Piper Hoffman

Humans have long invented and clung to rationales for our superiority to animals, and, by extension, for our right to use and abuse them. One favorite distinguishing characteristic was language, but then great apes like a chimpanzee named Washoe learned sign language. People claimed that only we use tools, but multiple species were found to do the same; some crows even improve the design of tools for specific purposes and teach the new designs to each other.

But we still had friendship — only humans had genuine friendships, the argument went, while animals had at most mutually beneficial transactions, not lasting relationships built on something beyond self-interest. ”For evolutionary biologists and anthropologists, friendship has been considered one of the core traits of only one species of ape: us,” Carl Zimmer writes in the February 20th issue of Time Magazine.

And another one bites the dust: Zimmer’s article reports the observation of friendships among dolphins, chimpanzees, and members of other species. These friendships include helping each other, sharing, just hanging out, and mourning a friend’s death.

It’s getting harder and harder for humans to justify our exploitation of other animals. Soon we will be left with only one alleged distinction between us and them: we have souls and they don’t. Conveniently for those who like the status quo, science is powerless against this one.

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.

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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.

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 Ending Vivisection and Other Evils on Blogcritics.

The makers of Lipton tea were testing it on animals. And I don’t mean sitting bunnies down with a nice warm mug and a scone and tracking whether they preferred English Breakfast over Earl Grey. No, what I mean is:

• cutting holes into rats’ intestines and feeding them tea ingredients through tubes in their throats;

• infecting baby pigs with E. coli toxin and cutting their intestines apart while they were still alive;

• suffocating mice and breaking their necks; and

• cutting off rabbits’ heads.

The goal of all this “science” was to study the health effects of tea. Safe to say tea’s health effects on Lipton’s lab animals were ultimately suboptimal. But the experimenters were more interested in the health effects of tea on humans, so why not study the health effects of tea on humans? It’s not as though there was a safety concern – humans have been drinking tea for millennia and to date tea’s documented kill rate is zero, so having some human volunteers drink tea for a while wouldn’t seem to pose any risks. I suspect that the only drawback of human testing was that it would take longer to get results. That doesn’t justify drilling holes in live animals.

Lipton’s manufacturer, Unilever, was under no legal obligation or requirement to conduct these tests.

I’ve been able to use the past tense to describe Unilever’s vivisection because the company announced on January 31st that it was stopping the experiments. The announcement came hot on the heels of a campaign of phone-calling and letter-writing from individuals, coordinated by PETA. Unilever says that it will continue to test its products (tea is only one of a vast number of products Unilever manufactures) where it is legally required to, but it will outsource the testing to a third party. I don’t see how outsourcing helps the animals being experimented on, but I do see how it helps Unilever’s PR department.

Vivisection is a giant industry that extends far beyond tea. According to PETA over 100 million animals “suffer and die in cruel chemical, drug, food and cosmetic tests, biology lessons, medical training exercises, and curiosity-driven medical experiments.” 95% of these animals have no legal protection. The federal statute that should regulate animal experimentation, the Animal Welfare Act, doesn’t cover mice, rats, birds, and cold-blooded animals, thanks to the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) decision to pull the teeth out of the law Congress passed. So even an experimenter who finds that things have gotten too horrific even for him can’t go to court to save the victims.

Laboratory workers torture and kill millions of animals every year and they can’t even pretend to have an excuse. As Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.” Right here in the U.S.A.