they're called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical ‘vacuum’ chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with
imaginary straw.”
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Scully was invited to tour that particular facility by Sonny Faison, the pig farmer who said his animals “love” their living conditions. In truth, as we see repeatedly in this example and others in this appendix, innovation in animal farming often means a backward step in the animals' quality of life. Notwithstanding claims to the contrary by factory farm operators, the evidence shows that when the focus turns to raising an animal faster, on cheaper feed, or in less space, the animal invariably loses.

As a child visiting his uncle's farm in Wisconsin, physician Michael Klaper saw a dairy cow separated from her newborn calf. The incident left a lasting impression. Years later, he wrote:

The mother was allowed to nurse her calf but for a single night. On the second day after birth, my uncle took the calf from the mother and placed him in the veal pen in the barn—only ten yards away, in plain view of the mother. The mother cow could see her infant, smell him, hear him, but could not touch him, comfort him, or nurse him. The heartrending bellows that she poured forth—minute after minute, hour after hour, for five long days—were excruciating to listen to. They are the most poignant and painful auditory memories I carry in my brain.
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There's a popular belief, long outdated, that dairy cows lead blissful lives. But as this and other examples show, life on a dairy farm is anything but easy.

Centuries or even decades ago, life might have been different for a dairy cow. But with the typical dairy farm's footprint changing from pastoral to industrial, production methods have changed too. Today, while dairy cows would otherwise live past twenty, they're generally killed for beef before the age of four.
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Further, contrary to the conventional wisdom, cows don't routinely make milk and they don't
need
to be milked—like humans, they lactate only after giving birth. Unlike most humans, however, they're forcibly inseminated a number of times during their lives.
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As Klaper saw as a child, calves must be separated from their mothers within hours of birth; otherwise, the maternal bond grows too strong and makes separation especially difficult. Of course, even an immediate separation is painful for a mother whose mammary glands are designed to feed her own young and whose most basic instinct is to do so. And what happens next, following separation, depends on the calf's sex.

Most males born in the dairy industry are destined for veal crates—tiny stalls banned in the European Union but permitted in most of the United States. As John Robbins, author of
Diet for a New America
, observed, “The veal calf would actually have more space if, instead of chaining him in such a stall, you stuffed him into the trunk of a subcompact car and kept him there for his entire life.”
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For the connoisseur, veal's appeal lies in its softness and paleness. Thus, calves are tethered to prevent any but the slightest movement—this immobility keeps the infants' flesh tender by preventing muscle development. To keep them anemic and maintain their flesh's characteristic pink color, newborns are denied their mothers' milk and instead fed formula without iron. The young males are typically slaughtered at four months.

The inhumane treatment of veal calves is no mystery to most American consumers, who, since learning about veal in the mid-1970s, have responded by dramatically reducing their consumption of the anemic flesh. From 1975 to 1998, annual US per capita veal consumption fell 77 percent from almost 4 pounds to less than 1.
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Yet in counterpoise to the veal industry's decline, dairy consumption provides this dying industry with endless rebirth. Almost one in two calves born to dairy cows every day lands in a confinement crate, destined to be marketed to veal eaters in the United States or abroad. This seems a particularly bizarre irony for the millions of US consumers who would not dream of eating veal but who, by consuming dairy, power an industry that many believe should have died long ago.

Female calves, on the other hand, are destined for a life of milk production. Dairy's innovative answer to the battery cage is zero grazing, a system of intensive confinement that keeps cows tethered in stalls—usually of steel and concrete—for most of their lives. Unlike conventional dairy farming, which relies on pasture, zero grazing requires little land and is thus scalable in ways that pasture grazing is not. The rise of zero grazing over the past several decades has led to a heavy drop in the number of dairy farms and a sharp increase in the cow population at those that remain. Between 1970 and 2006, the number of US farms with dairy cows fell from 648,000 to 75,000. With this consolidation in the industry, the majority of US milk is now produced on farms with five hundred or more cows—nearly all of which are zero grazing.
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Yet cows, just like people and other animals, enjoy the wind in their hair and the grass under their feet. Research shows that given a choice, cows spend the majority of their time outdoors and choose to come inside only to escape high temperatures.
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As one dairy worker observed, “The thing you notice with zero grazing is how depressed and uptight the cows are. The eyes are dull.”
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Because of the parallels to intensely confined laying hens, some call these living milk machines “battery cows.”

Cows might look dull, but don't be fooled. In fact, research shows cows are smarter than we thought. It also finds they're capable of feeling deep emotions and forming complex social relationships. In one study, cows were challenged to open a door to find food while their brain waves were measured. When they solved the problem, they felt a thrill, according to Donald Broom, the Cambridge University professor who led the study. “The brainwaves showed their excitement; their heartbeat went up and some even jumped into the air. We called it their Eureka moment,” Broom said.
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In another study, researchers at Bristol University found that cows typically form friendships with two to four other animals and spend most of the time with their friends.
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Like many people, they may dislike others of their species and bear grudges for years.

“If you grew as fast as a chicken,” according to the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, “you'd weigh 349 pounds at age two.”
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Broiler chickens—so-called because they yield meat, not eggs—are bred to get as big as possible as fast as possible. They now grow twice as fast and get more than twice as big as they once did, prompting the awful pun “double broiler.” The rapid growth and distorted body size of broiler chickens means their legs and organs can't keep pace with the rest of their body, often leading to disease and deformity. According to one published study, “Broilers now grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive heart failure.”
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They can't walk so well either. Ninety percent of broiler chickens have abnormal gaits caused by genetic bone deformities.
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The pain of these deformities leads chickens to dose themselves with pain medicine (if available), by consistently choosing feed containing anti-inflammatory drugs over regular feed.
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“Broilers,” wrote Professor John Webster of the University of Bristol School of Veterinary Science, “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.”
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Six-week-old broilers have such a hard time supporting their abnormally heavy bodies that they spend up to 86 percent of the time lying down.
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And their constant contact with ammonia-laden litter leads to burns, breast blisters, and foot pad dermatitis.
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Yet for all the difficulties in a broiler chicken's life, conditions are no better for their hardworking cousins—laying hens. In fact, because of the way hens and their offspring are treated, eggs—a dietary staple for even many a vegetarian—are surprisingly inhumane. As factory farm critic Erik Marcus writes, “A bite of egg involves more animal suffering than a bite of hamburger or bacon.”
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For chickens in the laying industry, life starts inauspiciously. Male chicks are useless because they cannot lay eggs and, unlike genetically
engineered broiler chickens, are not bred for the rapid growth that makes it profitable to produce chicken meat. With no laws or humane standards mandating how unwanted chicks must be handled, farm operators are left to discard the day-old birds in whatever manner is most cost-effective. This could mean shredding them alive in a meat grinder or wood chipper, dumping them in a garbage can to starve to death, or stuffing them in a garbage bag to suffocate. Egg producers kill 270 million unwanted male chicks each year, enough tiny dead birds to circle the contiguous United States.
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Nevertheless, if they knew what was in store for their sisters, these baby roosters might be grateful for their early deaths.

For chickens unlucky enough to be born female and destined for a laying career, life starts with a painful surgical procedure known clinically as “partial beak amputation.” Euphemistically called “beak trimming” by those in the industry, this procedure involves cutting off about one-third of an unanesthetized chick's beak and leaving the sensitive nerve endings exposed for the remainder of her life. As one group of researchers explains:

The avian beak is a complex sensory organ which not only serves to grasp and manipulate food particles prior to ingestion, but is also used to manipulate non-food articles in nesting behavior and exploration, drinking, preening, and as a weapon in defensive and aggressive encounters. To enable the animal to perform this wide range of activities, the beak of the chicken has an extensive nerve supply with numerous [nerve endings sensitive to pressure, heat, and pain]. . . . Beak amputation results in extensive neuromas [tumors] being formed in the healed stump of the beak which give rise to abnormal spontaneous neural activity in the trigeminal nerve. . . . Therefore, in terms of the peripheral neural activity, partial beak amputation is likely to be a painful procedure leading not only to phantom and stump pain, but also to other characteristics . . . such as hyperalgesia [extreme sensitivity to pain].
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There is no human analog to debeaking, though it's not much of a stretch to compare it to having your lips chopped off and cauterized,
with the exposed flesh and nerve endings left to react painfully to whatever you eat, drink, or touch with your lips for the rest of your life. Researchers who monitored hens' pecking, drinking, beak-wiping, and head-shaking activities after being debeaked observed significant changes in these activities that persisted long after the hens' beaks appeared to be healed. The researchers blamed these persistent behavioral changes on the hens' increased sensitivity to pain and concluded, “The modifications in the pecking and drinking behavior of birds following partial beak amputation [conforms with other reports] that partial beak amputation results in long-term increases in dozing and general inactivity, behaviors associated with long-term chronic pain and depression.”
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