Eating Animals

At least one substantive post or substantive reply on Lori Gruen, Ethics and Animals (2nd Ed), in-text pgs. 81-100 (Ch. 4: “Eating Animals”) It has often been said that if people were required to kill the animals they eat, they would become vegetarians. In one year, a household of four people in the United States eats approximately three-quarters of a cow, one and a third pigs, seventy chickens, and four turkeys. If they were to kill all these animals them- selves, they would be slaughtering animals at least once a week (and would need a very large freezer). But it isnt only the use of time and space that might put people off eating other animals. The repulsion would come from having to look into an animals eyes while yielding a knife and slitting her throat. Most people dont have the time, space, or temperament to slaughter other animals to eat them, and they dont have to because large intensive slaughter- houses and processing plants exist to do the job for them. In the United States alone, these massive industrialized operations are capable of slaughtering and processing about ten billion animals annually, and the killing is designed to be swift and mechanical. In a single chicken slaughterhouse, for example, the birds are killed at a rate averaging 7,500 an hour, about two birds per second. The process involves shackling birds upside down by their feet from an overhead conveyor belt, dipping their heads into an electrified water tank to stun them, and then whizzing them past a sharp revolving blade that slices their necks. They are then dropped into a scalding tank that prepares their carcasses for de-feathering and dismemberment. The chickens are moving so fast, often only shackled by one leg, that when they arent sufficiently stunned, they struggle to free themselves. That struggle can cause the killing blade to cut through only part of their necks, and if the human killer on the floor at the time misses the kill, the chicken ends up boiled alive. One such killer, the late Virgil Butler, described his experiences working at Tyson Foods Grannis, Arkansas processing plant. Tyson Foods is the worlds largest food processing company and processes an estimated 2 billion chickens each year. 81 Published online by Cambridge University Press The killing machine can never slit the throat of every bird that goes by, especially those that the stunner does not stun properly. So, you have what is known as a killer whose job it is to catch those birds so that they are not scalded alive in the tank … No matter what the weather is like outside, this room is hot, between 90100F. The scalders also keep the humidity at about 100%. You can see the steam in the air as a kind of haze. You put on your plastic apron to cover your whole body from the sprays of blood and the hot water that keeps the killing machines blade clean and washes the floor. You put on the steel glove and pick up the knife. Its very sharp. It has to be. You can hear the squawking from the chickens being hung in the next room as well as the metal shackles rattling. Here come the birds through the stunner into the killing machine. You can expect to have to catch every 5th one or so, many that are not stunned. They come at you 182186 per minute. There is blood everywhere, in the 3 3 20 trough beneath the machine, on your face, your neck, your arms, all down your apron. You are covered in it. Sometimes you have to wash off the clots of blood, without taking your eyes off the line lest one slip by … You cant catch them all, but you try. You see it flopping around in the scalder, beating itself against the sides … another redbird. You know that for every one you see suffer like this, there have been as many as 10 you didnt see. The sheer amount of killing and blood can really get to you after a while, especially if you cant just shut down all emotion completely … You feel like part of a big death machine. Pretty much treated that way as well. Sometimes weird thoughts will enter your head. Its just you and the dying chickens. The surreal feelings grow into such a horror of the barbaric nature of your behavior. You are murdering helpless birds by the thousands (75,000 to 90,000 a night). You are a killer You shut down all emotions eventually. You just cant care about anything. Because if you care about something, it opens the gate to all those bad feelings that you cant afford to feel and still do your job. You have bills to pay. You have to eat. But, you dont want chicken. You have to be really hungry to eat that.1 1 From the Cyberactivist, Inside the Mind of a Killer 2003/08/inside mind of killer.html. 82 Ethics and Animals Published online by Cambridge University Press Butler, a self-described hillbilly from rural Arkansas, started out in the chicken industry as a catcher when he was a teenager. He would travel to various contract farms for Tyson, go into the chicken houses, grab the chickens, and stuff them into crates to be transported to slaughterhouses. Later he got a steady job killing chickens at Tyson plants. He worked killing chickens for five years before he could no longer do the job. It was certainly hard work, but apparently, what got to Virgil was his inability to accept the suffering he was causing and admit what he did for a living to his loved ones. Even though he was raised to believe they are just damned chickens, over time their blood and terror were too much for him. He ended up getting fired from Tyson in 2002 after missing work repeatedly, became a vegetarian, and, until his death in December 2006, worked tirelessly to expose what was happening on Americas factory farms. The scenes that Butler recounts are not so different from those Upton Sinclair described a century earlier in The Jungle, his graphic expos of abuses of workers and animals occurring in Chicagos unregulated slaughterhouses. While methods for transporting, slaughtering, and processing animals have not changed in meaningful ways for the animals, one thing certainly has changed the methods of rearing animals before they are transported to meet their ends. In the early 1900s, most animals were raised on small, independent farms and ranches, where the ranchers and farmers and their families had direct relationships with the animals. Knowledge about how to care for the animals was passed down from previous generations, and stories about the quirks and antics of the animals were shared at the end of long working days. Animals were typically outdoors, relatively free to move around, and able to socialize with others of their kind. They were protected from predators and had fairly pleasant lives. All that began to change in the 1920s, as farming became more industrialized. The Evolution of Industrial Agriculture In the 1900s, there were over six million farms throughout the United States. A century later, there were approximately two million farms, and the size of each was roughly triple that of the farms of old. This trend toward a smaller number of much larger operations is the direct result of the industrialization of agriculture. In 1926, the US Secretary of Agriculture encouraged the transformation of farms into factories, stating: The United States has Eating Animals 83 Published online by Cambridge University Press become great industrially largely through mass production which facilitates elimination of waste and lowering of overhead costs … tremendous econ- omies both in production and distribution has [sic] enabled manufacturers to supply consumers with what they want when they want it. It seems to me that in this matter agriculture must follow the example of industry.2 Of course, not all of these farms were dedicated to raising animals, but those that were faced unique challenges, not the least of which was figuring out how to keep a large number of animals alive in a confined space. Chickens were the first to be transformed into mass-produced commod- ities, although they were not sent directly to factory farms but rather to laboratories in agricultural colleges across the country where animal hus- bandry became animal science. As the Republican party of the 1920s was campaigning on the slogan a chicken in every pot, poultry scientists were studying chicken reproduction, health, and nutrition in order to figure out a way to rear chickens intensively. Of all animals raised for food, chickens proved to be relatively good laboratory subjects. They had short lifespans and were small enough to be caged, and their early development could be studied outside of their mothers bodies, in eggs. Still it was not easy to keep the birds confined their entire lives. Initially, the lack of ultraviolet light contrib- uted to a nutritional deficiency that created leg weakness.3 Adding vitamin D to chicken feed allowed scientists, and ultimately farmers, to overcome this particular difficulty for intensive confinement. But as chickens were being confined in greater numbers, additional problems emerged, particu- larly problems with contagious diseases. If one chicken became sick, it would not be long before the whole flock, now confined in tight quarters, would become sick. In the 1940s, antibiotic use was introduced into industrialized animal farming, and it fundamentally changed the industry. In addition to helping control the spread of disease, adding antibiotics to feed increased the weight of chickens by 10 percent or more, and it turned out that antibiotics had a growth-promoting effect on other animals as well.4 In 1954, 2 million pounds of antibiotics were produced in the United States, and roughly a quarter of this supply was used in livestock feed. Within ten years, the amount of antibiotics used more than doubled, and by the late 1990s, over 25 million pounds of antibiotics were fed to animals on industrial farms in the United States. As we will see later in this chapter, the regular use of 2 As cited in Fitzgerald 2003: 108. 3 Boyd 2001. 4 Ibid.: 647. 84 Ethics and Animals Published online by Cambridge University Press antibiotics and antimicrobials in animal agriculture has had worrisome consequences on public health. Adding antibiotics to animal feed is just one of the ways that industrial- ized farmers were able to increase the growth of animals. Manipulating their genomes, both through trial-and-error breeding and through laboratory interventions to genetically modify animals, has allowed for faster develop- ment of larger, meatier animals in less time. Again, this all started with chickens, or, more precisely, with eggs. The older breeds of chicken initially bred for slaughter required seventy to eighty days to grow to their final weight of just under 3 pounds, and the feed conversion ratio that is, the number of pounds of food it takes to produce a pound of chicken was 4 to 1. Today, chickens reach an average slaughter weight of about 5 pounds in only forty-five days, and the feed conversion ratio is now less than 2 to 1.5 The ability to grow larger animals, in less time and for less direct cost, could only have occurred when companies were large enough to exert control over all aspects of the industry from production through marketing so as to make profits more predictable, which, in turn, allowed for more investment in research. Tyson Foods, Inc. is a prime example of a corporation that not only controls production, but also influences the mar- ketplace, even creating products that consumers didnt know they wanted. From its humble beginnings in spring 1936, when John W. Tyson, a small- time Arkansas trucker, drove 500 chickens to sell to the big Chicago slaugh- terhouses, Tyson Foods, Inc. has become the the largest provider of protein products on the planet, achieved primarily through a process known as vertical integration. Tyson Foods owns almost all of the hatcheries, feed mills, and slaughter and processing plants it uses to produce animals. And the top ten integrated firms now control over 75 percent of chicken produc- tion in the United States, so they influence the market as well. They contract out the process of growing chickens to smaller operations, but the com- panies maintain ownership of the chickens. Although sometimes referred to as family farmers, these smaller grow-out operations dont look anything like the family farms of old. Integrators often require growers to maintain expensive state-of-the-art chicken houses in which up to 30,000 birds are crammed and monitored by high-tech equipment. Computers give growers up-to-the-second reports on temperature, feeding and watering 5 Barrett 2002a. Eating Animals 85 Published online by Cambridge University Press systems output, and chicken weight. Heaters, coolers, lights, humidifiers, and ventilation are automated and respond to computer outputs. These high- end modern chicken houses can cost between $175,000 and $200,000 each. While this automation may seem to make things easier for the contract grower, the debt they bear makes these small growers vulnerable to the changing whims of the integrators. Growers must accept the terms of the contracts in order to make ends meet. In addition, as one contract grower put it, you become a prisoner to your farm … Ive got pagers that alert me when somethings wrong but you only have a few minutes to react. In the past, when the houses werent so dependent on technology, you had more time to adjust the temperature or the water. Now, youve got to get there quick or else youll lose thousands of birds.6 In addition to vertical integration, the large corporations have diversified they dont simply grow and slaughter one type of animal, but are involved in turning a variety of animals into consumer products. Tyson Foods, Inc. is one of the three largest cow and pig slaughterers in the United States. In 2019 their sales were over $42 billion and they boast that they produce 1 in 5 pounds of all the chicken, beef, and pork in the United States. They have the capacity to kill 45 million chickens, 155,000 cows, and 461,000 pigs per week. 7 One of their fun facts states that they sell enough chicken tender- loins in one year that if you placed them end to end, they would circle the earth 3.7 times. And it isnt just their imagined chicken tenderloins travers- ing the earth, but the actual body parts of all sorts of animals raised, processed, and sold around the world. Globally, an estimated 72 billion land and 13 trillion aquatic animals are killed for consumption each year.8 Worldwide consumption of animals has increased more than fivefold since 1950, and factory farms, or what govern- ment agencies and the industry are now referring to as CAFOs concen- trated animal feeding operations are being set up in many countries, particularly those that have relatively lax regulations and enforcement.9 Tyson Foods, Inc. has processing plants in Argentina, Brazil, China, India, 6 Barrett 2002a. 7 www.tysonfoods.com/who we are/our story. 8 2018 numbers for land animals: slaughtered for meat and 2107 numbers for aquatic animals: . 9 The CAFO terminology is potentially misleading as there is much more that happens on factory farms than animal feeding. 86 Ethics and Animals Published online by Cambridge University Press Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Venezuela. Smithfield Foods, which was acquired by the Hong Kong based WH group in 2013, has factory farming operations globally. JBS is one of the top five animal processing companies in the United States and is owned by the worlds largest slaughterer of cows and pigs, JBS S. A. in Brazil. In addition to destroying billions of animals annually, factory farms damage the quality of life in the communities in which they are located. In 2005 The Chicago Tribune reported that in Poland, a Smithfield subsidiary was operating a large pig factory farm in the town of Wieckowice. The report claimed that the waste from the pigs was being disposed of near the local school, causing students to vomit and faint. The company changed the location of the waste to the other end of its property, closer to a lake, but then local residents complained that the water smelled odd and that their children who swam in the lake were developing eye infections.10 After Hurricane Florence hit North Carolina in 2018, killing over 3 million chickens and thousands of pigs, residents were worried about the flooding of manure lagoons. North Carolina is home to around 10 million pigs and the waste they produce is stored in giant lagoons. Thirty-three lagoons over- flowed from the storm, discharging tons of hog feces into the surrounding area.11 While the quality of life for people living near factory farms is degraded by their presence, life for animals on factory farms is devoid of all quality. Their lives are full of pain, fear, and frustration until they are slaughtered. Living and Dying on Factory Farms In a technological trade magazine article extolling the virtues of high-tech industrial animal production, the journey of one Tyson chicken, from birth to death, is told from his point of view. It reads: It all started nearly 50 days ago when I poked my egg tooth out of my shell. In just a couple of hours, I was on a truck from the hatchery to the grow-out farm where I would spend the next 46 days of my life. At the farm, I was quickly unloaded and put into a house with about 20,000 other chicks … For 10 Hundley 2005. 11 Graff 2018. Eating Animals 87 Published online by Cambridge University Press the first five days, the lights were kept on around the clock. There was nothing else to do… [Content truncated to 3000 words]

WRITE MY PAPER