Concentrated animal feeding operations
Because people talked about this on the Oliver Sacks – Temple Grandin thread: a website about CAFOs.
In the United States and other parts of the world, livestock production is becoming increasingly dominated by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). In a CAFO, animals are crammed by the thousands or tens of thousands, often unable to breathe fresh air, see the light of day, walk outside, peck at a plants or insects, scratch the earth, or eat a blade of grass.
Over 50 billion food animals are raised and slaughtered every year (not including massive quantities of farmed fish). Grazing and growing feed for livestock now occupy 70 percent of all agricultural land and 30 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet. If present trends continue, meat production is predicted to double between the turn of the 21st century and 2050. Yet already, the Earth is being overwhelmed by food animals that consume massive quantities of energy and resources, whose wastes foul waterways and farmlands, and when eaten excessively, degrade our health.
Nature as Industry: The Merciless World of the CAFO
The CAFO is the ultimate expression of the industrialization of nature. If all of us knew more about the realities of modern industrial animal food production, however, one would hope that we would apply the collective brakes on this dietary, environmental, and ethical madness.
“The principle of confinement in so-called animal science is derived from the industrial version of efficiency. The designers of animal factories appear to have had in mind the example of concentration camps or prisons, the aim of which is to house and feed the greatest numbers in the smallest space at the least expense of money, labor, and attention. To subject innocent creatures to such treatment has long been recognized as heartless. Animal factories make an economic virtue of heartlessness toward domestic animals, to which we humans owe instead a large debt of respect and gratitude.”
—Wendell Berry, Stupidity in Concentration
I didn’t know that Grandin supports or defends CAFOs, though I did know she has no issue with raising animals for slaughter. I suppose in current conditions you can’t do the second without doing the first.
Well, those chicken nuggets don’t bread themselves, you know.
There are 350 million people living in the US (roughly)…which means about 1 billion meals are consumed each day (roughly). Or 360 billion meals a year. Even conservatively considering that only 2 of the three meals contains meat, that’s still a HUGE demand for protein.
Those numbers don’t distress me in the least when they’re put into context with the magnitude of the demand.
I want so badly to try to say something about the notion of caring about peace, kindness, ending suffering, equality, treating each other decently, being good people toward each other, and a lot of other important good things. But i can’t figure out how to make the words come out right.
So here are some actual numbers:
http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/
Kevin K
Well wait – saying there is a need to provide food for 350 million people (and, globally, 7+ billion people) is not the same thing as saying animal suffering and environmental damage don’t matter – or that they don’t “distress” you.
I’ve been thinking about this since the early 90s. David Suzuki (the 2nd Greatest Canadian as voted in a CBC poll) presented what was, to me, an eye-opening documentary way back then about industrial agriculture. As the daughter of a couple of transplanted Italian peasants, I’m used to being up close and personal with my food. My parents butchered and cured their own meats, made their own sausage and cheese, etc. As kids, we were the free labour my parents needed to get the work done; carrying, lifting, moving, stacking while the adults cut and prepped. I suppose that I thought all meat came from farms like the one where we got our steer, pig and 2 dozen chickens from in the fall.
Once I found out about industrial farming, I became a vegetarian for about 15 yrs. I wasn’t actually opposed to killing animals for food (obviously given my past) but I didn’t want to be complicit in the torture of animals so that people could eat meat 3Xs a day in the west. So I stopped eating meat for a while. When I got pregnant, I craved chicken and couldn’t stomach the protein-rich foods I’d been eating as a vegetarian so I started eating meat again. Now, we buy our meat from local farms at a local farmer’s market. It’s a pretty privileged place to be but we’re lucky enough to be in it. I don’t judge people who can’t afford to buy their meat anywhere but the grocery department at WalMart but I don’t have to add to the demand.
Just an interesting side note to my vegetarian years: There are some people who, when they find out that you don’t eat meat, revel in eating meat in front of you and telling you all about the butchering process. It’s a strange compulsion; taking pleasure from trying to make others upset. Pre-internet trolls, I suppose.
I found I was able to put them off their meat by actually explaining the butchering process to them. Heck, I have brain-tanned a deer hide. You eating a burger in front of me isn’t going to make me cry.
As an Israeli transplant I find the USian level of meat addiction astonishing. In Israel it is unusual to have meat more than once a day. I have seen people in the US who suffer cravings if they have one meatless meal. It would be easier and more environmentally friendly if US folks cut down a bit.
I consider killing a sentient creature to be wrong, no matter how much it’s considered to be socially acceptable. I’ve never heard an argument which justified the killing, all i’ve ever heard are expressions of social normativity.
Sam– mmm, hmm. My family raised backyard chickens and one year raised pigs and sheep. my brother went vegan and I was a vegetarian until poverty made me decide free/cheap and nutritious foods were things I couldn’t afford to be choosy about.
I have had one hand on a sausage grinder and another on a chunk of meat with an eyeball in. The meat-eaters who tried to taunt me had nothing.
That is another difference between my experience in Israel and in the US. In Israel meat is relatively expensive. Poor people often cut down on meat.
Every time i see the word “meat” instead of “pieces of corpses from murdered animals” i think there is a shift going on. It’s a usage of language which allows people to frame the situation as “i’m hungry” and shift it away from “an innocent creature is captured, tortured, and slaughtered for me to put in my mouth”.
It’s deflection. It’s denial. It’s dishonesty.
This piece of meat. vs. This piece of murdered cow corpse.
This piece of meat vs. This piece of murdered human corpse.
Which is worse? Is it deflection, denial and dishonesty; or context and point of reference?
I don’t know what you mean by “which is worse”? You are asking if some murder is worse than others?
And i don’t know what you are trying to suggest about context and point of reference. I live in the context of a murderous society which approves of and lies about most of the murder, when it’s not simply denying it. What point of reference would be helpful here?
Being poor doesn’t stop me from avoiding murdering creatures to eat. Being in a society which murders creatures for food doesn’t convince me that it’s okay, it just makes me frustrated to live in that society. Is there a point of reference which helps with that? If something is wrong, it doesn’t become right just because seven billion people are doing it. It becomes seven billion times more wrong.
If we want less suffering in the world, it’s not easy to solve all of the world’s problems, but we can AT LEAST choose to personally do our best to avoid actively participating in the murderous slaughter and suffering, to the extent of which we are capable. This isn’t too idealistic, this is the easy part.
Yeah, I was a bit cryptic from trying to be brief. I’m at work so divided time and attention etc.
I don’t mean to push any buttons for you either. What I mean is which is worse in terms of the emotional reaction to the language used in each case.
I understand your point of view and in fact lived as a “non-practising” vegetarian for a decade. I flatted with a vegetarian and ate and cooked mostly vegetarian food, but happily ate meat when out. Vegetarian dishes still make up a major part of my diet. However, I do enjoy eating meat and I’m fortunate that where I live sheep, cows, deer are all raised on pasture. Pigs and chickens are more problematic, but free range options are available. We also have high standards of animal welfare (penned pigs and chickens aside – that is an abomination) and animal slaughterhouses are humane and efficient. unlike many (most?) meat eaters, I have had multiple opportunities to walk unsupervised through many different meat works from live end to packaging, so I’m under no illusions what happens.
Coming back to my question above. The flesh off an animal corpse is literally just meat, regardless of species. Most people reading the questions above will have a different reaction to describing a dead human as a murdered corpse to describing them as meat. Both invoke a strong negative reaction, but describing a murdered human as meat invokes taboo consumption imagery as well, compounding the taboo of murder. describing the dead cow as meat invokes a (normalised) pleasure reaction in most meat eaters and a revulsion reaction in many/most vegetarians. Describing a cow as having been murdered would, I suggest, invoke puzzlement or even humour from most meat eaters, but agreed outrage/anger/sadness/revulsion from vegetarians.
My point is that the language used, and the reaction to it, is not so much a case of deflection, denial or dishonesty as it is the socially normative context and the listeners point of reference.
Okay, thanks Rob, i understand you more clearly now. What seems to ME like deflection, denial, and dishonesty, does not necessarily seem that way to somebody ELSE who is still operating under the approved social conditioning and contexts. Still a bad situation, but i do understand your point.
I’m very sorry to hear that you are able to look at animals on a pasture and still not be dissuaded from having them killed and put in your mouth. I know it’s social conditioning which makes you and other people find this to be acceptable, and i wish i knew how to say something to convince you that an ethical behavior pattern would involve defying the accepted norms of the conditioning. I think to myself, “i changed my behavior after i saw things and got more facts,” but i don’t know how to give facts to everybody else in a way which would convince them to change their behaviors as i did.
It’s depressing. Living on this planet is just like being trapped in a horror movie, except that it’s not fiction. Billions of people right now are actually perfectly content to accept the slaughter of trillions of animals, able to accept the death and killing without being perturbed in their day-to-day activity. And it’s not enough for them to capture and torture and murder the animals and then eat them; people seem to feel it’s acceptable to also make up entire mythologies around the whole situation, describing the captivity and murder as “humane” or “cruelty-free” or some such. As if there were possibly such a thing as a humane and non-cruel way to capture, kill, and devour another sentient being.
Just sad; and i feel like crawling out of my own skin, feel some really genuinely intense self-loathing and nausea when i remind myself of all the dead creatures that i willfully put in my own mouth, just because everybody else was doing it, just because my parents and schoolmates and co-workers and neighbors were doing it. This is how we have Holocausts, this is how we have a world of billions of people eating slaughter: social conditioning to train people to accept the evil before they have a chance to develop their own psychological resistance to it. This is how we have sexism and xenophobia and bigotry: socially conditioning everybody to accept the evil norms before they have a chance to develop their own ethical framework. This is why we have overpopulated the world. This is why people feel it’s okay to reproduce and breed, despite the unborn being unable to give consent to being condemned to a lifetime in this world. I don’t know how to work against it in a systematic way, all i know is my own way of trying to cope with it. And my way of coping is usually, as someone said in another context, “selecting the lesser of evils from a menu of terrible choices.” Or something like that.
Kevin, The great thing about this is that we are able to have the conversation without resorting to name calling and othering. I’ve certainly seen enough of your writing over the last few weeks to have a sense of you as a person begin to form in my head. More of a shadow or an artists first few pencil strokes, but certainly a person, not an abstract. It’s so easy to loose sight of the fact that behind the nyms are real, complex, wonderful, inspiring, misguided and sometimes just plain wrong about something or horrible people.
I don’t claim to be right about this issue. I’m certainly aware I can’t claim any moral high ground. My position is more informed in part by ethics and in part by practicality and social normativity (and delicious delicious… sorry). I have recently drawn the line at squid and octopus. I’ve seen too much evidence of a level of intelligence and self awareness that I haven’t observed in sheep or chickens for instance. The jury is still out for me on pigs, but I suspect at some point I’ll wave a tearful farewell to bacon.
My long winded point is that it is nice to have a place where over the course of several discussions we can both agree and disagree on various issues to one degree or another but, but still be bound by the commonalities. I value the participants here for that and thanks to Ophelia for making it possible.
I’m always still learning how to do this better, and it is definitely thanks to such things as Ophelia’s work on this blog which makes it possible for me. Thank you.
@Rob: I grew up on a (mostly) pig farm. I can tell you that pigs are terrifyingly (given their size) intelligent. They are also quite easily satisfied so it’s quite unusual to see their smarter side. There’s a reason that “as happy as a pig in shit” is an aphorism. But when they’re motivated, they will confound you. And their motivations can be diverse. They like to escape but apparently not because they want to be free, but because they want to be over there for a bit. Then they’ll come back. Some pigs will take a lifelong dislike to a particular person and can be very mean (one once bit clean through my boot, could easily have taken my foot off) or just belligerent. They seem to delight in making it hard to do things like check their feet.
This might be enough to make your bacon sandwiches hard to swallow, but I’m not sure that intelligence should be the benchmark. After all, surely I’m projecting somewhat when I describe pigs as delighting in disobedience. Is it wronger to eat animals that remind me of me than ones that don’t? Do they have a more valid reason to live than cows, which are bred as much for passivity as for bulk? I don’t know.
I am a meat eater, but as Kevin says I have no way to justify it other than deliciousness and laziness. Those are not very good reasons at all and I think my brain is telling me I shouldn’t eat animals. There is one quasi-argument that’s rather easy to poke holes in and is kind of circular, but has some resonance with farmers and other people who raise animals for food: those animals would have never been alive at all if people weren’t going to eat them. I know, I know, but bear with me a little bit. The reason it almost qualifies as an argument is that farmers – at least, on small farms like the one I grew up on – *care* about their animals. I don’t just mean general health care, they *like* them (or hate them or fear them, depending on the animal). They recognise them as individuals. They know their moods. They try to keep the animals happy. Their lives matter. And the obvious response is “why take those lives away then?” and I’ve got nothing.
What I do have are memories of sitting up all night with animals giving birth, having sheep living in the house as pets, being out for hours in horrendous weather looking for one lost animal not with profit in mind, but because there was an animal that was lost and alone. That’s one of the many reasons I’m strongly against factory farming of any sort, especially ones with sciency-sounding abbreviations. It’s important to me that the lives of our food animals matter. But then I keep coming back to that one obvious retort….
Well, as apex predators we predate on things that can’t eat us (and some of those that can); the same abilities that make us apex predators we can choose a diet that is contrary to our inclinations and nutritional needs while at the same time we can make said diet fulfill our inclinations and nutritional needs.
Alternatively we can just work on getting cloned animal tissue tech up from the goldfish cells that have already been used, ‘cuz meat is wonderful. That and you reduce the environmental footprint of livestock production both in terms of acreage and greenhouse gas emissions.
I’m saying that I’m not distressed by the number 50 billion farm animals (many, many, many, many, many, many chickens; many, many pigs; many cows; few of everything else). The number itself is meant to disturb your sensibilities. “OMG!!! That’s a LOT of animals!!! We have to do something!!!11eleventy!!!”
Well yes. It is. And the alternative is? 49 billion? 48 billion? 47 billion? At what point does the number become “acceptable”? I know the vegans will all declare ZERO!! But the rest of the world likes its eggs with bacon and its cheese underneath a burger. You’re not going to change the human desire for meat.
Yes, farming practices should be humane. If for no other reason than healthy animals fetch a better price than non-healthy animals, and are probably better for you when consumed. I’ve never farmed, but I’ve lived in farm communities (nothing smells worse than a chicken farm — except possibly a pig farm). The good farmers — the ones who are most successful at their business — are the ones who use the most-modern humane practices designed to deliver high-quality product to their buyers.
Tugging at your meat-loving conscience based on the sheer volume of the demand for meat? Propaganda.
Then you’re smelling them wrong. Or someone is farming wrong. There’s no reason why farms should smell. Well, they’ll smell a bit when they spread manure as fertiliser, but other than that, nah.
It would be great if that were true but it obviously isn’t. The most financially successful farmers are the ones who get their animals to slaughter as quickly as possible. Those are the least tasty animals and the ones who don’t get to have much of a life. Farmers who treat their animals better and let them live longer don’t make more money than those with a factory approach. It’s not a scalable business. In the UK at least it is very difficult for the more old-fashioned, ethical and humane farmers to make a living. It’s very easy indeed for factory farmers to make money.
Kevin K, yes you can change the human desire for meat. See the case of the many vegetarians and vegans who weren’t raised with those diets. Our family went vegetarian some 7 years ago – and my husband grew up in Argentina. It was no sacrifice, not even for my husband.
You can change the human desire and cultural acceptance for meat, just like it took a while to change the cultural acceptance for slavery. It took propaganda and tugging at people’s consciences, but it changed.
A sheep farm.
Kevin Hutchins,
Agree with all of your comments here. Wish I had time to elaborate. Your comment @#13 describes the thoughts I have on an almost daily basis, particularly:
” i wish i knew how to say something to convince you that an ethical behavior pattern would involve defying the accepted norms of the conditioning. I think to myself, “i changed my behavior after i saw things and got more facts,” but i don’t know how to give facts to everybody else in a way which would convince them to change their behaviors as i did.”
“It’s depressing. Living on this planet is just like being trapped in a horror movie, except that it’s not fiction. Billions of people right now are actually perfectly content to accept the slaughter of trillions of animals, able to accept the death and killing without being perturbed in their day-to-day activity.”
Just sad; and i feel like crawling out of my own skin, feel some really genuinely intense self-loathing and nausea when i remind myself of all the dead creatures that i willfully put in my own mouth, just because everybody else was doing it, just because my parents and schoolmates and co-workers and neighbors were doing it. This is how we have Holocausts, this is how we have a world of billions of people eating slaughter: social conditioning to train people to accept the evil before they have a chance to develop their own psychological resistance to it. This is how we have sexism and xenophobia and bigotry: socially conditioning everybody to accept the evil norms before they have a chance to develop their own ethical framework.”
Heck, that’s practically your whole comment. Sorry. But it is such a great comment.
Thank you, teslalivia. Sometimes i’m afraid my emotional venting will clutter the commentary, but it’s encouraging to know you understand the thoughts and/or feelings. Ophelia already does a favor by curating, researching, questioning and filtering through a lot of material, so i feel like i am in good company when i’m reading these pieces and hearing intelligent discussions from people like you. Much better than a lot of other possible socializing or so-called social networking. Actual encouragement while still feeling challenged rather than just “in the echo chamber” because there are so many diverse commenters here, i love it.
I once engaged in a discussion with a vegan on his views on meat and murder. It turned out he was also anti-safe-and-legal-abortion because of those same ethics. He really sounded like a very religious Christian, sure that his choices were the right ones for everyone.
I’m all for people holding onto their personal ethics and living their lives that way. Telling people they’re unethical if they make different choice: I’m not so supportive of that.
I see your point, learie. Is there a more tactful way of saying, “i don’t think this is ethical?”
I ask in all earnestness because when i saw Ophelia post that photograph of a woman being literally beaten by patriarchs, i wanted to say many crude things, but what would be more tactful than saying, “this violates all of my senses of ethics and humanism”? I want to accomplish the communication of sincere sentiment without resorting to name-calling? Thank you, i hope you see how personal feelings make it difficult to find the ideal words.
Saying “I don’t think this is ethical” is your absolute right. We could have a discussion on those terms. ‘Is killing an animal for food ethical?’ is an excellent question for meat eaters. ‘Is killing for food the same as murder?’ is a discussion question.
You also have the absolute right to say “anyone who eats meat is a murderer”, but we can’t have a discussion. “You are a murderer if you eat meat” is an accusation.
I would like to respond further: but I have to go. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to engage with you.
Thanks, that’s what i meant, i wanted to avoid name-calling, i wanted to find something that appeals persuasively to people’s sense of ethical concern for reducing harm and suffering.