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End factory farming…before it ends us

Viva!’s campaigns to save animals from suffering

Intensive, industrialised, factory - they’re all words that describe modern farming methods. Intensive because as many animals as possible are crammed together in the smallest possible space. Industrialised because feeding, watering and dung clearing are often performed automatically. Factory because the philosophy of mass production is what lies behind it all.

Can you conceive of the mentality that looked at restlessly strutting chickens, descendants of jungle fowl, and decided to cram them five to a wire cage no bigger than a microwave oven - so small that not even one hen can stretch her wings? Then they piled thousands of cages one on top of another and forced the hens - through selective breeding, constant lighting and food unnaturally high in protein - to produce an egg almost every day of their short lives, when their ancestors laid just 20 a year. So many egg shells that calcium is leached from the hen’s bones, causing them to break from osteoporosis.

This system produces 70 per cent of all eggs in the UK. Barn egg production is equally squalid - no cages but sheds with upwards of 15 hens to a square metre. The sad little by-products of all egg systems are day-old male chicks, too scrawny for meat and incapable of laying eggs so 40 million are cruelly gassed with CO2 or crushed to death every year.

The fate of meat chickens is little better. As many as 30,000 or more are crammed into a single shed to stand in their own excreta for the six weeks of their obscenely short lives. Huge, waddling babies, forced to grow so unnaturally fast that their hearts can’t cope and many die from heart disease. Legs break under their ballooning weight and despite this ordeal, these perversions of nature account for almost all chicken meat eaten. Ducks, turkeys and Guinea fowl all endure similar conditions - and geese are heading the same way.

What sane person would look at highly-intelligent animals such as pigs and force them into overcrowded, concrete cells? No bedding, no enrichment, filth and squalor and absolutely nothing to do - unable to fulfil even their most basic natural instincts. And as a bonus, cut off their tails and crush their teeth without anaesthetics in an attempt to control the resulting aggression.

A special barbarity is reserved for sows - female breeding pigs. Until recently they spent their entire lives encased in metal - narrow crates little wider than their bodies, ensuring they could never turn around or lie down properly. In Britain, continual campaigning has led to the abolition of these stalls while the sows are pregnant. They have been replaced with yet more barren concrete and filth except for 70 days a year when they are confined in metal farrowing crates while they deliver and suckle their annual 2.5 litters. No wonder they go mad, gnawing at their bars in the bleak and desolate despair of mental collapse.

These are the obvious examples of factory farming but there are others, less obvious. Despite their seemingly free-range existence, dairy cows are probably the hardest worked of all farmed animals. They are one of the few animals to endure pregnancy and milking both at the same time. And what milking - up to 10 times the amount they need to suckle a calf. Look at dairy cows in the field and you will see hip bones that protrude from their skin like coat hangers through a flimsy shirt. Watch them as they walk and you will see distended udders. They limp and lurch along with difficulty. Hardly surprising as one third at any one time suffer foot and leg problems and excruciating laminitis. A further third experience the equally painful mastitis - massively inflamed teats that issue copious amounts of pus. Animals that can live into their mid twenties are exhausted after just two or three pregnancies and are slaughtered - equivalent in age to a teenage girl.

And what of their offspring? All are removed from their mother at two or three days old, despite her bellows of despair and their own confusion and fear. Female calves will mostly be kept to replenish the herd while the teetering little male calves are shot in the head - another by-product of another cruel industry. Until BSE (mad cow disease) they were despatched to the barbaric solitary confinement of continental veal crates, and purposely diseased with anaemia so their flesh would appear white. This still goes on across Europe but, for the time being, without British calves.

Sheep, too, are touted as free-range animals - and so they are. But that doesn’t tell the full story. Tricked into ovulating at the wrong time and forced into producing too many babies - increasingly triplets - it is a struggle to survive, often on over-grazed, marginal land. Instead of giving birth in Spring, ewes often deliver their young as early as December. The result is cold, starvation, disease and death, which claims 20 per cent of all new born lambs - four million every year.

And when they’re marketed, each little creature which has known only the quiet of the countryside will be transported from market place to holding pen, from livestock dealer to exporter an average of eight times each. Many will be subjected to days of road transport - often as far as Greece - crammed with others in unventilated, unheated transporters. Many will die - whole consignments have died - of stress, thirst and heat stroke.

And so it goes on. Beef cattle are no exception and it was unnaturally being fed the remains of their own kind that has given the world this terrifying and incurable outbreak of vCJD - the human form of BSE.

Even reproduction has become a perversion of nature. Artificial insemination has mostly replaced the age-old natural method. It can involve males being continually and forcibly masturbated for their semen, which is then crudely injected into females through plastic pipes. It enables producers to control fertility entirely, to increase the frequency of birth and destroy the natural seasonal cycle. Turkeys have become such monstrosities of manipulation that they can no longer breed naturally  at all.

This whole cycle of exploitation took wing after the end of World War II - or, to be more precise, after 1948 when antibiotics were first introduced. And it is these which are the key to this unnatural, cruel and ultimately dangerous abuse of animals. What began with greed is likely to end in catastrophe. There has been enough writing on the wall in the form of warnings to graffiti the Great Wall of China. But still the dosing goes on - often indiscriminately, on a daily basis, frequently incorporated in food and water.

A whole string of antibiotics and other drugs are administered for different purposes. Some are used to prevent disease, some are used to try and cure diseases and some, believe it or not, are used simply to make animals put on weight more quickly. The onslaught is relentless and the outcome is not even in doubt any more.

In evolutionary terms, the time from 1948 to today is no more than a twinkling of light. And yet the results are stark. One by one we have lost the ability to use specific antibiotics because the bacteria they are designed to kill have developed resistance - the drugs no longer work. Worse than this, the mutated microbes have the ability to pass on their resistance to unrelated organisms in an example of microbial co-operation that no one understands. In severe cases of food poisoning, there is now only one antibiotic of last resort - and one of its derivatives is still being fed to animals.

We are staring into the abyss - not our words but those of an enquiry into drug-resistant bacteria. As enquiry tumbles on the heels of enquiry, the farming industry refuses to respond and as one drug is banned, their use of another increases - and the government wrings its hands as only governments know how.

We have virulent new forms of salmonella, E. coli and campylobacter  which have turned food poisoning into an epidemic. And we have superbugs, which are wreaking havoc in our hospitals. Thousands of people are dying horrible deaths as a result. And the problem is growing rapidly worse. Factory farming has to end, we have to stop this obsessive promotion of animal protein and we have to begin treating animals with respect and consideration - or pay the price.

 

 

© Tony Wardle