PEAST2600 Week 6 Tragedy of Industrialized Animal Factories Reflection Paper

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PEA_ST 2600 Summer 2019 PEA_ST2600 Assignment Schedule Week n 6 The Oceans - The Seas Reading Assignment : Text: CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrialized Animal Factories o From Textbook: Part III Inside the CAFO: Ken Stier & Emmett Hopkins Floating Hog Farms: Industrial Aquaculture is Spoiling the Aquatic Commons o PDF file: John Ikerd. Who Pays the Cost of Water Pollution & Depletion? (pdf, 5 pages) https://faculty.missouri.edu/ikerdj/papers/WisconsinWaterPollutionDepletion.pdf Viewing Assignment : Captain Paul Watson - Positive Economy Forum Le Havre 2015 ... ▶ 12:52 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU8R6iulrDA Oct 27, 2015 - Uploaded by Positive Economy Forum Captain Paul Watson, Founder of Sea Shepherd, explains why and how we should protect oceans' fauna and ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU8R6iulrDA Writing Assignments : (1) Reflection Paper (1page/single-spaced) on the required Reading and Viewing Assignments (due Wednesday). Please see Writing Prompts that may help you orient your personal reflections. This is the sixth of seven Reflection Papers in which you state your basic thoughts and any personal insights about this week’s assignments. The Reflection Paper may express agreement, perplexity, or respectful disagreement with the two Readings and the Viewing segment featuring Captain Paul Watson, original co-founder of Greenpeace. (2) Discussion Board Postings: Please comment on at least two writings by your class colleagues (due by Friday). The Discussion Board Postings should be your personal insights or thoughts in agreement and/or respectful disagreement with our class colleagues. 1. This week as we glance towards the bodies of water that support the earth, we must ask ourselves if we are concerned about the oceans and seas, and why? 2. Your response to the short presentation by Watson and, what, if any, part of his talk particularly resonated with you. 3. Please discuss industrial aquaculture as per the article by Stier & Hopkins. 4. How does Professor John Ikerd’s paper tie in with this? THE CAFO READER THE TRAGEDY OF INDUSTRIAL ANIMAL FACTORIES EDITED BY DANIEL IMHOFF © 2010 by the Foundation for Deep Ecology Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the Foundation for Deep Ecology. Pages 405 and 406 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Library of Congress Control Number: 2010925052 Distributed by University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England www.ucpress.edu Interior design by BookMatters. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To the hundreds of billions of animals, past and present, who have been and continue to be tortured in the industrial food factories known as concentrated animal feeding operations—CAFOs. And to the activists, farmers, scientists, writers, photographers, concerned citizens, and all others engaged in creating a healthy, humane, community-based, and sustainable food system. May the real costs and impacts of mega feeding operations and their associated economies become more widely discussed, debated, and understood. And may the time come when animal husbandry, agricultural diversity, and wild biodiversity are valued for their own sake as well as our own, and when the interdependence between healthy lands, healthy plants and animals, healthy communities, and healthy people is universally acknowledged. CONTENTS Foreword Douglas R. Tompkins Introduction Daniel Imhoff PART ONE THE PATHOLOGICAL MINDSET OF THE CAFO Introduction: From Agrarianism to Industrialism Farm Factories: The End of Animal Husbandry Bernard E. Rollin Fear Factories: The Case for Compassionate Conservatism—for Animals Matthew Scully Cold Evil: The Ideologies of Industrialism Andrew Kimbrell Renewing Husbandry: The Mechanization of Agriculture Is Fast Coming to an End Wendell Berry Man, the Paragon of Animals? Questioning Our Assumptions About Evolution Christopher Manes PART TWO MYTHS OF THE CAFO Myth: Industrial Food Is Cheap Myth: Industrial Food Is Efficient Myth: Industrial Food Is Healthy Myth: CAFOs Are Farms, Not Factories Myth: CAFOs Are Good for Rural Communities Myth: Industrial Food Benefits the Environment and Wildlife Myth: Industrial Food Can Feed the World Myth: CAFO Manure Is a Benign Resource PART THREE INSIDE THE CAFO Introduction: What the Industry Doesn’t Want Us to Know Power Steer: On the Trail of Industrial Beef Michael Pollan Boss Hog: The Rapid Rise of Industrial Swine Jeff Tietz Watching the Chickens Pass By: The Grueling Monotony of the Disassembly Line Steve Striffler The Milk of Human Unkindness: Industrialization and the Supercow Anne Mendelson Size Matters: The Meat Industry and the Corruption of Darwinian Economics Steve Bjerklie Floating Hog Farms: Industrial Aquaculture Is Spoiling the Aquatic Commons? Ken Stier and Emmett Hopkins PART FOUR THE LOSS OF DIVERSITY Introduction: Extinction Is Forever Old MacDonald Had Diversity: The Role of Traditional Breeds in a Dynamic Agricultural Future Donald E. Bixby Squeezed to the Last Drop: The Loss of Family Farms Tom Philpott Assault on Nature: CAFOs and Biodiversity Loss George Wuerthner Narrowing of Poultry Breeds Traditional Versus Industrial Beef and Dairy Cattle Traditional Swine and Lean Hogs Demise of the Family Farmer Loss of Individual Farms PART FIVE HIDDEN COSTS OF CAFOS Introduction: Economists Have Forgotten How to Add From Farms to Factories: Pillaging the Commons Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Bad Meat: Deregulation Makes Eating a High-Risk Behavior Eric Schlosser CAFOs Are in Everyone’s Backyard: Industrial Agriculture, Democracy, and the Future Kendall Thu Paying the Polluters: Animal Factories Feast on Taxpayer Subsidies Martha Noble Sliced and Diced: The Labor You Eat Christopher D. Cook Diet for a Hot Planet: Livestock and Climate Change Anna Lappé PART SIX TECHNOLOGICAL TAKEOVER Introduction: From Farms to High-Tech Antibiotic Drug Abuse: CAFOs Are Squandering Vital Human Medicines Leo Horrigan, Jay Graham, and Shawn McKenzie Franken Food: Livestock Cloning and the Quest for Industrial Perfection Rebecca Spector Genetically Engineered Farm Animals: A Brazen Effort to Make Nature Fit the Industrial Mold Jaydee Hanson Nuclear Meat: Using Radiation and Chemicals to Make Food “Safe” Wenonah Hauter PART SEVEN PUTTING THE CAFO OUT TO PASTURE Introduction: Toward a Humane, Equitable, and Sustainable Food System Toward Sustainability: Moving from Energy Dependence to Energy Exchange Fred Kirschenmann The Good Farmer: An Agrarian Approach to Animal Agriculture Peter Kaminsky Changing the Law: The Road to Reform Paige Tomaselli and Meredith Niles A Chef Speaks Out: Making the Case for Taste Dan Barber Dismantlement: A Movement to Topple Industrial Animal Agriculture Erik Marcus The Farmer’s Bind: Scaling Up for a Different Kind of Agriculture Becky Weed Healing: Restoring Health, Wealth, and Respect to Food and Farming Joel Salatin Vote with Your Fork: It’s Time for Citizens to Take Back the Food System Daniel Imhoff Know Where Your Food Comes From What You Can Do What Policy Makers Can Do Contributors Resources A Glossary of CAFO Terms and Euphemisms Selected Bibliography Acknowledgments Credits Notes Index FOREWORD DOUGLAS R. TOMPKINS his book, along with its photo-format companion volume, CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation): The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories, has been a long time in the making. It is not the first of its kind. Our foundation, the Foundation for Deep Ecology, has published several large-format books and companion readers over the last seventeen years documenting various ecological outrages. These volumes have exposed the fallacies and outright pathologies of industrial agriculture and industrial forestry (Fatal Harvest, The Fatal Harvest Reader, and Clearcut); megascale dam building for hydroelectricity (Patagonia Sin Represas); public lands livestock grazing in the American West (Welfare Ranching); ill-conceived fire suppression policy (Wildfire and The Wildfire Reader); motorized recreation (Thrillcraft); and mountaintop-removal coal mining (Plundering Appalachia). With The CAFO Reader, we again turn our attention to the horrors of industrial food production, this time with a focus on factory “farms,” which are of course nothing of the sort, having little connection with honorable agrarianism and everything to do with cruelty and environmental abuse in the pursuit of corporate profit. Through the years, as editors and producers of these books, we have come to recognize a common thread that ties them together. Wherever we look closely at the most egregious assaults on the Earth’s beauty and integrity, we find that the abusive behavior flows from a root cause: a technological and industrial approach to production, land management, recreation, or other economic activity. Time and again we are struck by the fact that this reductionist, narrow, techno-industrial paradigm when applied to a production system ends up diminishing nature, accelerating its demise, and unbalancing ecosystems. In short, we conclude that within this fundamental industrial framework lies the answer to why the world is falling apart and why we find ourselves, one and all, ensnared in the massive social and ecological unraveling we call the “ecosocial crisis.” For it is not only natural systems that are in crisis—as manifest in burgeoning rates of extinction, collapsing fisheries, and a rapidly warming planet—but also human societies that depend on healthy ecosystems. Around the globe, natural and human communities are in decline or in some state of crisis, collapsing or having already collapsed. Industrialism, the godchild of this mechanistic worldview, lurks behind every tree and is responsible for the deeper and deeper hole we humans are digging for ourselves. In The CAFO Reader, we recognize the logic of industrialism applied to domesticated food animals. The result is a tragic, pathetic, and inhumane method of raising animals in factory farms to produce meat, milk, eggs, leather, fur, and nonessential culinary luxuries such as liver pâté. Living creatures are treated as machines, reduced to “units” in an assembly line of protein production by corporate food purveyors, with the individual animal’s suffering ignored. This is the kind of atrocity for which the word evil seems too meek and mild. After reading this book, a reasonable person might assume that agribusiness’s unethical treatment of farm animals could sink no lower. Unfortunately, the future bodes otherwise, for on the horizon we see cloning and genetic engineering emerging in full force from a Frankenstein laboratory owned and operated by giant corporations looking to make their breeding and raising of commercial/industrial animals ever more “efficient.” Thus the ecosocial crisis deepens. At every juncture, the subjugation T of nature by human culture is exacerbated, and the factory “farm” becomes yet another symptom of the machine mind that seeks to engineer the world—including living creatures—in service of human aims and corporate interests. It is time to call this cold and calculated evil system by its real name: industrial animal concentration camps. This is a much more accurate term than the seemingly innocuous and technical acronym CAFO, for concentrated animal feeding operation. As you read through this book, consider how you can contribute to the abolition of this ungodly industry and its despicable treatment of other sentient beings. These concentration camps for animals simply have to go, and it will take the same kind of creative, uncompromising social change movement built by those visionaries who worked to abolish slavery, racism, torture, and other relics of inhumanity over the last two hundred years. Please lend your voice and your votes, your personal economic choices and your heart to this effort. It is quite possible to banish these animal factories from the face of the Earth; it only takes the will and determination of citizen activists. We spent a number of years researching and assembling this book as a tool to inform the broader public of where most meat comes from and how it is produced. Now we need an army of activists who will make it a principle textbook, who will become articulate on this issue so they can forge arguments, alliances, and strategies to campaign for a change in social norms that ultimately eliminates these food animal factories. For anyone who takes up this noble cause, we can guarantee that this kind of activism will pay your rent for living on the planet. INTRODUCTION DANIEL IMHOFF ur domesticated livestock have never been as cruelly confined or slaughtered in such massive quantities in all of history. Every year, at least four domesticated animals are raised for every person on the planet. In the United States alone, nearly 10 billion domesticated livestock—mostly chickens, pigs, and cows—are raised and slaughtered annually, a number that is dwarfed if one includes rapidly expanding land- and ocean-based fish farming. This is twice the number that America raised in 1980, and ten times more than in 1940.1 Even more alarming is that animal food production is expanding across the globe at a staggering pace. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that global consumption of both meat and dairy products will double by 2050.2 Yet already the world’s lands and waters are being overwhelmed by animals that consume vast amounts of energy, foul the environment, and when eaten excessively, degrade our health.3 In the United States and in other parts of the world, the raising of livestock has become increasingly dominated by concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), intensive livestock operations (ILOs in Canada), and smaller animal feeding operations (AFOs). These are essentially factorylike buildings into which animals—industrially bred for rapid growth and high output of meat, milk, or eggs—are tightly crammed, caged, and sometimes even chained or tethered. By current U.S. Environmental Protection Agency definitions, a large CAFO imports its feed and concentrates more than any of the following: 1,000 cattle; 2,500 swine over 55 pounds; 10,000 swine under 55 pounds; 55,000 turkeys; 125,000 chickens; or 82,000 laying hens. As the name implies, a CAFO is a feeding operation. Animal density and weight gain are the primary objectives. These animal factories are quite different from small- or medium-size diversified farms that combine row or tree crops with livestock raised on pastures, using the animals’ manure to fertilize the fields or orchards. Most CAFOs shouldn’t really even be described as farms—either technically or legally—because they basically operate under an industrial factory framework. In a CAFO, animals are concentrated in unnaturally high stocking rates by the thousands or tens of thousands and under unnatural conditions, often unable to breathe fresh air, see the light of day, walk outside, peck at plants or insects, scratch the earth, or eat a blade of grass. They are fed a high-calorie grain-based diet (sometimes including reclaimed animal manure, ground-up fish, or recycled animal parts) designed to maximize growth and weight gain in the shortest amount of time. Only a select few modern breeds are chosen for these cold industrial parameters. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the term factory farming appeared in an American journal of economics in 1890, although confinement feeding operations such as the deplorable nineteenth-century “swill” dairies—which fed milk cows the spent distillery wastes from whiskey production—had been in existence long before that. Industrial animal farming received a significant boost in the 1920s with the discovery that adding vitamins A and D to feed rations allowed producers to keep animals indoors all year long, channeling their energy into rapid growth.4 By the post – World War II era, the increasing confinement of livestock ultimately triggered high rates of mortality and outbreaks of disease. These problems were countered with a second technological O development essential to the CAFO system—regular doses of antibiotics (or antimicrobial medicines) in feed and water to fight off infectious pathogens and promote weight gain.5 As grain replaced pasture as a primary feedstock, farmers also turned to twentieth-century industrial technologies such as synthetic fertilizers, toxic pesticides and herbicides, and hybrid and genetically modified crop varieties to boost feed harvests. Factory farms grew larger, and became ever more mechanized and capitalized. Smaller independent slaughtering facilities closed down, and regional distribution networks dried up. With falling prices and limited access to markets, millions of independent family operators vanished from the agricultural landscape altogether. Or they became low-margin contractors or low-wage employees for the animal factories that replaced them. Corporate agribusinesses that have revved the economic engines of the global animal factories have reduced living creatures to mere production units of milk, eggs, and meat. Every step of the way, domesticated animals have been increasingly altered and bred to meet the conditions of their confinement. Chicks’ beaks can be partially seared off so they cannot fatally strike one another. The tails of piglets are “docked” to instill “avoidance behavior” inside a stall crammed with hogs: the animals do all they can to prevent an aggressive or stimulation-deprived pen mate from gnawing their sensitive backsides. The horns of young cattle are sawed off or chemically shortened before they are sent off to the overcrowded feedlots. Mother sows and dairy cows nurse their offspring for a bare minimum before they are both whisked off into animal factory food assembly lines. The CAFO industry argues that while such practices may seem cruel to some, they are done to benefit the health and welfare of the animals and to provide an abundant and safe food supply for a hungry planet. Meanwhile, the intensive concentration of animals produces obscene amounts of waste. It is not uncommon for a CAFO on 100 acres to generate the same amount of sewage as a city of 100,000 inhabitants. The key difference is that CAFOs aren’t required to set up carefully monitored sewage treatment plants. Instead, the waste—spewed onto surrounding “sprayfields” or buried directly into the soil—is often too much for the area to safely absorb and at some point becomes a toxic social and ecological liability. Stored in football field-size ponds (aka “lagoons”), massive quantities of manure often become fugitive—seeping into groundwater, released into the atmosphere, and mixing with rainwater during rain and flood events. Inside the CAFO, animals are routinely administered antibiotics whether they need them or not. (The states of Iowa and North Carolina, for instance, each administer more antibiotics for animal production than the entire human population of the United States uses for medical purposes.) The appearance of new, more virulent forms of disease-causing organisms such as Salmonella, E. coli, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) have been increasingly associated with CAFO production. Many scientists now caution that we are dangerously close to losing the effectiveness of valuable human medicines because of their overuse in industrial animal food production. At the far end of the animal food production chain are the slaughterhouses and “disassembly lines.” The pace of killing is relentless—7,000 calves, 130,000 cattle, 360,000 pigs, 24 million chickens per day in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century—making slaughterhouse work one of the more dangerous occupations.6 In February 2008, the Humane Society of the United States released an undercover video showing employees at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company in Chino, California, dragging, electrically prodding, and using forklifts to move “downer cows” unable to walk to the kill floor. Slaughtering an animal unable to walk under its own power is illegal under the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958 (updated in 1978 and 2002). But without adequate regulation and enforcement (recently strengthened in 2009), an estimated 100,000 downer animals have still been slaughtered every year in the United States.7 The Hallmark case led to the largest meat recall on record—143 million pounds—and the closure of that plant.8 In addition to the brutality inflicted on helpless creatures, what shook many observers was that this particular firm supplied a significant amount of meat to the National School Lunch Program. The CAFO industry has also become concentrated geographically. California and Idaho lead the country in dryland industrial dairies, and Texas and Kansas lead in cattle feedlots. Meat chicken (broiler) CAFOs are heavily concentrated along the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, western Kentucky, and North Carolina, while Iowa and Ohio specialize heavily in eggs. Swine CAFOs are centralized in Iowa and North Carolina. The state of Iowa, for instance, raises an average of 11.3 hogs for every citizen in its population of just 3 million. The New York Times reported in 2008 that Iowa’s 5,000 confinement hog facilities generate over 50 million tons of raw waste, or 16.7 tons of animal manure for every resident.9 Many CAFO production areas are prone to cyclical flooding. An increasing number of observers argue that such concentration has arisen as a direct result of intentional U.S. government policies that have allowed CAFOs to avoid paying the true costs of their operations.10 For over a decade—until the recent ethanol and biofuels boom—CAFO operators were able to purchase feed at below the cost of production. These staggering discounts came about thanks to billions of dollars in annual taxpayer-funded farm bill grain subsidies, allowing animal factories to outcompete smaller independent producers and unfairly expand their operations.11 Farm bill “conservation” programs have also doled out hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build the actual infrastructure for large CAFOs to process their waste, a routine cost of business that most small- and medium-size operations normally cover out of their own operating expenses. Powerful agribusiness corporations have successfully lobbied for laws that regard CAFOs as farms rather than industries, essentially giving them a free pass on certain air, water, and solid waste emissions, and in many cases, exempting them from animal cruelty legislation. Agencies have often failed to enforce existing environmental regulations and antitrust laws despite the outright domination of nearly every sector of the industry by a small number of corporations.12 Local control over the ability to reject a CAFO installation has been taken away from community governments in some states as the powerful industrial animal food production sector has successfully shifted authority from the local to the state level. In three states—Montana, Kansas, and North Dakota—it is actually illegal to photograph a CAFO without permission of the owner. Thirteen states have passed disparagement laws that attempt to restrict what can be said about perishable food products, meaning that our food system is now infringing on basic constitutional freedoms. The world’s increasing appetite for animal food products of all kinds—pork, dairy, beef, poultry, and eggs—is also placing unsustainable pressures on the planet’s ecosystems. The Earth’s atmosphere is literally heating up, and waterways and fisheries are being deluged as a result of the prolific waste output of the world’s food producing animals. According to an oft-cited 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report, the livestock sector alone accounts for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a larger share than all of the world’s transportation emissions combined.13 A more recent study published by the World Watch Institute, however, pegs global livestock production as responsible for 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.14 There are now five hundred reported “dead zones” throughout the world, aquatic regions whose biotic capacities are collapsing, largely because of agricultural runoff and waste contamination, much of it linked to the livestock sector. At one time, the concept of industrial-scale farming seemingly held out a promise to society at large. Fewer people would be required to grow more food in less labor-intensive factorylike operations. “Economies of scale” would make food cheaper for an expanding population in a world where periodic famine and crop failures inflicted mass suffering. Today we know too well that these short-term advances in affordability and availability of animal food products have been offset by tremendous costs to the natural world, rural communities, public health, and society at large—along with a legacy of basic welfare denied to untold billions of confined livestock. A 2008 Pew Commission report on CAFOs described—and cautioned against—the rise of the “agro-industrial complex: an alliance of commodity groups, scientists at academic institutions who are paid by the industry, and their friends on Capitol Hill.” The commission, overseen by the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, concluded that the current method of producing food animals in the United States “presents an unacceptable level of risk to public health and damage to the environment, as well as unnecessary harm to the animals we raise for food.”15 Clearly, the ways in which we produce our food define us as a culture and as human beings. The subject forces us to ask big questions: How did we arrive at this place where the very foundation of human society—secure and sustainable food production—has become so far removed from caring farmers and the cycles of nature? What are our ethical responsibilities as eaters, citizens, and producers in reforming a food production system that is so clearly in need of change? What does our treatment of domestic animals say about our society, our government, our food system, and our very way of life? But this is getting ahead of our story, a complex topic that bridges a vast number of subjects: economics, food science, veterinary medicine, ecology, ethics, nutrition, food and agricultural policy, and genetics, to name just a few. The rapid growth of the animal factory and industrial food production in general stems from a pervasive philosophical framework, one that reduces the world to a mechanistic system in which the ultimate goal is the maximization of output and market share, even as animal and human health, worker and community well-being, profit margins and democratic freedoms decline. Welcome to the world of the CAFO. Welcome to an issue for our time. Part One THE PATHOLOGICAL MINDSET OF THE CAFO INTRODUCTION From Agrarianism to Industrialism hat are the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of industrial animal food production? How did agriculture, arguably the crucible of human civilization, come to value productivity and profit over common decency and concern for the welfare of other beings? How have legions of eaters intentionally turned their backs on the grim realities that lurk behind the closed doors of concentrated animal feeding operations? Some would argue that we have become “species-ists,” ranking the interests of humanity above the well-being and flourishing of other species. Such “species-ism” serves to justify any treatment of animals used for food production, clinical testing, or other purposes because animals are deemed lesser beings than we are. Others make a strictly functional case: Livestock are here for our benefit. If we didn’t eat them or the foods and by-products they generate, they wouldn’t be here at all. Intensification and industrialization of food production are necessary to feed a burgeoning human population. Without a cheap and abundant food supply, many would go hungry. Why should we care about the welfare of an animal that is going to be slaughtered regardless? A counterargument follows that as our societies and economies have become urbanized and industrialized, the majority of the population have become disconnected from the plants, animals, and places that we depend on for basic sustenance. Without such knowledge or firsthand interaction with the farming process, we have given over our moral compass to the owners of animal factory food production and find ourselves complicit in an ethical collapse. The idea that our relationship with other members of the animal kingdom has moral relevance goes back millennia. Because food production has played such a vital role in our survival and in the organization of daily life, it became an essential topic of religious teachings. Ancient Hindus elevated the cow to sacred status, as its importance in supplying humans with fuel, milk, muscle power for plowing fields, and manure for soil fertility could not be equaled. Traditional Kosher laws restricted Jews to eating only cloven hoofed, cud-chewing mammals slaughtered according to ethical guidelines. This precluded the eating of pork (although pigs’ hooves are cloven), also prohibited by Islamic code. The Old Testament forbids intentional and unnecessary infliction of pain and suffering on animals and outrageous neglect of them (such as failing to provide food and water). According to Colorado State University veterinary ethicist Bernard E. Rollin: W Biblical edicts against cruelty helped Western societies reach a social consensus on animal treatment and develop effective laws. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, was the first to prohibit animal cruelty, and similar laws exist today in all Western societies. The anticruelty ethic served two purposes: it articulated concern about animal suffering caused by deviant and purposeless human actions, and it identified sadists and psychopaths who abuse animals before sometimes “graduating” to the abuse of humans. Recent research has confirmed this correlation. Many serial killers have histories of animal abuse, as do some of the teens who have shot classmates.1 French philosopher René Descartes led the way toward both a species-ist and a strictly functional approach to animal exploitation in the seventeenth century. Descartes argued that all of nature existed as a toolbox for human industry. Animals, Descartes wrote, are “soulless automata”: merely complex machines. Because they do not possess consciousness, they cannot feel pain or suffer. Their cries and writhing are simple reflexes. Under the banner of such modernist thought, livestock, raised for both food and clothing, eventually became soulless commodities on the assembly lines of a global industrial revolution. Yet as questions about the morality of slavery and sexual inequality surfaced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so too did concerns about our relationships with domesticated animals. Not long after the French colonies granted fundamental freedoms to black slaves, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham predicted a future animal welfare movement. “The day may come,” he wrote in 1789, “when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights.” While animals may not equal a human’s ability to rationalize or communicate, Bentham argued, “the question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” By the mid-twentieth century, agriculture in America was in the midst of a radical transformation. Millions of family farmers were leaving the land in the face of larger, more heavily capitalized agribusinesses. Centuries of agrarian tradition and animal husbandry gave way to land grant universities teaching animal sciences with a focus on industrial concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The addition of vitamins to feed rations, which allowed for year-round confinement of animals, the increase in grain harvests, the use of antibiotics and growth hormones to fight disease outbreaks and speed weight gain, and decades of genetic selection for animals that can be raised in intensive concentrations and confinement all fueled the growth of the animal factory and the CAFO industry. Along the way, the flames of debate about the ethical, social, cultural, and environmental repercussions of animal factory farming blazed on through seminal works like Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964), Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971), and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975). A legion of organizations devoted to animal rights, animal welfare, sustainable agriculture, and vegetarianism sprang up during this time. Future historians may look back on the age of the CAFO with bewilderment and rancor. Certainly animals feel pain, certainly they have the ability to suffer, and certainly they deserve our care, respect, and mercy—even those destined to become part of the food chain. Whether or not we choose to eat them, we can probably agree that a dignified life for farm animals assumes fundamental freedoms: the ability to turn around, to groom, to stand up and lie down, to stretch the limbs freely, to not live on top of one’s own waste, to live the life that a species is born to lead. If we are to evolve beyond the modern industrialized animal factory mindset, we must universally adopt a worldview that puts the health and care of all involved in the food production system above short-term profits and cheap calories at any cost. FARM FACTORIES The End of Animal Husbandry BERNARD E. ROLLIN the contract between humans and livestock has been broken. Agriculture as a way of life and as a practice of animal husbandry has been replaced by agriculture as an industry, driven by the goals of efficiency and productivity. Among the most profound changes has been a major departure from traditional farming and its core values. WITH THE RISE OF INDUSTRIAL ANIMAL AGRICULTURE, young man was working for a company that operated a large, total-confinement swine farm. One day he detected symptoms of a disease among some of the feeder pigs. As a teen, he had raised pigs himself and shown them in competition, so he knew how to treat the disease. But the company’s policy was to kill any diseased animals with a blow to the head—the profit margin was considered too low to allow for treatment of individual animals. So the employee decided to come in on his own time, with his own medicine, and cured the animals. The management’s response was to attempt to fire him on the spot for violating company policy. Soon the young man left agriculture for good: he was weary of the conflict between what he was told to do and how he believed he should be treating the animals. Consider a sow that is being used to breed pigs for food. The overwhelming majority of today’s swine are raised in severe confinement. If the “farmer” follows the recommendations of the National Pork Producers, the sow will spend virtually all of her productive life (until she is killed) in a gestation crate 2½ feet wide (sometimes only 2 feet) by 7 feet long by 3 feet high. This concrete and barred cage is often too small for the 500- to 600-pound animal, which cannot lie down or turn around. Feet that are designed for soft loam are forced to carry hundreds of pounds of weight on slotted concrete. This causes severe foot and leg problems. Unable to perform any of her natural behaviors, the sow goes mad and exhibits compulsive, neurotic “stereotypical” behaviors such as bar biting and purposeless chewing. When she is ready to birth her piglets, she is moved into a farrowing crate that has a creep rail so that the piglets can crawl under it and avoid being crushed by the confined sow, whose maternal instinct has been lost through breeding for productivity. Under more natural conditions, pigs reveal that they are highly intelligent and behaviorally complex animals. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh created a “pig park” that approximates the habitat of wild swine. Domestic pigs, usually raised in confinement, were let loose in this facility and their behavior observed. In this environment, the sows covered almost a mile a day in foraging, and, in keeping with their reputation as clean animals, they built carefully constructed nests on a hillside so that urine and feces ran downhill. They took turns minding each other’s piglets so that each sow could forage. All of this natural behavior is inexpressible in confinement. Factory farming, or confinement-based industrialized agriculture, has been an established feature A in North America and Europe since its introduction at the end of World War II, when agricultural scientists were concerned about supplying Americans with sufficient food. After the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, many people had left farming. Cities and suburbs were beginning to encroach on agricultural lands, and scientists saw that the amount of land available for food production would soon diminish significantly. Farmers who had left their farms for foreign countries and urban centers during the war were reluctant to go back. “How ’ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?” a post-World War I song asked. Having experienced the specter of starvation during the Great Depression, the American consumer was afraid that there would not be enough food. At the same time, a variety of technologies relevant to agriculture were emerging, and American society began to accept the idea of technologically based economies of scale. In a major departure from traditional agriculture and its core values, animal agriculture began to industrialize. Agriculture as a way of life and as a practice of husbandry were replaced by agriculture as an industry with values of efficiency and productivity. Thus the problems we see in confinement agriculture are not the result of cruelty or insensitivity, but rather the unanticipated by-product of changes in the nature of agriculture. In the first place, the basic approach of confinement agriculture entails raising vast numbers of animals, limiting the space needed to raise these animals, moving them indoors into “controlled environments,” and replacing labor with capital—that is, replacing humans with mechanized systems. One can tell a priori that confinement agriculture is inimical to animal husbandry, for husbandry requires naturalistic environments, relatively few animals, extensive production, and good shepherds. Confinement agriculture is responsible for generating animal suffering on at least three fronts that are not a significant part of husbandry agriculture: 1. Production diseases. Veterinarians acknowledge the existence of so-called production diseases—that is, diseases that would not be a problem or that, at worst, would be a minor problem if animals were raised traditionally. One example is liver abscesses in feedlot cattle. In confinement agriculture, beef cattle are typically raised on pastures and finished by being fed grain in feedlots, where a large number of animals are crowded into relatively small spaces for the last few months of their lives. That much grain is not a natural diet for cattle—it is too high in concentrate (calories) and too low in roughage. Although a certain percentage of feedlot cattle get sick and may die, the overall economic efficiency of feedlots is maximized by the provision of such a diet. The idea of using a method of production that creates diseases that are “acceptable” would be anathema to a husbandry agriculturalist. Indeed, the issue of diet in confinement operations is related to other health problems as well. In husbandry agriculture, animals eat natural forage. In industrialized agriculture, the quest for “efficiency” has led to feeding cattle poultry waste, newspaper, cement dust, and, most egregiously, bone or meat meal, which is something herbivores would not normally eat. Mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE) arose as a health problem because cattle were fed animal proteins from infected cows or sheep (a practice now prohibited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Ruminant Feed Ban). 2. Lack of individual husbandry. The huge scale of industrialized agriculture operations—and the small profit margin per animal—militates against the sort of individual attention that typified much of traditional agriculture. In traditional dairies fifty years ago, one could make a living with a herd of 50 cows. Today, one needs literally thousands. In parts of the United States, dairies may have 15,000 cows. People run sow operations with thousands of pigs that employ only a handful of unskilled workers. A case that speaks to this point was sent to me by a veterinarian for commentary in the column that I write for the Canadian Veterinary Journal: You (as a veterinarian) are called to a 5,000-sow farrow-to-finish swine operation to examine a problem with vaginal discharge in sows. There are three full-time employees and one manager overseeing approximately 5,000 animals. As you examine several sows in the created gestation unit, you notice one with a hind leg at an unusual angle and inquire about her status. You are told, “She broke her leg yesterday and she’s due to farrow next week. We’ll let her farrow in here and then we’ll shoot her and foster her pigs.” Is it ethically correct to leave the sow with a broken leg for one week while you await her farrowing? Before commenting on this case, I spoke to the veterinarian who had experienced this incident, a swine practitioner. He explained that such operations run on tiny profit margins and minimal labor. Thus, even when he offered to splint the leg at no cost, he was told that the operation could not afford the manpower entailed by separating this sow and caring for her! At this point, he said, he realized that confinement agriculture had gone too far. He had been brought up on a family hog farm where the animals had names and were provided individual husbandry, and the injured animal would have been treated or, if not, euthanized immediately. “If it is not feasible to do this in a confinement operation,” he said, “there is something wrong with confinement operations!” 3. Physical and psychological deprivation. Another new source of suffering in industrialized agriculture is the physical and psychological deprivation experienced by animals in confinement: lack of space, lack of companionship for social animals, inability to move freely, boredom, austerity of environment, and so on. Since animals evolved for adaptation to extensive environments are now placed in truncated environments, such deprivation is inevitable. This was not a problem in traditional extensive agriculture. From a public point of view, the unnatural confinement of animals is the most noticeable difference between traditional animal husbandry and modern industrial agriculture. Paul Thompson, a professor of ethics at Michigan State, has pointed out that the average American still sees farms as Old MacDonald’s farm. Cows, in the public mind, should be grazing in pastures, lambs gamboling in fields, pigs happily cooling themselves in a mud wallow. As one of my colleagues put it, “The worst thing that ever happened to my department is betokened by the name change from Animal Husbandry to Animal Science.” The practice of husbandry is the key loss in the shift from traditional to industrialized agriculture. Farmers once put animals into an environment that the animals were biologically suited for and then augmented their natural ability to survive and thrive by providing protection from predators, food during famine, water during drought, help in birthing, protection from weather extremes, and the like. Any harm or suffering inflicted on the animal resulted in harm to the producer. An animal experiencing stress or pain, for example, is not as productive or as reproductively successful as a happy animal. Thus proper care and treatment of animals becomes both an ethical and a prudential requirement. The producer does well if and only if the animal does well. The result is good animal husbandry: a fair and mutually beneficial contract between humans and animals, with each better off because of the relationship. In husbandry agriculture, individual animal productivity is a good indicator of animal well-being; in industrial agriculture, the link between productivity and well-being has been severed. When productivity as an economic metric is applied to the whole operation, the welfare of the individual animal is ignored. Husbandry agriculture “put square pegs in square holes and round pegs in round holes,” extending individualized care to create as little friction as possible. Industrial agriculture, on the other hand, forces square pegs into round holes by use of “technological sanders”—antibiotics (which keep down disease that would otherwise spread like wildfire in close surroundings), vaccines, bacterins, hormones, air-handling systems, and the rest of the armamentarium used to keep the animals from dying. Furthermore, when crowding creates unnatural conditions and elicits unnatural behaviors such as tail biting in pigs or acts of cannibalism in poultry, the solution is to cut off the tail of the pig (without anesthetics) or to debeak the chicken, which can cause lifelong pain. A few years ago, while visiting with some Colorado ranchers, I observed the ethic of animal husbandry in action, in a situation that contrasted sharply with the killing of sick pigs described at the beginning of this essay. That year, the ranchers had seen many of their calves afflicted with scours, a diarrheal disease. Every rancher I met had spent more money on treating the disease than was economically justified by the calves’ market value. When I asked these men why they were being “economically irrational,” they were adamant in their responses: “It’s part of my bargain with the animal.” “It’s part of caring for them.” This same ethical outlook leads ranchers to sit up all night with sick, marginal calves, sometimes for days in a row. If they were strictly guided by economics, these people would hardly be valuing their time at fifty cents per hour—including their sleep time. Yet industrialized animal production thrives while western cattle ranchers, the last large group of practitioners of husbandry agriculture, are an endangered species. Unlike industrialized animal agriculture, husbandry agriculture is by its very nature sustainable. When pigs (or cattle) are raised on pasture, manure becomes a benefit, since it fertilizes pasture, and pasture is of value in providing forage for animals. In industrial animal agriculture, there is little reason to maintain pasture. Instead, farmers till for grain production, thereby encouraging increased soil erosion. At the same time, manure becomes a problem, both in terms of disposal and because it leaches into the water table. Similarly, air quality in and around confinement operations is often a threat to both workers and animals, and animal odors drive down real property values for miles around these operations. Another morally questionable aspect of confinement agriculture is the destruction of small farms and local communities. Because of industrialization and economy of scale, small husbandry-based producers cannot compete with animal factories. In the broiler industry, farmers who wish to survive become serfs to large operators because they cannot compete on their own. In large confinement swine operations, where the system rather than the labor force is primary, migratory or immigrant workers are hired because they are cheap, not because they possess knowledge of or concern for the animals. And those raised in a culture of husbandry, as our earlier stories revealed, find it intolerable to work in the industrialized operations. The power of confinement agriculture to pollute the Earth, degrade community, and destroy small, independent farmers should convince us that this type of agriculture is incompatible with common decency. Furthermore, we should fear domination of the food supply by these corporate entities. As to the oft repeated claim that industrial animal agriculture provides cheap food, this food is only cheap at the cash register—significant costs such as cleaning up pollution and increased health care costs in CAFO areas are “externalized”—that is, passed on to the public as taxes. It is not necessary to raise animals this way, as history reminds us. In 1988, Sweden banned highconfinement agriculture; Britain and the EU have banned sow confinement. If food is destined to cost more, so be it—Americans now spend an average of only 11 percent of their income on food, whereas at the turn of the century they spent more than 50 percent, and Europeans now spend 20 percent. We are wrong to ignore the hidden costs paid by animal welfare, food safety, the environment, rural communities, and independent farmers, and we must now add those costs to the price of our food. Some years ago Tim Blackwell, the chief swine veterinarian for Ontario, invited me to give the keynote speech on ethics and animal welfare to the swine producers of Ontario. Though I had by then given over three hundred lectures to all kinds of audiences, I had never spoken to pig producers. The group I was about to address had converted to high-confinement, highly intensive, highly capitalized, and highly industrialized production methods that had replaced animal husbandry with industry, and traditional agricultural values with an emphasis on efficiency and productivity. I began in my usual fashion, with a few jokes, a few anecdotes. People laughed in the right places. So far so good. I continued as planned, discussing the differences between social ethics, personal ethics, and professional ethics. Ultimately, I spoke of the ethical problems that stemmed from the supplanting of an agriculture of husbandry—the practice of reciprocity and symbiosis between animals and people—by an exploitative agriculture in which animals do not benefit from being domesticated by humans. When finally my speech ended, at first there was no applause. Oh-oh, I thought. Silence—my perennial nightmare. But then the applause began, and grew. I still could not see their faces, but Tim moved toward me, grabbing my hand. “You’ve done it, you son of a bitch, you’ve done it.” “Done what?” I asked. “Touched their hearts! Can’t you see the tears in their eyes?” Stupidly, I replaced my glasses and saw that he was right. Suddenly, one man climbed atop a picnic table and began to speak. “This was it!” he shouted. “This was the straw that broke the camel’s back! I’ve been feeling lousy for fifteen years about how I raise these animals and so—in front of my peers, so I can’t back out later—I’m pledging to tear down my confinement barn and build a barn I don’t have to be ashamed of! I’m a good enough husbandman that I can do it right, make a living, and be able to look myself in the mirror!” This was Dave Linton, a leading hog farmer in the area. Tim whispered to me, “If Linton says it, he means it!” A year and a half went by. Periodically I received progress reports from Tim, until eventually he took me to visit the new barn in person. With eyes dancing, Dave and his wife spoke of the new barn while serving us what is arguably the best strawberry-rhubarb pie in the universe. Finally, his wife said, “Enough talk, Dave—let the man see for himself.” We walked to the barn and opened the door. We went in. Mirabile dictu! There was sunshine! “The roof is hydraulic,” Dave explained. “On nice days, we retract it so the animals are, in essence, outdoors. And look! No stalls, no crates!” Indeed, in place of the crates were huge pens, lavishly supplied with straw, with fifteen or so animals to each pen. The sows lay around on beds of straw, chewing it as a cowboy chews tobacco. “They look . . . they look . . .” I groped for words. “Nonneurotic. Happy! That’s it! Happy!” Tim said, “I’ve been a pig vet for twenty years, and this is the first time I’ve seen sows smile.” “And,” I marveled, “the air is sweet; at least as sweet as it could be!” The three of us shook hands. Linton was effusive. “I’m a religious man,” he said, “and God has already paid me back for doing the right thing!” “How so?” I asked. “It’s my boy,” he said. “My son.” He went on to explain, “When we had the old barn, my son dropped out of school and did nothing but play video games. I couldn’t interest him in the business or even get him to set foot in the barn. Since I built this one, I can’t get him out!” The key point is that there are alternatives to sow stalls. After all, we raised pigs for thousands of years without stalls! In fact, Tim Blackwell and I recently made a film entitled Alternative Housing for Gestating Sows. In it we portray a number of different loose-housing (i.e., noncrate) pen systems. What was notable was our discovery that not only do these systems work, but they also cost half as much to build as full-confinement systems, giving the producers a clear financial benefit. Regardless of economic indicators, Dave Linton’s story reminds us that it is a radical mistake to treat animals merely as products, as objects with no intrinsic value. A demand for agriculture that practices the ancient and fair contract with domestic animals is not revolutionary but conservative. As Mahatma Gandhi said, a society must ultimately be morally judged by how it treats its weakest members. No members are more vulnerable and dependent than our society’s domestic animals. FEAR FACTORIES The Case for Compassionate Conservatism—for Animals MATTHEW SCULLY of mass confinement agriculture, on both the Right and Left in America’s political debates there is little commentary on the issue of factory farming. The moral teachings of every major faith recognize that cruelty to animals is shameful and wrong, yet somehow these widely shared principles are seldom translated into serious policy debates over the treatment of animals. The livestock industry has a powerful interest in closing off debate about animal welfare: once the details of factory farming are known, the case for reform becomes overwhelming, and the great majority of voters take the side of mistreated animals. DESPITE THE HORRIFIC CONDITIONS few years ago I began a book about cruelty to animals and about factory farming in particular, problems that had been in the back of my mind for a long while. At the time I viewed factory farming as one of the lesser problems facing humanity—a small wrong on the grand scale of good and evil but too casually overlooked and too glibly excused. This view changed as I acquainted myself with the details and saw a few typical farms up close. By the time I finished the book, I had come to view the abuses of industrial farming as a serious moral problem, a truly rotten business for good reason passed over in polite conversation. Little wrongs, when left unattended, can grow and spread to become grave wrongs, and precisely this had happened on our factory farms. The result of these ruminations was Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. And though my tome never quite hit the bestseller lists, there ought to be some special literary prize for a work highly recommended in both the Wall Street Journal and Vegetarian Teen. When you enjoy the accolades of PETA and Policy Review, Deepak Chopra and G. Gordon Liddy, Peter Singer and Charles Colson, you can at least take comfort in the diversity of your readership. The book also provided an occasion for fellow conservatives to get beyond their dislike for particular animal rights groups and to examine cruelty issues on the merits. Conservatives have a way of dismissing the subject, as if where animals are concerned nothing very serious could ever be at stake. And though it is not exactly true that liberals care more about these issues—you are no more likely to find reflections or exposés concerning cruelty in The Nation or The New Republic than in any journal of the Right—it is assumed that animal protection causes are a project of the Left, and that the proper conservative position is to stand warily and firmly against them. I had a hunch that the problem was largely one of presentation and that by applying their own principles to animal welfare issues, conservatives would find plenty of reasons to be appalled. More to the point, having acknowledged the problems of cruelty, we could then support reasonable A remedies. Conservatives, after all, aren’t shy about discoursing on moral standards or reluctant to translate the most basic of those standards into law. Setting aside the distracting rhetoric of animal rights, that’s usually what these questions come down to: what moral standards should guide us in our treatment of animals, and when must those standards be applied in law? Industrial livestock farming is among a whole range of animal welfare concerns that extends from canned trophy hunting to whaling to product testing on animals to all sorts of more obscure enterprises like the exotic-animal trade and the factory farming of bears in China for bile believed to hold medicinal and aphrodisiac powers. Surveying the various uses to which animals are put, some might be defensible, others abusive and unwarranted, and it’s the job of any conservative who attends to the subject to figure out which are which. We don’t need novel theories of rights to do this. The usual distinctions that conservatives draw between moderation and excess, freedom and license, moral goods and material goods, rightful power and the abuse of power, will all do just fine. As it is, the subject hardly comes up at all among conservatives, and what commentary we do hear usually takes the form of ridicule directed at animal rights groups. Often conservatives side instinctively with any animal-related industry and those involved, as if a thing is right just because someone can make money off it, or as if our sympathies belong always with the men just because they are men. I had an exchange once with an eminent conservative columnist on this subject. Conversation turned to my book and to factory farming. Holding his hands out in the “stop” gesture, he said, “I don’t want to know.” Granted, life on the factory farm is no one’s favorite subject, but conservative writers often have to think about things that are disturbing or sad. In this case, we have an intellectually formidable fellow known to millions for his stern judgments on every matter of private morality and public policy. Yet nowhere in all his writings do I find any treatment of any cruelty issue, never mind that if you asked him, he would surely agree that cruelty to animals is a cowardly and disgraceful sin. And when the subject is cruelty to farmed animals—the moral standards being applied in a fundamental human enterprise—suddenly we’re in forbidden territory and “I don’t want to know” is the best he can do. But don’t we have a responsibility to know? Maybe the whole subject could use his fine mind and his good heart. What we’re really looking for, when we debate animal rights issues, are safeguards against cruel and presumptuous people. We are trying to hold people to their obligations, people who could spare us the trouble if only they would recognize a few limits on their own conduct. Conservatives like the sound of obligation here, and those who reviewed Dominion were relieved to find me arguing more from this angle than from any notion of rights. “What the PETA crowd doesn’t understand,” Jonah Goldberg wrote, “or what it deliberately confuses, is that human compassion toward animals is an obligation of humans, not an entitlement for animals.” Another commentator put the point in religious terms: “[W]e have a moral duty to respect the animal world as God’s handiwork, treating animals with ‘the mercy of our Maker.’ . . . But mercy and respect for animals are completely different from rights for animals—and we should never confuse the two.” Both writers confessed they were troubled by factory farming and concluded with the uplifting thought that we could all profit from further reflection on our obligation of kindness to farm animals. The only problem with this insistence on obligation is that after a while it begins to sounds like a hedge against actually being held to that obligation. It leaves us with a high-minded attitude but no accountability, free to act on our obligations or to ignore them without consequences, personally opposed to cruelty but unwilling to impose that view on others. Treating animals decently is like most obligations we face, somewhere between the most and the least important, a modest but essential requirement to living with integrity. And it’s not a good sign when arguments are constantly turned to precisely how much is mandatory and how much, therefore, we can manage to avoid. If one is using the word obligation seriously, moreover, then there is no practical difference between an obligation on our end not to mistreat animals and an entitlement on their end not to be mistreated by us. Either way, we are required to do and not do the same things. And either way, somewhere down the logical line, the entitlement would have to arise from a recognition of the inherent dignity of a living creature. The moral standing of our fellow creatures may be humble, but it is absolute and not something within our power to confer or withhold. All creatures sing their Creator’s praises, as this truth is variously expressed in the Bible, and are dear to Him for their own sakes. A certain moral relativism runs through the arguments of those hostile or indifferent to animal welfare—as if animals can be of value only for our sake, as utility or preference decrees. In practice, this outlook leaves each person to decide for himself when animals rate moral concern. It even allows us to accept or reject such knowable facts about animals as their cognitive and emotional capacities, their conscious experience of pain and happiness. Elsewhere in contemporary debates, conservatives meet the foe of moral relativism by pointing out that, like it or not, we are all dealing with the same set of physiological realities and moral truths. We don’t each get to decide the facts of science on a situational basis. We do not each go about bestowing moral value upon things as it pleases us at the moment. Of course, we do not decide moral truth at all: we discern it. Human beings in their moral progress learn to appraise things correctly, using reasoned moral judgment to perceive a prior order not of our devising. C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man calls this “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Such words as honor, piety, esteem, and empathy do not merely describe subjective states of mind, Lewis reminds us, but speak to objective qualities in the world beyond that merit those attitudes in us. “[T]o call children delightful or old men venerable,” he writes, “is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.” This applies to questions of cruelty as well. A kindly attitude toward animals is not a subjective sentiment; it is the correct moral response to the objective value of a fellow creature. Here, too, rational and virtuous conduct consists in giving things their due and in doing so consistently. If one animal’s pain—say, that of one’s pet—is real and deserving of sympathy, then the pain of essentially identical animals is also meaningful, no matter what conventional distinctions we have made to narrow the scope of our sympathy. If it is wrong to whip a dog or starve a horse or bait bears for sport or grossly abuse farm animals, it is wrong for all people in every place. The problem with moral relativism is that it leads to capriciousness and the despotic use of power. And the critical distinction here is not between human obligations and animal rights, but rather between obligations of charity and obligations of justice. Active kindness to animals falls into the former category. If you take in strays or help injured wildlife or donate to animal charities, those are fine things to do, but no one says you should be compelled to do them. Refraining from cruelty to animals is a different matter, an obligation of justice not for us each to weigh for ourselves. It is not simply unkind behavior, it is unjust behavior, and the prohibition against it is non-negotiable. Proverbs reminds us of this—“a righteous man regardeth the life of his beast, but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel”—and the laws of America and of every other advanced nation now recognize the wrongfulness of such conduct with cruelty statutes. Often applying felony-level penalties to protect certain domestic animals, our state and federal statutes declare that even though your animal may elsewhere in the law be defined as your property, there are certain things you may not do to that creature, and if you are found harming or neglecting the animal, you will answer for your conduct in a court of justice. There are various reasons the state has an interest in forbidding cruelty, one of which is that cruelty is degrading to human beings. The problem is that many thinkers on this subject have strained to find indirect reasons to explain why cruelty is wrong and thereby to force animal cruelty into the category of the victimless crime. The most common of these explanations asks us to believe that acts of cruelty matter only because the cruel person does moral injury to himself or sullies his character— as if the cruel person is our sole concern and the cruelly treated animal is entirely incidental. Yet there is only one reason for condemning cruelty that doesn’t beg the question of exactly why cruelty is a wrong, a vice, or bad for our character: that the act of cruelty is an intrinsic evil. Animals cruelly dealt with are not just things, not just an irrelevant detail in some self-centered moral drama of our own. They matter in their own right, as they matter to their Creator, and the wrongs of cruelty are wrongs done to them. As The Catholic Encyclopedia puts this point, there is a “direct and essential sinfulness of cruelty to the animal world, irrespective of the results of such conduct on the character of those who practice it.” Our cruelty statutes are a good and natural development in Western law, codifying the claims of animals against human wrongdoing and asserting those claims on their behalf. Such statutes, however, address mostly random or wanton acts of cruelty. And the persistent animal welfare questions of our day center on institutional cruelties—on the vast and systematic mistreatment of animals that most of us never see. Having conceded the crucial point that some animals rate our moral concern and legal protection, informed conscience turns naturally to other animals—creatures entirely comparable in their awareness, feeling, and capacity for suffering. A dog is not the moral equal of a human being, but a dog is definitely the moral equal of a pig, and it’s only human caprice and economic convenience that say otherwise. We have the problem that these essentially similar creatures are treated in dramatically different ways, unjustified even by the very different purposes we have assigned to them. Our pets are accorded certain protections from cruelty, while the nameless creatures in our factory farms are hardly treated like animals at all. The challenge is one of consistency, of treating moral equals equally, and living according to fair and rational standards of conduct. Whatever terminology we settle on, after all the finer philosophical points have been hashed over, the aim of the exercise is to prohibit wrongdoing. All rights, in practice, are protections against human wrongdoing, and here too the point is to arrive at clear and consistent legal boundaries on the things that one may or may not do to animals, so that every man is not left to be the judge in his own case. More than obligation, moderation, ordered liberty, or any of the other lofty ideals we hold, what should attune conservatives to all the problems of animal cruelty—and especially to the modern factory farm—is our worldly side. The great virtue of conservatism is that it begins with a realistic assessment of human motivations. We know man as he is, not only the rational creature but also, as Socrates told us, the rationalizing creature, with a knack for finding an angle, an excuse, and a euphemism. Whether it’s the pornographer who thinks himself a free-speech champion or the abortionist who looks in the mirror and sees a reproductive health care services provider, conservatives are familiar with the type. So we should not be all that surprised when told that these very same capacities are often at work in the things that people do to animals—and all the more so in our $125 billion-a-year livestock industry. The human mind, especially when there is money to be had, can manufacture grand excuses for the exploitation of other human beings. How much easier it is for people to excuse the wrongs done to lowly animals. Where animals are concerned, there is no practice or industry so low that someone, somewhere, cannot produce a high-sounding reason for it. The sorriest little miscreant who shoots an elephant, lying in wait by the water hole in some canned hunting operation, is just “harvesting resources,” doing his bit for “conservation.” The swarms of government-subsidized Canadian seal hunters slaughtering tens of thousands of newborn pups—hacking to death these unoffending creatures, even in sight of their mothers—offer themselves as the brave and independent bearers of tradition. With the same sanctimony and deep dishonesty, factory farm corporations like Smithfield Foods, ConAgra, and Tyson Foods still cling to countrified brand names for their labels—Murphy Family Farms, Happy Land Farms, Sunnyland Farms—to convince us and no doubt themselves, too, that they are engaged in something essential, wholesome, and honorable. Yet when corporate farmers need barbed wire around their happy, sunny lands, and laws to prohibit outsiders from taking photographs (as is the case in three states), and still other laws to exempt farm animals from the definition of “animals” as covered in federal and state cruelty statutes, something is amiss. And if conservatives do nothing else about any other animal issue, we should attend at least to the factory farms, where the suffering is immense and we are all asked to be complicit. If we are going to have our meats and other animal products, there are natural costs to obtaining them, defined by the duties of animal husbandry and of veterinary ethics. Factory farming came about when resourceful men figured out ways of getting around those natural costs, applying new technologies to raise animals in conditions that would otherwise kill them by deprivation and disease. With no laws to stop it, moral concern surrendered entirely to economic calculation, leaving no limit to the punishments that factory farmers could inflict to keep costs down and profits up. Corporate farmers hardly speak anymore of “raising” animals, with the modicum of personal care that word implies. Animals are “grown” now, like so many crops. Barns somewhere along the way became “intensive confinement facilities” and the inhabitants mere “production units.” The result is a world in which billions of birds, cows, pigs, and other creatures are locked away, enduring miseries they do not deserve, for our convenience and pleasure. We belittle the activists with their radical agenda, scarcely noticing the radical cruelty they seek to redress. At the Smithfield mass-confinement hog farms I toured in North Carolina, the visitor is greeted by a bedlam of squealing, chain rattling, and horrible roaring. To maximize the use of space and minimize the need for care, the creatures are encased row after row, 400- to 500-pound mammals trapped without relief inside iron crates 7 feet long and 22 inches wide. They chew maniacally on bars and chains, as foraging animals will do when denied straw, or engage in stereotypical nest building with the straw that isn’t there, or else just lie there like broken beings. Efforts to outlaw the gestation crate have been dismissed by various conservative critics as “silly,” “comical,” “ridiculous.” It doesn’t seem that way up close. The smallest scraps of human charity—a bit of maternal care, room to roam outdoors, straw to lie on—have long since been taken away as costly luxuries, and so the pigs know only the feel of concrete and metal. They lie covered in their own urine and excrement, with broken legs from trying to escape or just to turn, covered with festering sores, tumors, ulcers, lesions, or what my guide shrugged off as routine “pus pockets.” C. S. Lewis’s description of animal pain—“begun by Satan’s malice and perpetrated by man’s desertion of his post”—has literal truth in our factory farms because through the wonders of automation they basically run themselves, and the owners are off in spacious corporate offices reviewing their spreadsheets. Rarely are the creatures’ afflictions examined by a vet or even noticed by the migrant laborers charged with their care, unless of course some ailment threatens production— meaning who cares about a lousy ulcer or broken leg, as long as we’re still getting the piglets? Kept alive in these conditions only by antibiotics, hormones, laxatives, and other additives mixed into their machine-fed swill, the sows leave their crates only to be driven or dragged into other crates, just as small, to bring forth their piglets. Then it’s back to the gestation crate for another four months, and so on back and forth until after seven or eight pregnancies they finally expire from the punishment of it or else are culled with a club or bolt gun. Industrial livestock farming operates on an economy of scale, presupposing a steady attrition rate. The usual comforting rejoinder we hear—that it’s in the interest of farmers to take good care of their animals—is false. Each day, in every confinement farm in America, you will find cull pens littered with dead or dying creatures discarded like trash. For the piglets, it’s a regimen of teeth cutting, tail docking (performed with pliers, to heighten the pain of tail chewing and so deter this natural response to mass confinement), and other mutilations. After five or six months trapped in one of the grim warehouses that now pass for barns, they’re trucked off, 355,000 pigs every day in the life of America, for processing at a furious pace of thousands per hour by migrants who use earplugs to muffle the screams. All these creatures, and billions more across the earth, go to their deaths knowing nothing of life, and nothing of man, except the foul, tortured existence of the factory farm, having never even been outdoors. But not to worry, as a Smithfield Foods executive assured me, “They love it.” It’s all “for their own good.” It is a voice conservatives should instantly recognize, as we do when it tells us that the fetus feels nothing. Everything about the picture shows bad faith, moral sloth, and endless excuse making, all readily answered by conservative arguments. We are told “they’re just pigs” or cows or chickens or whatever and that only urbanites worry about such things, estranged as they are from the realities of rural life. Actually, all of factory farming proceeds by a massive denial of reality—the reality that pigs and other animals are not just production units to be endlessly exploited but living creatures with natures and needs. The very modesty of those needs—their humble desires for straw, soil, sunshine—is the gravest indictment of the men who deny them. Conservatives are supposed to revere tradition. Factory farming has no traditions, no rules, no codes of honor, no little decencies to spare for a fellow creature. The whole thing is an abandonment of rural values and a betrayal of honorable animal husbandry—to say nothing of veterinary medicine, with its sworn oath to “protect animal health” and to “relieve animal suffering.” Likewise, we are told to look away and think about more serious things. Human beings simply have far bigger problems to worry about than the well-being of farm animals, and surely all of this zeal would be better directed at causes of human welfare. You wouldn’t think that men who are unwilling to grant even a few extra inches in cage space, so that a pig can turn around, would be in any position to fault others for pettiness. Why are small acts of kindness beneath us, but not small acts of cruelty? The larger problem with this appeal to moral priority, however, is that we are dealing with suffering that occurs through human agency. Whether it’s miserliness here, carelessness there, or greed throughout, the result is rank cruelty for which particular people must answer. Since refraining from cruelty is an obligation of justice, moreover, there is no avoiding the implications. All the goods invoked in defense of factory farming, from the efficiency and higher profits of the system to the lower costs of the products, are false goods unjustly derived. No matter what right and praiseworthy things we are doing elsewhere in life, when we live off a cruel and disgraceful thing like factory farming, we are to that extent living unjustly, and that is hardly a trivial problem. Factory farmers also assure us that all of this is an inevitable stage of industrial efficiency. Leave aside the obvious reply that we could all do a lot of things in life more efficiently if we didn’t have to trouble ourselves with ethical restraints. Leave aside, too, the tens of billions of dollars in annual federal subsidies that have helped megafarms to undermine small family farms and the decent communities that once surrounded them and to give us the illusion of cheap products. And never mind the collateral damage to land, water, and air that factory farms cause and the more billions of dollars it costs taxpayers to clean up after them. Factory farming is a predatory enterprise, absorbing profit and externalizing costs, unnaturally propped up by political influence and government subsidies much as factory-farmed animals are unnaturally sustained by hormones and antibiotics. Even if all the economic arguments were correct, conservatives usually aren’t impressed by breathless talk of inevitable progress. I am asked sometimes how a conservative could possibly care about animal suffering in factory farms, but the question is premised on a liberal caricature of conservatism—the assumption that, for all of our fine talk about moral values, “compassionate conservatism,” and the like, everything we really care about can be counted in dollars. In the case of factory farming, and the conservative’s blithe tolerance of it, the caricature is too close to the truth. Exactly how far are we all prepared to follow these industrial and technological advances before pausing to take stock of where things stand and where it is all tending? Very soon companies like Smithfield plan to have tens of millions of cloned animals in their factory farms. Other companies are at work genetically engineering chickens without feathers so that one day all poultry farmers might be spared the toil and cost of defeathering their birds. For years, the many shills for our livestock industry employed in the “Animal Science” and “Meat Science” departments of rural universities (we used to call them Animal Husbandry departments) have been tampering with the genes of pigs and other animals to locate and expunge that part of their genetic makeup that makes them stressed in factory farm conditions—taking away the desire to protect themselves and to live. Instead of redesigning the factory farm to suit the animals, they are redesigning the animals to suit the factory farm. Are there no boundaries of nature and elementary ethics that the conservative should be the first to see? The hubris of such projects is beyond belief, only more because of the foolish and frivolous goods to be gained—blood-free meats and the perfect pork chop. No one who does not profit from them can look at our modern factory farms or frenzied slaughter plants or agricultural laboratories with their featherless chickens and fear-free pigs and think, “Yes, this is humanity at our finest—exactly as things should be.” Devils charged with designing a farm could hardly have made it more severe. Least of all should we look for sanction in Judeo-Christian morality, whose whole logic is one of gracious condescension, of the proud learning to be humble, the higher serving the lower, and the strong protecting the weak. Lofty talk about humanity’s special status among creatures only invites such questions as: What would the Good Shepherd make of our factory farms? Where does the creature of conscience get off lording it over these poor creatures so mercilessly? “How is it possible,” as Malcolm Muggeridge asked in the years when factory farming began to spread, “to look for God and sing his praises while insulting and degrading his creatures? If, as I had thought, all lambs are the Agnus Dei, then to deprive them of light and the field and their joyous frisking and the sky is the worst kind of blasphemy.” The writer B. R. Meyers remarked in The Atlantic, “Research could prove that cows love Jesus, and the line at the McDonald’s drive-through wouldn’t be one sagging carload shorter the next day. . . . Has any generation in history ever been so ready to cause so much suffering for such a trivial advantage? We deaden our consciences to enjoy—for a few minutes a day—the taste of blood, the feel of our teeth meeting through muscle.” That is a cynical but serious indictment, and we must never let it be true of us in the choices we each make or urge upon others. If reason and morality are what set human beings apart from animals, then reason and morality must always guide us in how we treat them, or else it’s all just caprice, unbridled appetite with the pretense of piety. When people say that they like their pork chops, veal, or foie gras just too much ever to give them up, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony, willfulness, or at best moral complacence. What makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat. Of the many conservatives who reviewed Dominion, every last one conceded that factory farming is a wretched business and a betrayal of human responsibility. So it should be a short step to agreement that it also constitutes a serious issue of law and public policy. Having granted that certain practices are abusive, cruel, and wrong, we must be prepared actually to do something about them. Among animal activists, of course, there are some who go too far—there are in the best of causes. But fairness requires that we judge a cause by its best advocates instead of making straw men of the worst. There isn’t much money in championing the cause of animals, so we’re dealing with some pretty altruistic people who on that account alone deserve the benefit of the doubt. If we’re looking for fitting targets for inquiry and scorn, for people with an angle and a truly pernicious influence, better to start with groups like Smithfield Foods (my candidate for the worst corporation in America in its ruthlessness to people and animals alike), the National Pork Producers Council (a reliable Republican contributor), or the various think tanks in Washington subsidized by animal use industries for intellectual cover. We need conservatives, and especially our storied “values voters,” to engage with the issue and get behind humane farming laws so that we can all quit averting our eyes. Such reforms, consisting of explicit federal cruelty statutes with enforcement funding to back them up, would leave us with farms we could imagine without wincing, photograph without prosecution, and explain without excuses. The law would uphold not only the elementary standards of animal husbandry but also of veterinary ethics, following no more complicated a principle than that pigs and cows should be able to walk and turn around, fowl to move about and spread their wings, and all creatures to know the feel of soil and grass and the warmth of the sun. No need for labels saying “free-range” or “humanely raised.” They will all be raised that way. They all get to be treated like animals and not as unfeeling machines. On a date certain, mass confinement, sow gestation crates, veal crates, battery cages, and all such innovations would be prohibited. This will end livestock agriculture’s moral race to the bottom and turn the ingenuity of its scientists toward compassionate solutions. It will remove the federal support that unnaturally serves agribusiness at the expense of small farms. And it will shift economies of scale, turning the balance in favor of humane farmers—as those who run companies like Wal-Mart could do right now by taking their business away from factory farms. In all cases, the law would apply to corporate farmers a few simple rules that better men would have been observing all along: we cannot just take from these creatures—we must give them something in return. We owe them a merciful death, and we owe them a merciful life. And when human beings cannot do something humanely, without degrading both the creatures and ourselves, then we should not do it at all. COLD EVIL The Ideologies of Industrialism ANDREW KIMBRELL is enabled by a cold, calculating Trinity of Science, Technology, and the Market that has stripped our public life of empathy. Countering factory farms requires going beyond legal and political strategies: what’s needed is a societal reevaluation that places compassion and morality above the industrial cult of efficiency at any cost. THE EXPLOITATION OF ANIMALS FOR PROFIT ig No. 6707 was meant to be “super”—super fast growing, super big, super meat quality. He was supposed to be a technological breakthrough in animal food production. Researcher Vern Pursel and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture had used taxpayer money to design this pig to be like no other, and to a certain extent they succeeded. Number 6707 was unique, both in his general physiology and in the very core of each and every cell. For this pig was born with a human growth gene engineered into his permanent genetic makeup, one of hundreds of thousands of animals that have now been engineered with foreign genetic material. Pursel’s idea was to permanently insert human growth genes into livestock to create animals many times larger than those currently being bred. Pursel jokes of a pig “as big as a barn.” He is serious, however, about merging human genes with the pig’s genetic makeup to create more meat and more profit for the hog industry. Pursel’s pig did not turn into a superpig. The human growth genes injected into the animal at the early embryo stage altered its metabolism in unpredictable and tragic ways. By analogy, imagine injecting elephant growth genes into an early human embryo and the physiological changes that might accrue. The human growth genes in No. 6707 caused the creation of a huge muscle mass that overwhelmed the rest of the pig’s physiology. He was crippled and bowlegged and riddled with arthritis. The genes made him impotent and nearly blind. The deformed pig could not stand up and could only be photographed in a standing position with the support of a plywood board. When Pursel was asked about his purpose in creating this suffering, pathetic creature, he responded that he was attempting to make livestock more efficient and more profitable. As for his failure, he said, “Even the Wright brothers did not succeed at first.” Clearly for Pursel, there appeared to be little distinction between a machine (an airplane) and a living animal. Pursel is not alone in his view of farm animals. The billions of animals that are slaughtered and disassembled each year throughout the factory farm system are viewed as little more than profitable commodities and production units. As most industrial factories use inanimate natural resources to manufacture various products, so animal factories dismember billions of animals annually and turn them into the neatly packaged commodities we purchase at our supermarkets and fast-food restaurants. This mechanistic mindset about farm animals is even encoded in our laws. The important protections against cruelty and mistreatment in our federal Animal Welfare Act apply to pets, P exhibition animals, and research animals, but not to our farm animals. SECULAR DOGMAS Activists who have spent decades seeking protection for these animals have been repeatedly frustrated and angered by the coldness displayed by our legislators, policy makers, and much of the general public to the plight of these fellow creatures. How can so many blithely tolerate the unspeakable cruelties visited upon these countless sentient creatures? Part of the answer lies in the literal physical distance between the buyer of these animal commodities and the factories that produce them. “Out of sight, out of mind,” is a ubiquitous if unattractive part of all our natures. Particularly when we imagine the horrors of the slaughter-house, it’s easier just to eat the burger and not think of the hidden history and suffering of the animal, made invisible by time and distance from the moment and place of eating. But even as the nature of factory farming is masked through physical and temporal distancing, there is another, more subtle, more profound distancing that keeps the majority from challenging the realities of factory farming and the other evils of the industrial system. After all, Pursel was not physically distanced from the suffering he was creating. In fact, he was with pig No. 6707 day after day, carefully assessing each deformity and reaction. His distancing was not physical, but psychological and ideological. He and so many others—including most of our leaders—are ensconced in habits of thinking that are extraordinarily effective in making them immune to even the most terrible suffering and in suppressing their humanity and ethical responsibility. Ideas have consequences, and the bizarre and tragic fate of pig No. 6707 is in reality the result of certain “trickle-down” ideologies that have over many generations become unquestioned habits of thought in modern industrial society. What are these dogmas? Pursel was motivated to genetically engineer pig No. 6707 by his unequivocal belief in objective science, and the requirements of efficiency. He was also driven by the hope of creating a more competitive and profitable pig. Quantitative science, efficiency, competition, and profit are the central dogmas underlying not just Pursel’s experiments but also the entire industrial enterprise. These dogmas have been the underpinning of the industrial system that has spawned much of the wealth and the stunning daily “miracles” of modern technological society. The sufferings of billions in factory farms and other tragic results of applying these industrial ideologies to life have arisen not out of cruelty or passion, but rather from the impassive application of the “laws” of science, efficiency, and the market to living beings. That is why factory farms and other evils of the system are “cold” evils. They are not created by terrorists, religious fanatics, or psychopaths, persons acting out of uncontrolled “hot” violence, anger, or lust. Rather it is the businesspeople, scientists, policy makers, and consumers who are acting “rationally” by comporting themselves with these “laws” of science and economics on which our system is based. Factory farms, like environmental pollution, are representative of numerous systemic industrial evils that only 1 percent of society creates but in which the other 99 percent are complicit. For many fighting for laws and regulations to help protect animals, a discussion of ideology may seem abstract. But I guarantee that anyone in the struggle against the factory farm system will come up against the wall of one or more of these dogmas consistently. Your view of animals and their suffering will be called “unscientific” by many animal scientists. Your suggestions for giving these animals more space or better treatment will be dismissed as grossly inefficient by economists. Your pleas to have laws passed that protect these animals will be said by legislators and their agribusiness friends to drive up costs, reduce profit, and make us less competitive in the world market. These modern shibboleths have kept the animal movement at bay and effectively marginalized advocates for decades. Unless we expose these ideological frames and find an alternative language, we will continue to flail away at these modern credos without much impact. In the following exploration of these industrial ideologies, we will see that they date back centuries and involve some of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment and Western philosophy. I am not suggesting that purveyors of factory farms or animal research or industrial development have read up on their Descartes, Bacon, or Adam Smith. Quite the contrary: I believe that certain basic tenets of these philosophers have trickled down from the scientific and academic elite to become habits of thinking and perception for the general public. These ideologies now go virtually unexamined, yet they provide the basic rationale for much of what I have called the “cold evil” of the industrial system. THE CULT OF OBJECTIVITY One of the epochal moments in the history of Western science occurred on June 22, 1633, when Galileo, under extreme pressure from church inquisitors, “abjured” his heresy that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Since that time Galileo has remained an ultimate symbol of modern enlightenment martyred by the forces of superstition and prejudice. Yet if we consider the nature of the cold evil so prevalent today, we can bring charges against Galileo anew. For his real crime was not his understanding of the nature of the heavens, but rather his seminal role in creating what could be called “the cult of objectivity”—resulting in a science and scientific community that have largely been purged of subjectivity and qualitative human thought. Galileo, a mathematician, was convinced that the natural world could not be understood through participation, relation, or metaphysical or spiritual work; rather, he maintained that the truth could be found only by means of objective, quantitative measurement and rigorous mathematical analysis. All the “warm” aspects of the human—memories, senses, kinship, empathy, relationship—he dismissed as subjective and immeasurable and therefore without value in the scientific search for truth. Galileo wrote that color, taste, and all subjective experiences were “merest opinion,” while “atoms and the void are the truth.” He then carried this argument one incredible step further, positing that what cannot be measured and reduced to numbers is not real. This philosophical “crime” of amputating human qualities from the search for truth is summarized by historian Lewis Mumford: Galileo committed a crime far greater than any dignitary of the Church accused him of; for his real crime was that of trading the totality of human experience for that minute portion which can be observed and interpreted in terms of mass and motion. . . . In dismissing human subjectivity Galileo had excommunicated history’s central subject, multi-dimensional man. . . . Under the new scientific dispensation . . . all living forms must be brought into harmony with the mechanical world picture by being melted down, so to say, molded anew to conform to a more mechanical model. The magnitude of the revolution in science inaugurated by Galileo and his fellow Enlightenment thinkers is difficult to comprehend. Perhaps philosopher Scott Buchanan best encapsulated this transformation when he described Galileo and his generation of thinkers as “world-splitters.” Focusing fully on treating all of life and creation in cold, strictly mathematical and mechanical terms, they created a lasting dualism by separating the quantitative and qualitative, the objective and subjective. Regarding all the warm, individual, empathic, and feeling functions of the human as incapable of quantification and therefore of little or no importance, they elevated one value, the “cold” objective, as the only road to truth. Their dualism resulted in an attempt to completely eliminate human subjectivity from the scientific search for knowledge and truth. This cult of objectivity is thus based on the pathetic notion that somehow the observed can be separated from the observer, a fallacy that has disfigured and deformed most fields of science for centuries. The cult of objectivity also provides the central underpinning for cold evil, offering a sure ideological defense against any attempt to reduce distancing through the infusion of qualitative human experience, whether it be feeling, relationship, participation, or culture. Its influence results in a justthe-facts, bottom-line conception of truth. Whoever seeks to break the bondage of cold evil, to strike out against it, is inevitably accused of being unscientific or, even worse (as so many animal advocates know), “emotional.” When we protest against the dangers of nuclear technology, the dire effects of global warming, the massive destruction of biodiversity, the cruelties of the factory farms, or the monstrous creations of genetic engineering, we are inevitably warned not to react emotionally but rather to rely on objective “experts” using “sound science.” We are intellectually bludgeoned into abandoning our protest and acquiescing to the objective “laws” and methods of science, the cold facts. As a result, the arts and philosophy are ghettoized as entertainment or academic pursuits, while love of and participation with animals and nature are dismiss...
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Water pollution can be described as the contamination of the world drainage systems
from groundwater, to small water bodies to large water masses such as rivers, lakes, and oceans.
According to Paul Watson, the ocean is the life support system of this planet, and it has been
working well for over a million years due to the biodiversity and the interdependence of the
species that define the ecosystem within it (Watson, 2019). In the last century that has been
defined by the significant industrial revolution in various human activities such as agriculture
and fishing, human beings have been taking from the sea disrupting the eco-balance and the
ecosystem that is sustained by the biodiversity, and thus the ocean at this rate may eventually
collapse.
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Water pollution can be described as the contamination of the world drainage systems
from groundwater, to small water bodies to large water masses such ...


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