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:
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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
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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
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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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