Factory Farming
Gone are the days of the family farm. Farming has become a massive, corporate-owned business like many others, with responsibilities only to its stockholders, and the goal of making maximum profit in minimum time. Further information about family farms versus factory farming can be found here.
Interested in making the switch to "humane", organic meat? Learn whether it's as good as you expect here.
What is factory farming?
From FactoryFarming.com:
Factory farming is an attitude that regards animals and the natural world merely as commodities to be exploited for profit.
In animal agriculture, this attitude has led to institutionalized animal cruelty, massive environmental destruction and resource depletion, and animal and human health risks.
Animal Cruelty Issues
Animal Cruelty Issues
Poultry
In factory farming, each chicken is given less than half of one square foot of space. Turkeys receive less than three square feet. After they hatch, birds of both kinds have the ends of their beaks cut off to prevent them from attacking each other in their crowded conditions. This process is known as “debeaking”, and has been compared to having the ends of your fingers removed. Additionally, turkeys have the ends of their toes and their snoods cut off. All of these tasks are performed without anesthesia. (link)
Both chickens and turkeys in modern factory farms have been genetically engineered and pumped with antibiotics; as a result they grow much faster than ever before. For example, in the 1960's, it took a turkey 32 weeks to reach slaughter size, but now, it takes only 13-16 weeks. In the 1950’s, it took a chicken 84 days to reach five pounds. Today, it takes 45 days[1] , meaning that they are not even old enough to cluck yet when they die.
"[B]roilers now grow so rapidly that the heart and lungs are not developed well enough to support the remainder of the body, resulting in congestive heart failure and tremendous death losses." —Martin D, "Researcher Studying Growth-Induced Diseases in Broilers," Feedstuffs, May 26, 1997.
“Is it more profitable to grow the biggest bird and have increased mortality....[S]imple calculations suggest that it is better to get the weight and ignore the mortality.” — Tabler GT, Mendenhall AM, “Broiler Nutrition, Feed Intake and Grower Economics,” Avian Advice 5(4) (Winter 2003): 8–10.
When it comes to turkeys, they have been bred to have such large breasts that they cannot even mount and mate on their own. A method of artificial insemination is their sole means of reproduction. Breeding toms are kept in the dark for most of their lives and milked for their semen once or twice a week, while females are “cracked open” (the term used by industry representatives) twice a week. Their legs are clamped into metal forceps and they are inseminated, one after the other, as workers hurry to inseminate between 1,200 and 1,400 turkeys within two hours. One factory worker described how young turkeys are curious and friendly with employees “until the first couple AIs—and then they run from you…”[2]
Like chickens, turkeys suffer from their considerable growth, leading Feedstuffs, an industry journal, to state:
Turkeys have been bred to grow faster and heavier but their skeletons haven't kept pace, which causes 'cowboy legs'. Commonly, the turkeys have problems standing and fall and are trampled on or seek refuge under feeders, leading to bruises and downgradings as well as culled or killed birds.[3]
Turkeys and chickens are transported in open-air crates to the slaughterhouse. This results in high mortality as the birds are exposed to all sorts of weather, but each chicken or turkey is worth so little that it is cheaper overall for the industry to use open-air crates.
They are handled roughly at the slaughterhouse, where they are unloaded by forklift and dropped onto a conveyor belt. With thousands of birds to be processed every hour, there is no reason for employees to stop and pick up the individual birds who miss the belt and fall to the ground.
When it comes time to slaughter the birds, they are hung by their feet on a moving rail and dragged through the stunning tank, an electrified water bath meant to stun and immobilize them. These are often set lower than is necessary to truly render the birds unconscious out of concerns that high voltage might damage the carcass and therefore diminish its value.
They are then carried past the tank to have their throats cut either by a mechanical blade or a plant employee. Often, struggling birds are cut improperly; as a result they are moved, fully conscious, to the scalding tank, in which they are boiled alive. This occurrence is so common that the industry has a term for it; they call these millions of birds “redskins”.[4]
In an affidavit signed on January 30, 2003, former slaughterhouse worker Virgil Butler wrote that when chickens are scalded alive, they “flop, scream, kick, and their eyeballs pop out of their heads. They often come out of the other end with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they’ve struggled so much in the tank.”[5]
For more pictures, please click here. Warning: Graphic.
Beef
The average beef cow is born and lives on the range for the first months or years of its life. Medical care is often not provided to these animals; consequently, many fall ill and even die. A particularly common problem amongst cattle is known as "cancer eye", wherein a form of malignant cancer develops in the cow's eye and eventually eats away at its face. [6]
Factory farms identify their cows in the same manner that cowboys on the range used; that is, with the use of a hot branding iron. While being branded, the animals bellow and scream. “Waddling”—cutting out a chunk of the skin hanging beneath the cow’s neck—is also often used as a method of identification. [7]
In Canada, cows are also required to wear ear tags. [8]
Hormonal growth promoters are legal in Canadian beef, though they have been banned by European Union. There are six in use. Three are natural: progesterone, testosterone and estradiol-17ß. Three are synthetic: trenbolone acetate (TBA), zeranol and melengestrol acetate (MGA). The hormones are administered in the cows' feed or via implants under the skin, typically behind the ear. [9]
About 3 months before they are to be killed, range cattle—confused by the presence of humans and their sudden confinement—are rounded up and brought into feedlots to be fattened on unnaturally rich diets that cause metabolic problems. There they are crowded by the thousands into dusty, manure-laden feedlots.
Cattle may be transported to several different places during their lives, often up to hundreds or thousands of miles in a single trip. These long journeys, during which the animals are not fed or watered and are exposed to all types of weather, are extremely stressful and often result in death. This “shipping fever” costs the industry over $1 billion a year. [10]
Once they get to the slaughterhouse, the cows are meant to be stunned through a mechanical blow to the head; however, with 250 cows to be processed every hour, this is often done improperly and the animals struggle, still alive.
In an April 2001 article, the Washington Post reported:
The cattle were supposed to be dead before they got to Moreno. But too often they weren't.
They blink. They make noises, he said softly. The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around. Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. They die, said Moreno, piece by piece...
"In plants all over the United States, this happens on a daily basis," said Lester Friedlander, a veterinarian and formerly chief government inspector at a Pennsylvania hamburger plant. "I've seen it happen. And I've talked to other veterinarians. They feel it's out of control." [11]
Professor of animal science at Colorado State University Temple Grandin was commissioned by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to tour slaughterhouses in Ontario and Quebec. Her conclusions?
"Canada is falling behind the U.S...Plants in Ontario and Quebec get failing grades".[12]
During her visit to Canada, Grandin noted:
Out of five beef plants, two failed because of excessive use of electric prods, cattle falling on slippery floors as they lined up to be stunned, and three cattle were actually hanging upside down (hung by a chain around one leg) and bellowing as their throats were being slit.[13]
For pictures, please click here. Warning: Graphic
Fish
Many people do not realize that factory farms exist for fish as well as for land animals, but they do. In fact, one in five fish eaten today were raised in a factory farm.[14] Their existence is the result of overfishing in the oceans--there are literally not enough fish in the sea to support our avarice. Fish are not the only ones to suffer as a result of overfishing, however. Common fishing techniques like bottom trawling (in which nets are dragged thousands of miles across the ocean floor) and longlining (which uses large numbers of baited hooks on an extended line) result in the destruction of underwater habitats and kill mass numbers of sea 
turtles, dolphins, albatrosses and other sea birds, and any other marine animal unfortunate enough to be trapped as "bycatch". (source) As agribusiness magazine Feedstuffs explained:
Every new seafood fad leads to the decimation of another species of fish... Any major increase in seafood consumption can be sustained only if the seafood is grown on farms or in other managed environments.[15]
But factory farmed fish is certainly not without its problems. The fish are raised as intensively as any land animal, with thousands upon thousands living in controlled indoor tanks or specially sectioned off coastal estuaries.
Crowded in feces-laden water, the fish are particularly susceptible todisease and thus many fish farms make liberal use of "chemicals as disinfectants and to kill bacteria; herbicides to prevent the overgrowth of vegetation in ponds; vaccines to fight certain diseases; and drugs - usually combined in the feed - to treat diseases and parasites."[16]
As the fish grow, they are periodically sorted by size in an attempt to keep larger fish from eating the smaller ones before they can be slaughtered and sold. The process is called "grading" and requires the fish to be pumped or netted out of their tanks and dropped onto a series of grates with progressively smaller gaps; in this way they are sorted into differently sized enclosures. This is a stressful process that often results in scrapes, loss of scales, and death. [17]
Once they are mature, the fish are carried in oxygenated tanker trucks to a processing plant, where they are dumped into mesh cages. As the water drains, the fish who survived the stressful trip die of suffocation.
There is a particular type of irony in raising farmed fish to limit the depletion of wild populations, considering that in 1997, for example, it took 10 million tons of wild-caught fish to feed and raise 29 million tons of farmed salmon, sea bass, halibut and flounder. (An additional 22 million tons of wild-caught fish were used to feed pigs and cows that same year.)[18]
Additionally, there is considerable evidence that farmed fish populations can have a negative effect on the health of wild fish, in particular, wild salmon. In British Columbia, for example, the sea lice which infect farmed salmon have begun to spread to wild salmon, and the Watershed Alliance Salmon Society of BC predicts that if salmon farming is allowed to continue as it has, "wild salmon could disappear from certain areas in less than 4 years." [19] Learn more about our soon-to-be empty oceans.
Pork
Canada slaughters an average of 20 million pigs every year; approximately 250,000 are from British Columbia.[19, 20] 6 million live pigs are exported to the United States annually.[21] In 2003, managers of Canada’s largest pig exporter faced cruelty charges when 10,000 dead or dying pigs were found on the company’s farms. Investigators discovered dead pigs piled behind barns as well as dead piglets in manure tanks, and all live pigs "were in some form of distress." [22]
Gestation Crates and Piglets
There are about 1 million mother pigs in Canada, and they spend most of their lives in individual "gestation" crates, which are about 7 feet long and 2 feet wide—too small for the pigs to even to turn around. They will spend 3 to 5 years in these crates. [23] This confinement produces stress- and boredom-related behaviours, such as the compulsive gnawing of cage bars or pressing against water bottles. [24]
In 2007 Maple Leaf Foods, the largest pork producer in Canada, announced plans to phase gestation crates out in 10 years in favour of group housing systems; these allow for a degree of freedom of movement and socialization. This change will affect about 116,000 pigs annually. [25]
After giving birth, mother pigs are moved to "farrowing" crates, which are wide enough for them to lie down and nurse their babies but still not large enough for them to turn around or build nests for their young. An average of 20 piglets are born to each pig annually, and 15% of these piglets die within 2 to 3 weeks. The others are taken from their mother and raised in metal pens with concrete floors.[26]
After this, piglets are packed into pens until they are separated to be raised for breeding or meat.[27] These overcrowded conditions lead to stress-related behaviors, such as cannibalism and tail-biting. To prevent this, farmers cut off the piglets’ tails and use pliers to break off the ends of their teeth. No pain-killers are used.[28] Pieces are also torn out of the piglets' ears, to make individual pigs easier to identify.[29]
In Canada and the United States, male piglets are also castrated at an early age to prevent "boar taint", a harmless but unappealing "urine, faeces, musk or onions" scent that is released when the meat of an adult male pig is cooked. [30], [31] This painful removal of the testicles, like the other alterations, is done without any pain-killers. [32]
For more pictures, please click here.Warning: Graphic
Foie Gras
Please visit our page on Foie Gras here.
Veal
Please visit our page on veal here.
Eggs
Please visit our page on eggs here.
Dairy
Please visit our page on dairy here.
References:
[1] Compassion Over Killing, 45 Days: The Life and Death of a Broiler Chicken
[2] Farm Sanctuary News, “Unnatural Breeding Techniques and Results in Modern Turkey Production”, Winter 2007
[3] Feedstuffs, 9 September 1991
[4] United Poultry Concerns, Chicken:The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food by Steve Striffler, Yale University Press, 2005
[5] ibid.
[6] Mercy for Animals, Beef
[7] Farm Sanctuary, Factory Beef Production
[8] Canadian Cattle Identification Agency, FAQ, 2009
[9] Health Canada, Shipping Fever Pneumonia, 2006
[10] ibid.
[11] Warrick, Joby, The Washington Post, "They Die Piece by Piece" 10 April 2006
[12] Harpur, Tom, The Toronto Star, "Western Culture Floats on a Sea of Blood", 21 September 2003
[13] ibid.
[14] Farm Sanctuary, Seafood Production
[15] Feedstuffs
[16] Farm Sanctuary, Seafood Production
[17] PETA, Fish Farms: Underwater Factories
[18] Melville, Nancy A., HealthSCOUT, "The Downside of Fish Farms" 23 September
[19] Nield, Jeff, Animation Shows How Sea Lice From Fish Farms Can Reduce Wild Salmon Population, 25 September 2008
[19] Canada Pork International, Hog Production in Canada (Table 1), March 2005
[20] BC Pork, The Pork Industry in British Columbia
[21] United States Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, "Canadian Pork Industry Overview, September 2003," The PigSite.com, Sep. 2003.
[22] Kelly Pedro, “Pigs Found Dead, Dying. Seven Men Have Been Charged Over the Grim Discovery Involving 10,000 Animals,” The London Free Press, 15 Sep. 2003
[23] Humane Society International: Canada, Gestation Crates, 2009
[24] Marc Kaufman, “In Pig Farming, Growing Concern,” The Washington Post, 18 Jun. 2001.
[25] Humane Society International: Canada, Canada’s Largest Pig Producer to End Confinement of Pigs in Gestation Crates, 28 Feb 2007
[26] Humane Society International: Canada, Gestation Crates, 2009
[27]William G. Luce et al., “Managing the Sow and Litter,” Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service, Mar. 1995.
[28] ibid.
[29] L. Neil Burcham, "Identify Pigs by Ear Notching,"Cooperative Extension Service, New Mexico State University, Nov. 1997.
[30] ThePigSite.com, Boar Taint: An Understanding of What It Is, 8 Sept 2008
[31] PutPorkonYourFork.ca, Pork Facts from the Experts, 2009
[32] PigProgress.net, Towards a More Humane Castration for Piglets, 15 July 2007
