A Sunless Hell: Confronting the cruel facts of factory-farmed
meat
Matthew Scully
Special for the Republic
February 19, 2006
Factory farming, in general, is no one's favorite subject, and the details
here are particularly unpleasant to think about: masses of creatures
enduring lives of unrelieved confinement and deprivation. But if you're in
need of reasons to sign the petitions and vote for the initiative, they are
easy to find, and our discomfort with the subject is a good place to start.
Known in the trade as "intensive confinement" or "mass confinement," it
sounds pretty rough. And as we're seeing already, pork producers and the PR
firms in their hire do not take well to criticism of what they regard as
"standard practice."
Just this month, the industry's allies in the Arizona Legislature proposed a
constitutional amendment to bar the public from passing any laws promoting
the humane treatment of farm animals, effective Jan. 1, 2006. Nice to have a
fallback position: Even if the humane-farming initiative passes by vote of
the people, as industry lobbyists apparently fear it will, they plan to
nullify the law retroactively.
Basically, pork producers figured out some years ago that if they packed the
maximum number of pigs into the minimum amount of space, if they pinned the
creatures down into fit-to-size iron crates above slatted floors and carved
out giant "lagoons" to contain the manure - if they turned the "farm," in
short, into a sunless hell of metal and concrete - it made everything so
much more efficient. An obvious cost-saver, and from the industry's
standpoint, that should settle the matter.
Veal, by definition, is the product of a sick, anemic, deliberately
malnourished calf, a newborn dragged away from his mother in the first hours
of life. Veal calves are dealt the harshest of punishments for the least
essential of meats. And if you think people can get too sentimental about
animals, try listening sometime to chefs and gourmands going on about the
"velvety smooth succulence" of their favorite fare.
"Cost-saver" in industrial livestock agriculture may usually be taken to
mean "moral shortcut." For all of its "science-based" pretensions, factory
farming is really just an elaborate, endless series of evasions from the
most elementary duties of honest animal husbandry. Man, the rationalizing
creature, can justify just about anything when there is money in sight. It's
only easier when your victims are so completely out of sight and unable to
speak for themselves.
Over the years, one miserly deprivation led to another, ever harsher methods
were applied to force costs lower and lower, and so on until the animals
ceased to be understood as living creatures at all. Pigs, for example,
aren't even "raised" anymore, a term that once conveyed some human attention
and care. These days, in America's 395,000-kills-per-day pork industry, pigs
are "grown," crowded together by the hundreds in the automated,
scientifically based intensive-confinement facilities formerly known as
barns.
Unlike the old ways
To the factory farmer, in contrast to the traditional farmer with his sense
of honor and obligation, the animals are "production units," and accorded
all the sympathy that term suggests. As conservative commentator Fred Barnes
put it in the Wall Street Journal, "On the old family farms, pigs and cattle
and chickens were raised for food, but they were free for a time; they
mated, raised piglets, calves and chicks and were protected by the farmers .
. . . They had a life. On industrial farms, they don't."
Among the more disreputable claims made to justify intensive confinement is
that it's actually for the benefit of the pigs. They "prefer" confinement to
grazing outdoors. They need "protection" from each other's aggression.
If you know absolutely nothing about pigs, this has a vaguely comforting
ring to it - that is, until the moment you step into a factory farm, as I
have had occasion to do. Inside, it becomes dramatically obvious that their
ceaseless, merciless confinement is the cause of the pigs' aggression, and
by no stretch a protective measure. It turns out that when you trap
intelligent, 400- to 500-pound mammals in gestation crates 22 inches wide
and 7 feet long, when their limbs are broken from trying to turn or escape
and they are covered in sores, blood, tumors, "pus pockets," and their own
urine and excrement, they tend to act up a bit.
Indeed, the most notable thing is how the appearance of any human being
causes a violent panic. A mere opening of the door brings on a horrific wave
of roars, squeals and cage-rattling from the sows. Another memorable sight
is the "cull pen," wherein each and every day, the dead or dying bodies of
the weak are placed, the ones who expired from the sheer, unrelenting agony
of it.
It takes a well-practiced dishonesty to insist with a straight face that
intensive confinement is "for their own good," and almost as brazen is the
libertarian case for factory farming, which may be summed up as "mind your
own business." Along with this comes a haughty little reminder that we're
all the beneficiaries of factory farming, and where do you think all that
cheap meat comes from, and why don't we just be grateful and let them manage
their own affairs?
The argument has a certain practical appeal, provided you forget that
factory farming is propped up by tens of billions of dollars in annual
federal subsidies, which are very definitely our business. Much as the
immiserated animals are kept on four legs by hormones and antibiotics, the
entire enterprise is sustained by those federal subsidies and billions more
paid by government to repair industrial farming's immense collateral damage
to land, water and air.
The illusion of consumer savings depends not only on unscrupulous corporate
farmers, but also on complaisant citizens and blithely indifferent consumers
who don't ask too many questions - least of all moral questions. And the
industry wants to keep it that way. Just buy the "cheap" meat, forget the
damned animals, and keep the subsidies coming.
Once the details are known, in short, it all becomes a very tough sell for
factory farmers. And so far their quaint-sounding "Campaign for Arizona
Farmers and Ranchers" (brought to you by the National Pork Producers Council
and other agribusiness trade groups) is not going well.
Industry lobbyist Jim Klinker, now director of the Arizona Farm Bureau and
lead spokesman against the humane-farming initiative, started things off
with a blunt reminder that farm animals aren't pets, and so our sympathy for
them is misplaced. "These people," Klinker told Tucson Weekly, "want these
animals raised the same way we raise our dogs and cats. I think most people
understand that's not how food is produced."
When you want people to harden their hearts, however, it's probably not such
a good idea to invite comparisons between farm animals and dogs or cats. How
would your dog react if you stuffed her into a crate in which she could not
even stretch or turn around, and never let her out? No human attention or
companionship with other animals. No bedding, straw to lie on. No single
moment outdoors, ever, to feel the breeze or the warmth of the sun.
What if it were a dog?
Your dog, a being of intelligence and emotional capacities entirely
comparable to those of a pig, would beg and wail and whimper and finally
fall silent into a state of complete brokenness. And anyone who inflicted
such tortures on that animal, no matter what excuses might be offered, would
be guilty of a felony. If the creatures are comparable, and the conditions
identical, and the suffering equal, how can the one be "standard practice"
and the other a crime?
Next, in an interview with Arizona Capitol Times, Klinker tried out the
"sentimentalist" line. The initiative, he scoffed, is based on "pure
emotions" - as opposed to factory farming itself, which we are to assume is
guided at every grim stage by the light of pure reason.
He followed up with a little warning that the Humane Treatment of Farm
Animals Act is all the doing of "outsiders" anyway, by which he means
various cranks, subversives, and social misfits who apparently are
conspiring at this very moment to "impose the values of a vegetarian society
on all Arizonans."
One problem here is that if Klinker is going to be our defender of true
Arizona values against "outsiders," then he needs to hear from a broader
range of outside opinion. And it may surprise him to learn that the problems
of factory farming are becoming more apparent, and more abhorrent, to people
of every political stripe.
When the conservative columnist George Will, for example, calls cruelty to
animals "an intrinsic evil," citing the "pain-inflicting confinements and
mutilations" of factory farming, you know it can no longer be shrugged off
as the concern of a faint-hearted few.
Factory farming, Mr. Will observed in Newsweek not long ago, has become a
"serious issue of public policy." And conservatives in particular, applying
that uncompromising moral clarity on which they pride themselves, should not
be afraid to call "vicious" things what they are.
Another conservative writer, Andrew Ferguson of Bloomberg News, challenged
the "hyper-efficient agricultural economy" and "the cruel innovations the
modern industrial farm depends upon." And Father Richard John Neuhaus,
writing in the conservative National Review, expressed his disgust at "the
horrors perpetuated against pigs on industrial farms," a matter "that
warrants public and governmental attention."
Neuhaus could cite, if he needed further authority, Pope Benedict XVI, who
has warned against the "degrading of living creatures to a commodity"
entailed in factory farming. And Protestant Christians could hear a similar
message from one of their own most respected figures, Charles Colson, the
conservative evangelist who cautions that "When it comes to animal welfare
today, Christians have allowed the secular world to set the agenda. ... We
need to get involved in shaping laws that determine animal treatment. But
first we must make it our business to find out how the ... cattle of the
earth are treated on factory farms." Christians especially, declared Colson,
"have a duty to prevent the needless torment of animals."
"Outsiders," all of them, but not to my knowledge collaborators in any
effort to impose "the values of a vegetarian society" on Arizona. For
Klinker and other lobbyists for factory farming, surely the lesson is that
they should spend a little less time warning about other people's values,
and a little more time examining their own.
It is true, as he reminds us, that other states have far larger "herds" than
in Arizona's $40 million-a-year pork industry. But this is hardly a thought
to put one's mind at rest. The same was also true, until recently, of Utah,
now home to a sprawling network of nightmarish "mega-farms," all of them
built and run by giant corporations like Smithfield Foods, the real
outsiders in all of this. The largest of these places, a sort of gulag for
pigs, holds 1.3 million in confinement and produces more waste every year
than metropolitan Los Angeles.
Why, Klinker wonders, enact a law here instead of in Iowa, North Carolina or
Utah? Well, for starters, maybe Arizonans do not want to go the way of Utah.
And in that case, now would be a good time to bar the door.
Prepare yourself to hear, in the coming months, these arguments and similar
rubbish from industry lobbyists, their shill veterinarians, and anyone else
they can trot out to make something pernicious and contemptible seem decent
and praiseworthy. Then in the quiet of the voting booth ask yourself why any
creature of God, however humble, should be made to endure the dark, lonely,
tortured existence of the factory farm, and what kind of people build their
fortunes upon such misery.
The answer will send an unequivocal message, to factory farmers here and to
all concerned, that unbridled arrogance, bad faith, and rank cruelty are not
Arizona values.
Matthew Scully worked for Arizona governors Mecham, Mofford, and
Symington.
A former special assistant and deputy director of speechwriting for
President Bush, he is the author of "Dominion: The Power of Man, the
Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy."
