If somebody wanted to avoid one mass produced food in the US, which would it be? I’m not including niche products like Fois Gras, though I do include milk and eggs. Also pork, chicken, fish and beef. I’m also excluding the fine products of Niman Ranch, purveyors of sustainable agriculture, cage-free eggs, traditional farming, etc.
I understand that veal is bad because baby calves are chained in enclosures where they can’t turnaround or walk. I’m not sure how the calves feel about it though, because I am not a calf. I mean you might think that chickens appreciate fresh air and sunshine, but according to Cecil: “UK researchers studying commercial poultry farms say only 15 percent of chickens who have the opportunity ever leave the henhouse.” Sure they get more enthusiastic when you plant trees outside. But I’d like to see some sort of scientific measures of animal suffering as I don’t assume that my intuition necessarily accords with the preferences of our feathered familiars. Something likethis (both links PDFs).
Pigs are allegedly fairly intelligent. They are reportedly jam-packed in small enclosures making them sufficiently neurotic so that they nibble at each other’s tails. Hey, it’s a tough world. I’ve ridden on some crowded subways as well. But apparently some pigs don’t bother to retaliate after having their tails bitten and they can suffer infection. So factory pig farmers cut off the tails (dock them) early on to eliminate the problem altogether. That sounds sensible. But ISTM that if an organism loses the will to defend itself, that its lifestyle conditions are probably pretty uncomfortable. So some years ago, I dropped my veal boycott and started avoiding pork and ham.
Ham is my favorite meat, incidentally. I will buy it from Niman Ranch.
Over at Vox, Dylan Matthews thinks I have it all wrong. To him chicken is the worst with eggs a close 2nd. “But chicken is healthy”, I say. :: The article didn’t contain much in the way of measuring indications of stress via blood test, etc. But it did note that the little cluckers are given about a square foot of space each and are bred to be sadistically overweight: they suffer impaired walking ability as a result.
Also with burgers you get a ton of meat with one of God’s creatures, while you need hundreds of clucking sparks of life to get the same quantity of meat on America’s table.
So say I wanted to avoid one and only one factory farmed food. Which would it be?
Pork, chicken and most US beef is grain fed, meaning that it includes all the deaths of all the rats that died of poisoning to produce the grain that fed the livestock, as well as the treatment of the livestock itself.
Pigs probably suffer the most indignities. Their growth is measured by stabbing their back to see how much fat you go through before you hit bone. And they’re deliberately fed their own waste product, “Ditch Liquor.” (According to the novel Hannibal, anyway. I’m a city boy.)
The proper definition is part of the great debate. I’ll define it is that which leads to the most animal suffering that we care about. Which doesn’t help much.
Presumably social animals have a greater capacity to suffer because they have an evolutionarily backed motive to convey suffering. And a good way to convey suffering is to feel it. But pure physical pain is also a decent evolutionary adaptation.
I can reframe the question though. Which major food animal food group in the US is the least ethical and the most worthy of either avoiding or substituting a non-factory version? In other words, see the last 2 sentences of the OP.
I have read arguments that soybean production is brutal as it involves the deaths of thousands of rodents. But at least they are free range rodents, right?
I don’t eat pork, because porks are such lovely creatures. They’re smart and affectionate, and they wag their tales. I can’t support that industry. Avoiding pork takes more effort than I expected it to, but I don’t mind. Bacon is everywhere.
I’m working on eliminating beef, now. I still eat chicken but that’s next on my list.
Veal, lamb, sheep, mutton & goat are right out. And turtles, fwiw. I like turtles. And fois gras, obvs, although I will eat duck or goose.
Ahh, but given half a chance, they’ll eat you. It doesn’t justify how the average farm pig is treated, but I don’t feel bad about the act of eating them. Turnabout being fair play, and all that.
I think pigs are the ones who suffer the most. They’re crammed into cages indoors where they can barely move, while the typical cow spends much time outdoors eating grass. It’s much easier to convince people to be sympathetic to cows and sheep than pigs. Cows and sheep are cuter.
This reminded me of a very old Ripley’s Believe it or Not cartoon that reported on what NASA experts did think about the likely food stuffs that one could have in future space stations (but more likely on) or moon/mars bases.
Chickens and Sheep would be preferred. No cows or pigs, because they are too big and they eat too much.
Something to think about if you do take into account that our planet can be considered our main space ship.
I think that you would need to do some cognizance testing on the various animals to determine the answer. It seems likely that we’ve basically bred our farm animals so that they have all the worldly cares of someone who’s been lobotomized. If one pig chews off anothers, and the other one doesn’t seem to notice, I’d currently put that down to genetics rather than that the pig went crazy due to space restraints. All the pigs that would have gone crazy, from tight spaces, were bred out of the stock thousands of years ago leaving all the ones who are too retarded to realize that its nose is stuck in another pig’s asshole all day.
But maybe not. As said, we would need to do some testing to confirm that.
The only way to get a grown pig to exercise is to put them on a treadmill.
I’d focus on the livestock which are force fed e.g. foie gras or white veal or in a rare example of deliberate underfeeding, superfine woolled sheep which are housed and fed maintenance rations to keep the fibre as fine as possible.
Of the mainstays of agribusiness laying hens whether battery or “free range” would be my nomination.
Doesn’t classify as farmed food but the animal with the worst deal in agribusiness is a thoroughbred teaser stallion.
Not far behind that IMHO are pets from working/hunting breeds who are kept in city apartments.
“Brutal” = you being raised to be slaughtered because we like to eat your dead remains, and the only thing that matters between birth and the inevitable slaughter is that you stay alive.
Cute, yes. I drove by a big semi once hauling a big trailer that had something that looked like a hundred pairs of big, wondering eyes looking out through the slats, which I realized were cattle going to some place I would rather not think about and they would rather not know about. I’ve had a different view of the morgue section of the grocery store ever since.
I don’t think there’s any one single meat avoidance that stands out above the others, other than obvious cruelty like foie gras which involves horrible force-feeding of geese. And there are very good reasons to avoid veal. I am happy to say that I’ve more or less been avoiding beef, too, for many years. Red meat just isn’t good for you, and the humanitarian aspect of it isn’t so much that cows are “cute” as the fact that they do feel pain and fear. There are credible sources for the fact that the fear of cattle being herded into slaughterhouses is a real and palpable thing, their killing not always humane, and I’m really not that interested in buying the bloody remains just because they’re wrapped up in plastic in a nice store and have a price tag on them. There’s a reason that stuff is red – it’s pieces of a dead animal. I’m not an extremist and, being an omnivore by nature, I’ll admit to throwing a steak on the barbecue on rare occasions, but it isn’t often.
Temple Grandin has done some interesting work in the U.S. meat industry and has some valuable insight. I tend to agree with her opinion that as long as we are a meat-eating culture, we should strive to slaughter the animals with as little pain and terror as possible. So that’s my definition of what is not brutal, or in other words to me brutality means torturing an animal to death.
Temple has made some good improvements in the beef and pork industry and wants to do similar work for poultry. She’s made some interesting observations about sadism in the poultry industry, how it affects the people involved. (Namely, that if sadism is ignored/allowed, it becomes “normal” and the workers become inured to it so that more and more of them indulge in sadistic practices like deliberately (for fun) running over hens with forklifts.)
Poultry and hogs have it really bad because they are overcrowded to the extent that they demonstrate “antisocial” behaviors like chewing each other’s tails off or pecking each other’s eyes out. People in the industry also talk about how stupid sows are because they’ll lay on top of their piglets and crush them. They of course fail to mention that this most often happens because the pens are so small the sow has nowhere to go other than straight down. Some clever person invented gestation pens/crates that have indentations along the walls where some piglets can tuck themselves to avoid being crushed. In my opinion, that’s a bandaid, not a solution. But market pressure causes (I won’t say force because they could resist if they wanted to) the industry to jam as many animals into the smallest space possible in order to “harvest” more.
I’ve also seen some industry comments about how the chickens don’t go out into the yards they opened up for them when responding to market pressure for free range chicken. They fail to mention how the birds have been modified (through either breeding or GMO) to have so much muscle that their legs and internal organs are frail. I doubt they want to move because of that, so no, they’re not going out to browse the yard. Stop using those meat breeds, use a “normal” breed of chicken and I think you’ll find that they adore exploring their yards!
(I eat meat, although all of these things bug me. I compensate by buying locally farmed meat as much as possible instead of large industry meat from the grocery stores.)
Chicken are also put in crowded conditions. ISTM that factory cow raising is the least bad. I understand they spend a little while outdoors.
I honestly don’t have a problem with this. I opine that animals can adapt to urbanized areas. Everyone has to earn a living and if the pig is living in Old McDonald’s farm (as in E I E I O, not Ronald), well ISTM that things might very well be worse in the natural world. Also, I understand that hens are sort of mean to one another: the state of nature isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Quoted for context. That’s the rub: economy is a legitimate concern, but at some point we should curb the sadism IMHO.
I agree that more research would be fruitful, even if the protocols are not obvious. +1.
: The article didn’t contain much in the way of measuring indications of stress via blood test, etc. But it did note that the little cluckers are given about a square foot of space each and are bred to be sadistically overweight: they suffer impaired walking ability as a result.