Piper Hoffman

Let’s hear it for McDonald’s, which has taken a step towards making the lives of the pigs it feeds to people a bit less brutal. It is requiring its pork suppliers to create plans for phasing out gestation crates, which I described in an earlier blog post:

Gestation crates are small metal cages only two feet wide that prevent pregnant pigs from turning around or even lying down comfortably. Sows spend most of their adult lives in these crates as they are inseminated soon after they give birth and thus kept pregnant over four out of every five months. Gestation crates cripple pregnant pigs and cause obesity. The fumes and toxins produced from the concentration of so many animals in one space sicken them (and the humans who “take care of” them). Pigs are smart, affectionate animals, and the constant confinement, lack of activity or stimulation, and pain lead to neurotic behaviors like biting the bars of their cages over and over, or chewing on nothing.

As the largest restaurant chain in the world, McDonald’s has the potential to eliminate gestation crates from the industry by refusing to patronize suppliers that use them. Unfortunately the company has not announced guidelines that factory farms will have to follow in place of gestation crates. Will sows have more space, or will they be crowded together though not in individual pens? Will they be able to socialize with each other? Will their environments allow them to satisfy their instinct to burrow and root around? And what about farrowing crates, where sows are caged and prevented from touching their piglets while they nurse?

The best announcement of all would be that McDonald’s and its competitors are going to stop feeding animals to people. But here in reality, let’s support the Humane Society of the United States, which worked with McDonald’s to create this policy to make farmed pigs’ short lives less miserable.

An update on my previous post, Factory Farms are Breeding More Than Cows: Agribusiness Antibiotic Abuse Creates Superbugs: the FDA has refused consumer advocates’ petitions to “limit the routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals.” For an administration that claims it wants to improve health care, rendering some of our most important medications powerless is a funny way of showing it.

From a new study by the University of Queensland’s School of Psychology:

” ‘Many people like eating meat, but most are reluctant to harm things that have minds. Our studies show that this motivates people to deny minds to animals,’ ” researcher Dr. Brock Bastian said.

The university’s website continues, the “research demonstrates when people are confronted with the harm that their meat-eating brings to food animals they view those animals as possessing fewer mental capacities compared to when they are not reminded.

“The findings also reveal that this denial of mind to food animals is especially evident when people expect to eat meat in the near future.” In other words, people lie to themselves just to eat a burger.

Bastian calls this the “meat paradox.” It is a paradox for meat-eaters to tell themselves that animals don’t have minds because, of course, they do, and the very same people will acknowledge that in different contexts.

Meat isn’t just bad for the animals and for people’s health — it’s bad for people’s souls.

Congress and President Obama have managed to accomplish one thing together: legalizing the slaughter and human consumption of horses.

If horse meat catches on, it will be the first time in the U.S. that people will routinely eat animals who are commonly kept as companions. This will test the persuasiveness of the animal rights slogan, “if you love animals called pets, how can you eat animals called dinner?”

If it turns out that people can comfortably call the same animal both pet and dinner, then advocates for vegetarianism will have an even tougher time than they expected convincing people that meat is murder.

On the other hand, maybe all the little girls who ask for ponies for their birthdays will make the connection early on between the animals they love and the food they eat. Best case scenario: this cruel and gross law will create a new generation of vegetarians.

As a vegan I hear a lot of the same questions over and over. I am vegan because I don’t want to participate in the suffering that factory farming causes non-human animals, as opposed to being vegan for health or environmental reasons – though those are great reasons too. In observance of World Farm Animals Day on October 2, here are some answers to five questions people often ask me about being vegan.

1. Shearing sheep doesn’t kill them, so why don’t you wear wool?
    
   Because sheep raised for wool suffer terribly and are eventually killed for their meat.

   Before humans started manipulating their genes, sheep would grow just enough wool to keep them warm in the winter, and they would molt and grow a new coat each year. Genetically engineered merino sheep grow wool year-round, and they grow much more of it because they have been bred to have roll upon roll of extra skin—which creates perfect warm, moist environments for flies, which lay eggs, which produce baby maggots, which eat sheep alive. Really.

   Having their sheep eaten hurts the bottom line, so in the name of preventing this “flystrike,” wool growers slice the skin right off the sheep’s legs and hindquarters. Really. It is called mulesing, and, like all factory farm mutilations it is performed without anesthesia and causes lasting excruciating pain.

   Shearing the wool from sheep is a race for dollars because shearers are paid by volume. They often cut off rolls of skin along with the wool. They usually shear sheep before the sheep would naturally shed their winter coats in order to harvest as much wool as possible, which leaves sheep shivering until the temperature rises. Many die of exposure.

   Wool producers amputate lambs’ tails and horns and castrate the males without anesthesia. Once sheep have aged beyond their peak wool-producing years they are sold for slaughter. Australia is the largest producer of wool, but ships sheep to Europe for slaughter for meat. The travel conditions are so miserable that many animals die in transit, including lambs who are trampled to death. Depending on the country they are sent to, many are dismembered while fully conscious.

   Close to 15 million sheep are slaughtered in Great Britain alone every year.
    

2. Chickens are not killed to get eggs, so why don’t you eat eggs?
    
   Because chickens and their chicks are tortured to get eggs, and egg-production does result in slaughter. As I’ve written earlier on this blog, four egg-laying chickens are stuffed into each 16″ by 16″ battery cage. Poultry producers cram the birds in to maximize the number of eggs they can collect per square inch. The birds cannot spread their wings or lie down. They stand on wire mesh that cuts into their feet; sometimes their toes grow around the wire. The walls of the cage rub their feathers off and cause blood blisters. With no outlet to express their natural urges to dust bathe and to peck at the ground, birds peck at and injure each other. Most have the ends of their beaks seared off as chicks in a painful, mutilating procedure intended to prevent this pecking. The concentration of the hens’ waste, which collects on the floor beneath the rows and rows of cages, creates so much ammonia that it sickens the birds, hurting their lungs and making their eyes burn. They never see the sun or feel a breeze, and they never form the family groups that wild chickens create instinctually.

   While female chicks are having their beaks burned off, male chicks are losing their lives. A few of them are kept to reproduce the breed, but most are killed immediately in one of a number of ways, including tossing one atop another in dumpsters to suffocate each other to death, electrocuting or gassing them, and throwing them live into grinders. They are useless to factory farm owners because raising them for their meat is not cost-effective. Chickens raised for meat have been carefully bred to grow enormous chests and thighs shockingly fast. Chickens used for egg production have been carefully bred to produce as many eggs as possible. The males of the egg-laying breed would not yield enough meat to earn their keep, earning instead a death sentence.

   Chickens can live for 15 years. In factory farm conditions, their egg production drops off and they are slaughtered at around one year of age. After an excruciating journey to the slaughterhouse that kills many of them, the birds are hung upside down and their heads are dragged through electrically charged water. The ones who aren’t rendered unconscious get to experience their necks being sliced open to bleed them, and then being scalded to facilitate plucking.

   Approximately 280 million hens raised for their eggs and 280 million male chicks are slaughtered each year in the United States.
    

3.  Cows are not killed to get milk, so why don’t you eat dairy products?
    
   Because cows and their calves are tortured to get milk, and, as I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, producing dairy does result in slaughter, both of “spent” dairy cows and of male calves. Calves are taken away from their mothers right after birth; the females are raised to produce milk, while the males are chained by their necks inside tiny wooden veal crates to keep them from moving because muscles would make their meat tougher. Veal producers deprive them of iron and fiber, giving them anemia, so their meat will be pale. Calves in veal crates never get to run, stretch, turn around, or even lie down comfortably. They are usually killed after just three weeks of life for “bob” veal or at four or five months of age for “special-fed” veal. Losing their calves haunts mothers, who often cry out for their lost babies for days.

   Dairy farms constrain cows in what they call a rape rack to artificially inseminate them. For ten months after cows give birth, machines take the milk that was meant for their calves, and then they are inseminated again. This cycle continues until the cows are too sick or spent to produce optimal quantities of milk and are sent to the slaughterhouse. Cows’ natural lifespan is around 20 years, but on factory farms they see only four or five years before they are killed.

   Those four or five years are miserable. Normally cows form lasting friendships, nurture their young, and even play. On factory farms they are often trapped in pens too crowded for any kind of natural behavior, or kept on concrete floors that hurt their legs, in confined indoor spaces. These cows are fed hormones and deliberately bred to produce as much milk as possible, so even though farm workers pump antibiotics into them they still tend to develop mastitis, a painful infection of their udders.

   Like cows raised for beef, dairy cows end their lives at the slaughterhouse. After a hideous journey to the slaughterhouse that hobbles, sickens, and kills many cows, a shot to the head from a captive-bolt gun is supposed to render them unconscious — but it often doesn’t work. Many conscious cows are hung upside down by a shackle around one ankle, cut open, bled, and dismembered while fully conscious.

   Around 2.8 million dairy cows and about 700,000 veal calves are slaughtered each year in the United States.
    

4. Why don’t you just buy free range meat and cage free eggs?
    
   Because the label “free range” means very little, and there is little to no government oversight to confirm that factory farms are actually in compliance with the minimal standards that are in place.

   Pigs: To earn the free range label, farmers don’t have to treat pigs well. Free range pigs suffer castration with no anesthesia, and they are confined indoors until they are nine months old. Many free range farms amputate pigs’ tails, again without anesthesia.

   Access to a forest and acorns doesn’t come without an extra price for pigs. One is spaying – an invasive surgery akin to a hysterectomy but without the anesthesia. Another is nose-ringing, which farmers inflict on nearly all free range pigs. Farm workers bore into pigs’ noses with iron tongs to implant a ring that prevents pigs from rooting around and foraging on the ground, lest they disturb the forest floor. Obviously ringing hurts, but its deleterious effects last far longer than those of the other mutilations they endure.

   Pigs have a basic and powerful instinct to root around and forage. The purpose of nose rings is to prevent them satisfying that urge. Their inability to satisfy a fundamental instinct can cause lifelong depression in pigs. Imagine if people were prohibited from fulfilling their urge for sex: it would not promote mental health, to say the least.

   When the inevitable day comes, free range pigs suffer the same horrific slaughter as their conventionally caged cousins. After cramped transport to the slaughterhouse without food and water, which kills many pigs even before they hit the killing floor, they meet their maker in gruesome ways. Some are dismembered while fully conscious.

   Poultry Raised for Meat: “Free range” means little to nothing for birds. Having one door open for five minutes a day qualifies birds raised for meat as “free range,” even if that door opens onto a pile of manure, only a few birds are close enough to the door to use it, and the whole flock is too crowded to move the rest of the time. Free range chickens, turkeys, and other birds have their beaks cut off and are slaughtered in the same miserable conditions as other birds raised for meat.

   Poultry Raised for Eggs: Rather than being crowded into battery cages, cage free chickens are crowded onto the floor or raised wire shelves in a shed. They do not go outside, ever. The “cage free” imprimatur does not give them any more space than their caged sisters, nor does it protect them from debeaking, ammonia, pecking from their neighbors, or inhumane slaughter.
    

5. Where do you get your protein?
    
   The average American diet contains twice as much protein as the human body needs, so if a vegan diet contains less protein than an omnivorous diet, it means vegans are less vulnerable to diseases caused by excess protein such as osteoporosis, heart disease, and cancer.

   Nearly all vegetables, beans, grains, nuts, and seeds contain some, and often a lot of, protein. That includes well-known protein sources like soy and all kinds of nuts and beans, and less well-known sources of protein like bagels, potatoes, peas, and spaghetti.

*             *             *

Consuming the meat or by-products of any animal abets torture. Veganism is a boycott of agribusiness with the goal of ending corporate cruelty to helpless animals, and it comes with added benefits like a healthier diet and less expensive clothing.

Good resources on moving towards a vegetarian or vegan diet include the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine 21 Day Vegan Kickstart and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Vegetarian/Vegan Starter Kit.

What to do with old clothes? The cotton industry has come up with an innovative answer, one that helps both the environment and people in need while clearing space in your closet: they will recycle your unwanted denim into home insulation and donate it to Habitat for Humanity and others who are building in needy communities. Get the details at CottonFromBlueToGreen.org. Just one more reason to buy and wear non-animal fibers.

It is extraordinarily difficult to protect non-human animals through the courts. For one thing, there are very few laws that protect non-human animals, so often there is nothing to ask the court to enforce. But even when there is a law that should protect an animal who is in a terrible situation, the courts close their doors because they believe that humans don’t have the right to sue on behalf of other animals. And of course, non-human animals don’t have the right to sue on their own behalf. In other words, there can be no day in court for most abused, exploited animals.

I used to be a litigator at The Animal Legal Defense Fund, and this dilemma was one of the reasons I left animal law. I could bang my head against those courthouse doors only so many times before my heart just broke.

Fortunately heartier souls than I carry on the important work of fighting for justice for non-human animals. Here is a great essay by one of them about the courts’ frustrating refusal to grant legal redress to other animals.

Article first published as Factory Farms Are Breeding More Than Cows on Blogcritics.
Antibiotics are overused, and as a direct result drug-resistant bacteria are developing that sicken and kill people (they are fatal in 30-60% of cases). This is old news. Doctors have responded by prescribing antibiotics less often and by emphasizing to patients the importance of taking all the pills prescribed to them. (If you don’t finish all your antibiotics, start doing so as of right now. Don’t be one of those cretins who stops taking antibiotics because they “feel better.” You’re bumping off antibiotics and aiding and abetting superbugs, and none of us appreciate it.)

What you may not have heard is that the antibiotics prescribed to people are just the tip of the superbug problem. Almost 80% of antibiotics administered in the United States are given to animals raised for food. Factory farms administer antibiotics to cows, pigs, and chickens preventatively (because the conditions they live in are so gross it’s hard to imagine they won’t get sick) and to foster unnaturally fast growth (because the more meat per day per animal, the more money for agribusiness).

28.8 million pounds of antibiotics are sold every year in the U.S. to feed to animals raised for food. Compare that to seven million pounds sold for administration to human beings. The numbers make it clear what we have to do: clean up factory farms so that animals aren’t trapped in filth so disgusting it would make them ill without medication, and give antibiotics only to animals who are sick. Both of these fixes require government to regulate agribusiness, which it is notoriously loathe to do.

Industry is trying to stave off government regulation by giving the appearance of solving the problem itself. For instance, according to Reuters, “the poultry industry [says] it already has ratcheted down ‘by a large margin’ its use of antibiotics.” But self-regulation is never the right (i.e. effective/remotely successful) answer for agribusiness. The same Reuters article reports that “Bernadette Dunham, director of FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, noted voluntary efforts to reduce antibiotic use and said, ‘We believe additional steps are necessary to have a real impact on this problem.’”

Doctors favor regulation of antibiotics on factory farms. The American Medical Association endorsed a bill to reduce the amount of antibiotics agribusiness feeds to animals they raise for food (see below for more on the bill, known as PAMTA). The AMA’s newspaper quoted Dr. Brad Spellberg, associate professor of medicine at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, as saying “I’ve seen patients die of treatable infections. I’ve told their family, ‘I have no medicine to use.’ This is a catastrophic public health crisis. I don’t know how else to put it.” (Emphasis added.)

The government knows what’s going on. The Food and Drug Administration acknowledged in 2010 that routinely feeding antibiotics to animals raised for food “is not in the interest of protecting or promoting public health.” But it has taken no action.

In 2009 Representative Louise Slaughter (D, NY) introduced PAMTA, The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which would have phased out the use of “medically important antibiotics” for non-medical purposes on factory farms. The bill did not make it into law. If it ever does, it would accomplish one of the necessary reforms – not giving antibiotics to animals who are not sick; unfortunately, it would do nothing to clean up factory farms to prevent animals from becoming sick.

You can help support PAMTA: sign the pro-PAMTA petition, and call your Representative and Senators to ask them to help introduce and co-sponsor PAMTA.

A win on PAMTA would still leave the problem of repulsive and corrosive conditions on factory farms. “[T]he reason why antibiotics are fed to animals on factory farms is to keep them from dying in the filthy, crowded conditions that farmers force these animals to call home. Factory farms are prime breeding grounds for potentially deadly bacteria such as E. coli, salmonella, and campylobacter, and the conditions are so putrid that millions of animals die within a matter of weeks before they are even sent to slaughter, despite being shot up with drugs. Imagine how few would survive without them.” The best way to clean up meat, dairy, and egg factories: Go veg and put them out of business. It’s a matter of life and death not just for the animals, but for you too.

Animals raised for food currently have no federal protection, but Congress will soon consider changing that. A bill called the “Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act” (HR 4733) has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would follow the lead of several states by taking a stand against gestation crates, veal crates, and battery cages. These are three methods of confining animals that are widespread (to the point of ubiquity) in factory farms and that cause animals relentless suffering.

Gestation crates are small metal cages only two feet wide that prevent pregnant pigs from turning around and even lying down comfortably). Sows spend most of their adult lives in these crates as they are inseminated soon after they give birth and thus kept pregnant over four out of every five months. Gestation crates cripple pregnant pigs and cause obesity. The fumes and toxins produced from the concentration of so many animals in one space sicken them (and the humans who “take care of” them). Pigs are smart animals, and the constant confinement, lack of activity or stimulation, and pain lead to neurotic behaviors like biting the bars of their cages over and over, or chewing on nothing.

Veal crates are also about two feet wide. Baby calves taken away from their mothers right after birth are chained by their necks inside these tiny wooden crates to keep them from moving – muscles would make their meat tougher. (Veal producers also deprive them of iron and fiber so their meat will be white.) Calves in veal crates never get to run, stretch, turn around, or even lie down comfortably, and they never will. They are usually killed at four or five months of age for “special-fed” veal or after just three weeks of life for “bob” veal.

Battery cages provide about four inches per hen in compliance with federal guidelines. Poultry producers cram four chickens into each 16-inch wide cage in order to maximize the number of eggs they can collect per square inch. The birds cannot spread their wings or lie down. They stand on wire mesh that cuts into their feet; sometimes their toes grow around the wire. The walls of the cage rub off the birds’ feathers and cause blood blisters. With no outlet to express their natural urges to dust bathe and to peck at the ground, birds peck at and injure each other (most have the ends of their beaks burned off as chicks in a painful, mutilating procedure intended to prevent this pecking). The concentration of so many hens in one space creates so much ammonia that it sickens the birds, hurting their lungs and making their eyes burn.

The Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act would not outlaw any of these cages, or any other form of cruelty against animals raised for food. It would only prevent the federal government from buying the meat of animals who were confined in gestation crates, veal crates, or battery cages. Several states have already gone further than this by banning these crates and cages, including Michigan, California, and Ohio, which banned or placed a moratorium on new gestation crates, veal crates, and battery cages; Colorado, Arizona, and Maine, which banned gestation and veal crates; and Oregon and Florida, which banned gestation crates. (All but Florida have phase-out periods before the prohibitions kick in. The federal law includes a two-year phase-out.)

Nevertheless, the federal bill is necessary. The major existing federal anti-cruelty statute, the Animal Welfare Act, excludes “farm animals, such as, but not limited to livestock or poultry, used or intended for use as food or fiber.” The only statute that offers animals any protection from the cruelty inherent in agribusiness is the Humane Slaughter Act, which is primarily honored in the breach. Slaughterhouse by Gail Eisnitz documents the frequent violations of the Humane Slaughter Act in horrific detail. And the Humane Slaughter Act does not protect poultry, thanks to a USDA regulation that hacks away at the statute. There is no federal law that prohibits cruelty to animals in factory farms for their entire lives before slaughter, and no federal law that gives poultry any protection at all.

It would be a victory just to have Congress adopt the Declaration of Policy in the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act: “It is the policy of the United States that the raising of livestock for food production shall be consistent with the basic principles of animal welfare.” More importantly, this bill would result in improvements to the lives of millions of farm animals because the federal government is one of the country’s biggest purchasers of meat. Paul Shapiro, Senior Director of the Factory Farming Campaign at the Humane Society of the United States, notes that the federal government buys approximately 1% of all the meat sold nationally. That translates to close to four million animals each year who would be spared three cruel forms of confinement, and in reality, the reforms would help many more animals than that as producers converted their entire facilities in order to qualify as government suppliers. Right there are four million reasons to contact your representative and ask her or him to support HR 4733.

It’s rare to find Perdue on the right side of an animal welfare issue, but don’t fret: it’s only because its two biggest competitors are on the wrong side, and that is hurting Perdue’s bottom line.

The issue is what it means to label chicken “natural.” Overlooking the fact that there is nothing natural about selling raw corpse-parts in plastic wrapping where people buy actual food, the question at hand is whether it is “natural” to inject said parts with salt, water, “and other ingredients.” Perdue is pissy because the two biggest poultry producers, Pilgrim’s Pride and Tyson Foods, inject but still use the “natural” label, while Perdue, coming in at number three, does not inject.

The purpose of injecting salt and other non-chicken substances into chicken carcasses is not to raise consumers’ blood pressure (as far as I know), but to enhance the flavor and appearance of the meat. As Jonathan Safran Foer writes in Eating Animals, the chicken at the supermarket is the remains of “a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal.” Injecting salt, water, and whatever else into the meat gives it “what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste.” It also puts more pennies in the poultry producers’ pockets by charging consumers chicken prices for water weight.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is considering revising its labeling guidelines to make clear that injecting any non-chicken substance into chicken is not “natural.” If it makes that change, Perdue will gain market share when Pilgrim’s Pride and Tyson Foods lose their “natural” labels and consumers who want to eat “natural” meat choose Perdue instead – at least until the two biggest players lose the syringes and earn the “natural” label again.

Changing the labeling guidelines could result in marginally better treatment of chickens while they are alive. Chickens who are properly nourished, not over-drugged, given an environment in which they can maintain their hygiene, and slaughtered humanely will have more flavor and look better without injections. (Or so I’m told by people in the know – as you may have guessed I don’t eat meat myself, and I have very mixed feelings about advancing an argument that the government should do anything because it will make meat taste good.) Changing the labeling guidelines could also make the factory farming of chickens marginally less profitable and therefore perhaps a marginally smaller industry because poultry producers won’t be able to overcharge consumers for water and salt by selling them as chicken.

But then comes the backlash: Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson Foods, and agribusiness everywhere will find another way to make up the lost profits, and it will probably come out of the chickens’ hides.