Factory farming is objectively disgusting. Animals and consumers alike are treated with unnecessary cruelty by the few companies that now dominate the meat industry.
Gone are the days of quaint farms. Farmers no longer know their animals, and few treat their livestock with any semblance of respect. Because only a few companies run the show, they force farmers to take on large amounts of debt to meet demand for chicken, beef and pork.
Tyson, JBS, Cargill, Smithfield and Perdue are the five largest factory farm companies in America. They account for $100 billion in annual sales and are economic powerhouses with a stranglehold on the market. They’re among the leading polluters of air and water throughout the country. Factory farming is actually the leading cause of air pollution in the country and second worldwide.
All these horrifying facts were brought to my attention this semester because I ended up taking a class in nonfiction literature which focused on animal ethics.
I had never considered more than superficially the adverse effects of factory farming before I took this class. In fact I had been one of the most anti-anti-meat people I have ever met. As a hunter since my youth, I always considered the bond between us and our food a sacred one.
What this class made me realize was the sacred bond between me and the meat on my plate had been broken. Not just broken, but shattered and stomped on and spat on. The food that winds up inside Kroger when we go shopping is gross. It’s a far cry from our image of a farmer tending his flock with the melancholy, beautiful knowledge that it will one day become food.
Today the farming process is much more mechanical than it is human. We’ve bred chickens that can’t stand up because their body mass grows faster than their bone density can allow. Pigs never see the light of day. Cows are forced to eat food their bodies don’t know how to process.
Not only is this process sad in terms of animal welfare, it’s dangerous for us. Besides the environmental effects I’ve mentioned, we’re pumping our farm animals so full of antibiotics that we’re effectively breeding super bacteria.
Doctors tell us not to take antibiotics unless we absolutely need them so we don’t grow these resistant bacteria, but factory farming has turned this entire process upside down by giving these drugs to animals to prevent them from getting sick in the first place. Essentially, we’re asking for an epidemic that our medicine can’t combat. It’s scary.
When I can hunt and cleanly take an animal off the land, I will feel good eating it. When I can buy meat from a local farm with a good reputation for animal welfare, I will feel good eating it, but eating meat from factories that endanger my very health and destroy our earth has become more troublesome than satisfying for the time being.
The only way to ensure that things get better for ourselves and the animals is to tell the factories that this isn’t how we want things to be.
dylmoore@indiana.edu
