Should We Still Only Eat Farm Animals?
A few years ago I wanted to visit the all-time egg farm I could find. I had been within an egg factory subcontract. I had seen a dozen sheds, each with a dozen rows of wire cages stacked ii loftier and 150ft deep. Those cages were so small the birds within couldn't even spread their wings. They were half-starved, diseased, and undeniably miserable.
Factory farming was clearly incorrect, so I wanted to instead observe a farm that represented an ethical and humane way to heighten animals for food.
Fortunately some minor farms, such equally those who gear up stands at farmers' markets, are willing to let people visit their facilities. So in March 2016, I drove from my home in San Francisco upwards California's northern coast, through towering redwoods and by crashing waves, to one of the best egg farms in the country.
The award-winning farm was nestled in a landscape of bucolic greenish grass and rolling hills. It looked like it came straight out of an advertisement. I saw a charmingly rundown-withal-functional mobile chicken coop standing in a football-field-sized pasture peppered with complimentary-roaming chickens. I thought to myself, why couldn't all farms be like this? I had seen what happened behind the locked doors of factory farms, but hither I seemed to exist witnessing a better fashion. I would before long larn but how incorrect I was.
Americans intendance about farmed animate being welfare. In fact, final calendar week California passed a ballot measure out for cage-free eggs with 61% of the vote, a rare level of agreement in these divided times. In 2016, a similar initiative in Massachusetts succeeded with 78%.
Consumers get out of their way to purchase cage-free or pasture-based eggs or buy meat at the local farmers' market place. My colleagues and I ran a survey in 2017 that showed that 75% of US adults believe they ordinarily eat meat, dairy, and eggs "from animals that are treated humanely." In fact, when vegans ask their friends to cease eating animals, one of the most common responses they hear is, "Don't worry. I just swallow humane meat."
Are consumers right? It'due south impossible for all of them to exist. Data on the number of animals per farm in the United states of america suggests that over 99% of US farmed animals alive on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, commonly known every bit "factory farms". Globally, that figure is probably over 90%.
So 75% of Americans think they consume humane meat, but a tiny fraction actually exercise. The majority of consumers seem tragically wrong about what they consume.
Take muzzle-free eggs, for example. Only because the birds aren't in cages doesn't mean they're healthy or happy. Cage-gratuitous birds accept effectually the same total space per bird; they but live in a big shed with thousands of other birds.
In this stressful environment, birds oftentimes peck each other so much that they lose feathers, bleed, and even die from what is finer cannibalism caused by the birds' high-density confinement. The air quality on cage-gratis farms tends to exist worse equally chickens walking around kick upwardly dust and feces, which threatens nutrient safety.
Raising chickens on pasture avoids some of these bug, but it invites new bug. Pasture-based flocks suffer due to predation and disease from wild fauna.
By some measures grass-fed cow farming is potentially worse than grain-fed cow farming. Grass-fed cow farming leads to two to four times more than production of methane, a major greenhouse gas, than grain-fed cow farming. It also takes more land, water, and fossil fuels to produce grass-fed beef. Buying "grass-fed" or "pasture-raised" tin be seen equally a salve for the environmental conscience, but the damage can actually be greater.
Maybe there are some rotational, labor-intensive methods that do reduce environmental impact. Yet, eco-witting animal farming does little to mitigate health concerns aside from the overuse of antibiotics. And the animal suffering, especially on chicken farms, is withal staggering.
You lot may exist thinking that fifty-fifty if the vast majority of farms still take serious bug, surely at least a few farms have happy animals.
This response is valid, to an extent. Where I grew upwardly in rural Texas, I lived effectually pasture-raised cattle who seemed perfectly content to chew their cud. I helped raise a handful chickens and goats myself. Yeah, their slaughter might be a terrible experience, but it seems plausible that 1 twenty-four hours of even suffering might not outweigh a few years of happy cud-chewing life.
When people call upon the idea of ethical beast farming – even if that constitutes little or none of their bodily consumption – it has dangerous effects as a "psychological refuge" they indirectly utilise to justify their consumption of manufactory farmed products.
Most Americans accept been exposed to the realities of animal farming from hundreds of undercover investigations over the years and dozens of scientific reports on the industry's environmental and public health impacts.
Simply their minds resolve this conflict between their values and their behavior past insisting that they eat a humane kind of meat that doesn't cause beast suffering or ecology damage. Their other options are to stop eating animate being products or to accept that what they're doing is harmful, and neither of these options are particularly appealing. This is why we see 75% of US adults thinking they eat humane meat, despite fewer than one% of farmed animals actually living on non-factory farms.
Ethical farming – nice endeavor
At the California egg farm I visited, the devil was in the details. Despite the pastoral scenery, I constitute that the birds were in worse health than those of whatsoever other farm I'd been to. I saw many cases of Marek's, a highly contagious disease that had led to fractional blindness in many of them; swollen abdomens, some with over a pound of fluid buildup in their less-than-five-pound body;and lice.
Similar the hens in mill farms, many of them suffered and died from cancer, stuck eggs, reproductive tract infections, and other ailments that result from artificial breeding for hyperactive reproductive systems that brand them lay unnatural numbers of eggs.
When I visited the farm, I sincerely wanted to believe that these animals had good lives, only the evidence just wasn't in that location to support it. It wasn't every bit bad as the factory farms I visited, just it still wasn't the kind of life I'd want to live myself.
Of class, the current scarcity of humane animal farms doesn't forestall their theoretically possibility. Just consider the toll: the eggs at the farm I visited toll over $6 per dozen. Inappreciably anyone is willing to pay that much for nutrient, and that farm withal had serious ethical bug.
I was disappointed by the visit to this farm and other farm visits, equally well as show from hundreds of other visits to "humane" farms past brute protection advocates and investigators. Mercy For Animals, the international non-profit animal protection organisation, says information technology randomly selects farms to investigate, and other groups have specifically sought out farms with leading humane certifications in order to show that fifty-fifty the animals on those farms withal suffer tremendously.
Fourth dimension to cancel factory farming
We would need extensive regulations and enforcement to maintain loftier animate being welfare throughout the industry. This would include the expenses of regular independent inspections and livestreamed security footage at all facilities.
Consumers or taxpayers would too demand to pay for direct costs such equally more space per animal, an army of veterinarians and medical supplies for sick animals, and a reversion of the bogus breeding that has fabricated animals grow meat and produce milk and eggs at ultra-fast rates. That level of welfare doesn't exist at the very best farms today, and then even the steep price tag of the eggs from the pasture subcontract I visited is still too low to guarantee that the animals have good lives.
And then even if humane animate being farming is possible in theory, and perchance even real in a handful of isolated cases, information technology tin't conceivably feed effectually x billion people past 2050.
The fact is that when we use animals as raw materials or labor in the food system this inevitably leads to mass cruelty because cheap prices and profits will always come up before their welfare.
This means we need to take a position against beast farming. So I think we'll be on track to end all animal farming.
This is an edited excerpt from The End of Beast Farming, Beacon Printing
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/nov/16/theres-no-such-thing-as-humane-meat-or-eggs-stop-kidding-yourself
Posted by: steinhoffcoth1963.blogspot.com
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